[Linganth] AAA 2025 CFP: Ghosts in the Machines

[Josh Babcock]

Dear Colleagues,

Beth Semel and I are organizing a session at the upcoming AAA and are
looking for additional participants who take a grounded, ethnographic
approach to AI technologies. The abstract and submission instructions are
below. Please let us know if you have any questions! Feel free to circulate
this to anyone in your networks who you think might be interested,
linguistic anthropologist or not.

Ghosts in the Machines:
(Un-)black-boxing AI Agencies

Organizers: Beth Semel and Josh Babcock
Abstract

The collection of technologies routinely thrown into the “AI” kitchen sink
has become as ubiquitous as the value-laden narratives about them. While
contemporary computational systems present genuinely new techno-scientific,
machinic affordances, many of their supposed novelties are anything but—nor
are the narratives, values, or interpretations assigned to them by
individuals, groups, and institutionalized personae across both
expert-technical and nonexpert domains. This panel explores how regimes of
value, narratives, and implicit-to-explicit understandings of personhood
and/or agency, reflexively framed as belonging to prior social spacetimes,
continue to haunt AI in the present, not despite, but because of diverse
narratives asserting its radical novelty (Choi and Babcock 2024). We ask:
what enfleshed, immaterialized, or absented agencies trail behind or snake
through AI? How do epistemic and systemic violences—racism, sexism,
anti-Blackness, white supremacy, ableism, and other intersectionally
compounding oppressive structures (Wilf 2023; Seaver 2022; Semel 2021;
Benjamin 2019; Noble 2018)—linger, become ghosted from, and interpenetrate
with the functioning and uses of, as well as narratives about, AI? And how
does the functioning of AI get rendered inscrutable in some contexts—made
“invisible by its own success” (Latour and Woolgar 1979)—while in others,
it is opened wide to explanations with varying degrees of “truth,”
“facticity,” or legitimization? This panel contributes to ethnographic
explorations of AI by synergistically bringing together
grounded-theoretical approaches to technological (un-)black-boxing from
scholars across fields and (sub)subfields of anthropology (with a
particular focus on linguistic and semiotic anthropology; Wortham and Reyes
2015), along with diverse (inter)disciplinary approaches to
techno-scientific and material agencies, from STS and HCI to interactional
sociology, sociolinguistics, the history of technology, and beyond.

To indicate your interest in participating, please submit a title of no
more than 15 words and a 1,500-character abstract to Beth Semel (
bsemel at princeton.edu) and Josh Babcock (joshua_babcock at brown.edu) by Monday,
April 14, 2025. Please note that the word and character limits are very
strict and will result in an abstract of fewer than 250 words in most
instances. We encourage you to use a character counter tool
<https://wordcounter.io/> rather than relying on word count.
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