Call for Papers:

The Imaginative Landscape of AI: Visions, Positions, Conflicts
For a Special Section of the International Journal of Communication
https://comai.space/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/CfP-Imaginative-Landscape-of-AI.pdf

Deadline for submission of abstracts: December 1, 2025

No technological development is currently the subject of more debate than AI. It is understood as the future of human development par excellence or as an existential risk to humanity. From Shanghai to Silicon Valley and beyond, there are various, sometimes strongly conflicting positions on AI. Promises of artificial general intelligence (AGI) have provoked terror, skepticism, and vast financial investments. Commercial large-language models (LLMs) have already unsettled higher education, software development, and early-career, white-collar employment markets. Supporters of effective altruism, longtermism, and rationalism take different positions on AI and the changes it will bring to society.

While various pioneer communities promote different visions of the future of AI and the changes it will bring to societal communication, social movements are taking positions against AI adoption from various perspectives. They point to the bias and discrimination of existing AI solutions, oppose the environmental impacts of data centers, advocate for a workers’ movement to curb job losses caused by AI, or even call for a ban on AGI because the dangers to humanity are unforeseeable.

All of this is also finding its way into politics, which is increasingly driven by thoughts of a global race for supremacy in AI development—alongside competing policy debates over the “right” way to develop AI. These different visions about AI are developing in both conflict and coexistence. In many cases, positions about AI do not map easily to pre-existing ideologies or movements.

The objective of the IJoC’s Special Section is to discuss this ‘imaginative landscape of AI’ on an empirical basis. By ‘imaginative landscape of AI,’ we mean the entirety of visions, Position, and conflicts seen in relation to AI—especially the relatively novel ones that have developed in relationship to this emerging technology. The ‘imaginative landscape of AI’ is not just about the technological side but about broader concepts and ideas for the future of communications and society with AI, as well as possible dangers for humans. The current ‘imaginative landscape of AI’ is anything but uniform; it is fragmented, diverse, ideologized and highly contradictory. Against this backdrop, we want to use the Special Section to take stock of this discussion.

We invite submissions on the following topics in particular, but not exclusively:

• Future visions and imaginaries of communications, society and social change in diverse global contexts in relation to AI and AGI.
• Novel ideological positions that have emerged around the specific affordances and dilemmas that AI technology presents – and possible relations back to Californian ideology.
• Dynamics of conflict emerging in the contestation of AI systems’ development, deployment, and meaning.
• Empirical studies on various pioneer communities and social movements related to AI, analyzing their engagement and positioning.
• Studies on long-term thinking, accelerationism, techno-skepticism, and related traditions in relation to AI.
• Further studies that identify important areas of the imaginative landscape of AI

We request that abstracts (500 words) be submitted by 1 December 2025. A review of the abstracts will take place by 1 January 2026. Manuscripts requested for submission must be submitted for review by 1 May 2026; publication is scheduled for spring 2027.

Abstracts can be submitted via the online form at
https://nc.uni-bremen.de/index.php/apps/forms/s/ctFFdYg5X3XKpeBBjoEQSMGm

Content-related questions can be directed to the editors of the Special Section, Andreas Hepp (ahepp@uni-bremen.de) and Nathan Schneider (nathan.schneider@colorado.edu). For organizational inquiries, please reach out to imaginative.landscape@uni-bremen.de.