CfP: AI and the Social Sciences (Revista de Estudios Sociales )

Guest Editors:

Andrés Páez and Juan David Gutiérrez (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)
Diana Acosta-Navas (Loyola University Chicago, United States)

Articles should be submitted between November 1st – 30th, 2024

Submissions will be accepted in either English, Spanish, or Portuguese, and should follow the editorial and stylistic guidelines of RES.

All papers should be submitted through the following link:

Overview
Recently, there have been global proposals on how to regulate the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, many of which are inspired by the European Union's AI Regulation. Concurrently, ethical frameworks, such as UNESCO’s Recommendations, have been developed to offer a broader theoretical perspective on responsible AI development. These regulations and proposals often use terms like transparency and explainability, fairness and bias, and inclusivity and diversity, assuming causal relationships between various aspects of AI and its impact on individuals and society. However, a critical examination of these proposals reveals the need for a more robust scientific and conceptual foundation to support and substantiate their claims. In this regard, the contributions of social sciences are essential. Except for Elliot (2022), there is a significant gap in recent literature regarding the general relationship between AI and social sciences, a gap that is even more pronounced in Spanish literature. While there are studies addressing the phenomenon from within specific social sciences, these approaches are typically very discipline-specific. We believe that many areas where AI has the most significant impact require a broader perspective that integrates a variety of viewpoints. This makes an interdisciplinary approach to this urgent topic highly necessary.


This special issue is dedicated to leveraging the approaches and research methods of social sciences to understand the impact of AI systems in three specific areas: interpersonal relationships, social order, and the interactions between AI, the state, and democracy. We invite submissions that provide empirical contributions or offer innovative conceptual developments within any field of social sciences.

Below, we present a more detailed overview of each of the three thematic areas and representative publications to illustrate the type of articles we hope to receive.

1. Interpersonal relationships. The interaction with AI systems is not only reshaping our relationship with technology but also transforming human relationships and our perception of others. Our understanding of friendship, creativity, communication, trust, and privacy, among many other aspects, is being altered by the advent of AI. Suggested topics include:
  • The socially situated relationship between humans and robots (Lindgren and Holmström 2020)
  • The impact of chatbots, softbots and virtual environments on the experience of love, friendship, intimacy, and sexuality (Delvin 2018)
  • Large language models (LLMs) and their impact on social interactions and human communication (Shin and Kim 2023)
  • The challenges of creativity in the era of generative AI (Gokul 2023)
  • The creation of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers (Nguyen 2020)

2. AI and social order. The effects of AI on society are becoming increasingly evident accross areas such as employment, health, education, transportation, finance, and access to social benefits. Suggested topics include:
  • Social biases (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, national origin, etc.) embeded in algorithms (O’Neil 2017; Páez 2021; Schlesinger, O’Hara, and Taylor 2021)
  • The geopolitics of AI (Crawford 2021)
  • Feminist perspectives on the impact of AI (Wellner and Rothman 2020; Toupin 2024)
  • The AI value chain and its impact on the value chains of various industries (Oosthuizen et al. 2021)
  • AI and access to employment (Ramírez and Páez 2024)
  • Implications of automated decision-making in the private sector (Barocas, Hardt, and Narayanan 2023)
  • AI from the perspective of the social studies of science (Lindgren 2023)
  • The social forces and values influencing AI development (Johnson and Verdicchio 2024)
  • AI and urban studies (Long and Liu 2016)
3. Interactions between AI, the State and democracy. Political discourse is increasingly being filtered, controlled, and manipulated using AI algorithms that serve purposes beyond social welfare. AI is also being used by governments for social control and to restrict the free flow of information, endangering individual and collective rights and freedoms. Suggested topics include:
  • The effect of filter algorithms on democratic discourse (Sunstein 2017) and the construction of individual and social identities (Gündüz 2017)
  • Concepts of justice and fairness in AI-based automated decisions (Wirtz, Weyerer, and Geyer 2019; Araujo et al. 2020)
  • Transformations in AI policy and public policy (Gutiérrez and Muñoz-Cadena 2023)
  • The impact of AI on daily life: sociological and anthropological perspectives (Elliott 2019)
  • AI, surveillance, and social control (Pasquale 2015; Bales and Stone 2020)