Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society publishes research both about and produced with artificial intelligence (AI): research about the social and cultural implications of AI, studies employing AI to develop new methodologies for critical research, and research oriented to new interdisciplinary paradigms for AI. In so doing, the journal brings together social science, humanities and artistic (SSHA) research on epistemologies, histories and practices of AI with computer science and data science (STEM) AI research, casting light on how AI applications translate, undermine or advance the diversity of social and cultural values and lifeworlds. 

Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society is part of the Cambridge Forum journal series, which progresses cross-disciplinary conversations on issues of global importance.

The journal invites submissions for the upcoming Themed Issue: Cultures of AI Interdisciplinarity, which will be Guest Edited by Tobias Blanke and Georgina Born. 

In the first instance, please submit an abstract of 500 words (excluding references) to the journal at cfc@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com and cc the editors (t.blanke@uva.nl and g.born@ucl.ac.uk). If your abstract is accepted, you will be invited to submit a full paper. 

The deadline for submissions of abstracts is 1 December 2024. 

The deadline for submissions of full papers is 1 March 2025. Submissions of full papers should be made through the journal's online peer review system. Authors should consult the journal’s author instructions prior to submission.

All full papers will be peer reviewed in line with the journal’s review process. Acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the full paper.

Description 

This inaugural issue will target core questions about, and visions for, interdisciplinarity in Artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as review existing achievements and experimentation. How do interdisciplinary collaborations help make sense of and intervene in our engagements with the emerging regimes of smart machines? How can this assist in both harnessing their positive potentials and mitigating their harmful effects? How can they render what is opaque and unaccountable legible and accountable? AI research has from its beginnings been interdisciplinary because the early pioneers and later innovators came from a range of disciplines. It has also always been about much more than engineering intelligence, because this objective cannot be fulfilled without asking what human intelligence is and how it relates to our entanglement with the nonhuman. In asking how artificial intelligence is different, we have to enquire into the practices, social relations, materials and infrastructures by which human intelligence is constituted.

The issue will explore the gains and challenges of the kinds of interdisciplinary collaboration central to AICuSoc, with a focus on those that cross the ‘great divide’ between computer science and data science (STEM), on the one hand, and the social sciences, humanities and arts (SSHA), on the other. In the past, this kind of collaboration has too often been seen as additive, with social and cultural research providing a kind of service function for the hard sciences, adding a touch of the social and cultural to what are otherwise scientific or engineering problematics. The issue aims to go beyond this additive approach, modelling and articulating alternative arrangements between STEM and SSHA via the medium of AI. It will show how interdisciplinarity can explore generative differences, which may even envisage ontological change, creating new technical and cultural objects and paradigms for AI’s futures.

The issue will unite conceptual reflection on, empirical studies of and experiments in AI interdisciplinarity, illuminating a range of methodological and epistemological directions and ontological speculations, and updating existing theories of interdisciplinarity with reference to the unprecedentedly complex practices between STEM and SSHA elicited by AI. We particularly welcome contributions that make reference to, and aim to advance, existing literatures and debates on interdisciplinarity per se. We also encourage submissions from early-career researchers. We invite contributions focusing on but not restricted to the following topics:

• Global Histories of AI Interdisciplinarity
• Novel Conceptualisations of AI Interdisciplinarity
• Interdisciplinary Data Practices
• Interdisciplinary Engagements between Industry and Academia
• The Institutionalisation of AI Interdisciplinarity
• Interdisciplinarity and Methodological Innovation in AI Research
• Frictions and Failures of AI Interdisciplinarity
• Infrastructures to Support AI Interdisciplinarity
• AI Interdisciplinarity as a Contribution to Theories of Interdisciplinarity
• Experiments in Interdisciplinary AI
• Novel Articulations between SSHA and STEM in AI Research
• Ontological Change and Interdisciplinary AI
• Data Colonialisms and Interdisciplinary AI
• Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and AI Interdisciplinarity
• New Avenues of Critique Envisaged by Interdisciplinary AI
• Interdisciplinary Imaginaries and Futures for AI

Submission guidelines Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society seeks to engage multiple subject disciplines and promote dialogue between policymakers and practitioners as well as academics. The journal therefore encourages authors to use an accessible writing style. 

Authors have the option to submit a range of article types to the journal. Please see the journal’s author instructions for more information.

Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style. Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal. 

All submissions should be made through the journal’s online peer review system. Author should consult the journal’s author instructions prior to submission. 
 
All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission. See the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information.  

Contacts 

Questions regarding submission and peer review can be sent to the journal’s inbox at cfc@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com.