Short Abstract

Language serves as a socio-digital and developmental infrastructure that reflects and reinforces existing inequalities. When combined with AI-enabled systems, it creates new forms of social and epistemic injustices that shape human agency and everyday lived realities.

Description

Language has long served as a crucial axis of inclusion and its intersection with technology is far from neutral. This panel explores how language-based socio-digital inequalities shape access to services, markets, and the state, when tools, algorithms, and interfaces misread, misrecognize, or erode the languages of those most in need of its potential benefits.

From access to participation, language support determines who can benefit from the economic, socio-cultural, civic, and personal affordance of digital technologies. However, chatbots, translation tools, recommendation systems, and automated governance heavily rely on language as a computational capital that is unevenly distributed among individuals, communities, and countries. Limited linguistic diversity and knowledge coverage and embedded biases in training data feed language-based marginalization into AI systems and reinforce them in use by limiting agency in who can engage with these systems, interpret and contest their processes and outputs.

Foregrounding language as a socio-digital and developmental infrastructure, this panel invites interdisciplinary contributions unpacking how linguistic digital divides intersect with economic means, skills, and other structural variables to deepen opportunity gaps and create new forms of social and epistemic injustice. Conceptual and empirical work exploring the intersections of language, artificial intelligence, and socio-digital inequalities, and their implications for inclusive, equitable, and plural digital futures, particularly in diverse and low-resource settings, from both Global North and South. Works-in-progress are also welcome.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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