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- Convenors:
-
Claudia Aradau
(King’s College London)
Tobias Blanke (Kings College London)
Annalisa Pelizza (University of Bologna and University of Aarhus)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel invites contributions that revisit methodological challenges in the study of AI and explore scholars’ inventiveness. It fosters dialogue on epistemological assumptions, material and political economies that inform AI design and use at the intersection of STS and critical AI studies.
Description
As AI has moved beyond the lab to become a driving force of global infrastructures, institutional interests, organisational practices, and power asymmetries, there is an urgent need to expand our methodological repertoire. This is due, not least, to the emergent delocalised and distributed practices of AI design, production, testing and use, which show the limitations of traditional STS methods, such as interviews, observation and document analysis. Even established techniques such as digital ethnography might fall short in addressing technological dynamics that are rarely exposed. To address these challenges, scholars have proposed going beyond the black box, ‘encircling’ algorithmic systems through creative uses of ethnography or controversy elicitation (Christin, 2020; Rieder et al, 2022; Marres et al, 2025).
This panel invites contributions that revisit methodological challenges in the study of contemporary AI developments and explore scholars’ inventiveness in devising new methods to problematise AI. These problematisations can range from biased and incomplete datasets and extractive data infrastructures to the opacity of algorithmic decision-making, to new Makings & Doings and more. We seek to foster dialogue around methods that engage with the epistemological assumptions and metaphors that inform AI design, as well as the material and political economies that sustain its development, deployment and use.
We also aim to advance dialogues at the intersection of STS and critical AI studies by bringing questions of AI’s elusiveness, scale, and opacity in conversation with debates about the role of critique today. How do methods interfere with the pluralisation of critique through anti-racist and decolonial perspectives, making trouble, and practices of refusal or intervention? How do methods play out in the denunciation of the AI ‘hype’? By focusing on these entanglements, the panel aims to open new pathways for understanding and intervening in the imaginaries and materialities of contemporary AI.