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- Convenor:
-
Kara White
(University of Osaka)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract
GenAI has taken the world by storm – and in its wake, STS and social researchers have been left dizzied, dismayed, and disheveled. But what if we could do genAI differently? This panel/workshop seeks contributions that engage WITH genAI – whether playful, mocking, or falling through the cracks.
Description
This combined format open panel seeks contributions that not only challenge how STS orients itself to the ongoing onslaught of generative AI as an ensemble of sociomaterial practices including code, algorithms, multivariate vectors, databases of text, GPUs and server farms, corporations and so, so much more, but that also challenge us to interact/code/perform/experience otherwise with these technologies. By combining traditional papers followed by a collaborative interactive workshop format, contributions should exploit and agitate genAI technologies.
What happens when genAI is reimagined as method, rather than as a tool to be applied to social science research, or as a kind of artificial research collaborator? Taking inspiration from experimental prototyping (Corsin Jimenez & Estalella 2017), and attention to “ethnographic projection” as a way to “game ethnography” (Farias & Criado 2023), we have a moment in which we can tinker with forms of genAI to rethink “toolmaking” (Chao et al 2024) as a critical technical practice (Agre 1997), not to merge or break apart the supposed separation between critique and technical engagements, but to design with and against genAI differently (or differentially? (Cf Munster 2025)). And yet, genAI is not a universalizing monolith (cf Lee & Ribes 2025; Sadowski 2025) and care must be taken (Ruckenstein & Trifuljesko 2023) to ground and particularize these practices and connections (e.g., Flore 2025).
Making and doing in STS has enabled alternative forms of knowledge-making and knowledge-expression. Can we intervene and invent with/through/aside genAI experimental prototypes besides generating bullshit (Hicks, Humphries, & Slater 2024)? Is there (de)generative potential in playfully designing or un-designing absurd solutions to non-existent problems? Traditional academic papers are welcomed as well as more speculative, artistic, performative, and irreverent contributions. What can we (de)generate together?