Call for Papers 4S 2026

The Starling Centre welcomes paper submissions for our upcoming panel, Critical AI Literacy: Power, Governance, and Social Futures

Details at a Glance

Conference: The 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Dates: October 7–10, 2026

Panel Abstract

Artificial intelligence is becoming a governing infrastructure that reorganizes how decisions are made and human agency is exercised. Unlike earlier information technologies, AI systems introduce distinctive ethical, social, and political challenges, including opacity, algorithmic authority, surveillance, and the redistribution of responsibility away from identifiable actors. By mimicking human judgment, AI blurs boundaries between human and machine while concentrating technoscientific power in the hands of a small number of corporate and state entities. As AI is normalized across educational, labour, legal, and social institutions, it demands forms of understanding that extend beyond technical competence, calling instead for critical capacities attuned to power, political economy, and social impacts. This panel asks: how can critical AI literacy function as an intervention that demystifies AI systems and reclaims technoscientific power from elite control?

Aligned with the 2026 4S theme of TechnoPower, the panel foregrounds AI as a site where technoscientific capitalism, including the assetization of knowledge and oligarchic influence, is actively reshaping social futures. We conceptualize critical AI literacy as a plural, situated practice that enables publics, workers, educators, and policymakers to interrogate AI’s political economy, embedded value systems, and material consequences, while imagining collective interventions against its unfettered use. Moving beyond critique alone, the panel emphasizes literacy as a transformative practice that reshapes how technoscience is perceived, governed, and contested.

Submission Topics May Include (but are not limited to):

  • Critical AI literacy as civic or democratic capacity-building;
  • Pedagogical approaches to teaching critical AI literacy in formal or informal settings;
  • Community-based practices resisting AI hype, inevitability narratives, or technosolutionism;
  • AI literacy in labour organizing, workplace governance, or worker resistance;
  • Policy approaches and regulatory frameworks informed by critical AI literacy;
  • Indigenous, feminist, decolonial, abolitionist, and other justice-oriented approaches to understanding AI;
  • AI, data extraction, and environmental or ecological impacts;
  • Empirical studies of everyday encounters with AI systems and algorithmic governance;
  • Public engagement and participatory methods for interrogating AI power

Submission Guidelines:

We welcome contributions from scholars, practitioners, educators, activists, and policymakers working across the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies and related domains. We especially encourage submissions from early-career scholars and from contributors working in interdisciplinary, community-engaged, and justice-oriented research contexts. Papers may be theoretical, empirical, methodological, or practice-based.

Please submit a paper proposal including:

  • Title
  • Author(s) and affiliation(s)
  • A short abstract (up to 250 words)

Deadline for Submissions: 30 April 2026

Submission Process: Please submit proposals through the official 4S conference submission system and indicate this panel title when selecting or proposing a panel.

Contact: For questions about the panel, please contact the panel organizer(s): Dorotea Gucciardo on behalf of the Starling Centre, starling@uwo.ca