[SIGCIS-Members] CFP for CBI's MOSAICS Symposium: Meanings, Ontologies & Structures of AI in Culture & Society

[Jeffrey Yost]

*Cal**l for Papers: *


*MOSAICS Symposium (CBI) *


*Meanings, Ontologies & Structures of AI in Culture & Society*


*When: Thursday & Friday, October 15 & 16, 2026 (Virtual)*


*Paper proposal deadline is May 29, 2026. *


*Program Committee*

*Sareeta Amrute, The New School for Social Research*

*Ekaterina (Katya) Babintseva, Carnegie Mellon University*

*Anita Say Chan, University of Illinois*

*Gerardo Con Diaz, University of California, Davis*

*Jeffrey Yost, University of Minnesota*


[Call at MOSAICS Symposium CFP <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/call-papers> and
below] Please share with anyone who may be interested.



“Artificial intelligence” (AI) is a loose, sprawling, and highly contested
term. Its meanings have varied widely in their appropriations, affordances,
and applications—both real and rhetorical—from early symbolic systems that
emulated human reasoning with logical rules and heuristics to multi-layered
neural networks that identify data patterns for natural language
processing, computer vision, and predictive modelling. AI developers’
practices and ambitions have changed over time, but the appeal of the term
“artificial intelligence” persists. However, “Intelligence” itself is a
politically charged notion that has been repeatedly used to justify state
violence, rationalize exploitation, and naturalize hierarchies, with giant
corporations today peddling the term to impose their own views on virtually
all spheres of life: from labor and healthcare to justice and public
governance.

And while historically the detrimental effects of algorithmic and
data-based systems have fallen most heavily on vulnerable populations, in
recent years the disruptions wrought by the AI boom have reached even those
who had previously been protected from them. Job displacement, the
aggressive introduction of AI systems to government and educational
institutions, and the economic and environmental costs of data centers,
that is, have made it increasingly difficult to find people whose lives
have not been precarized by these systems. Understanding artificial
intelligence—and the new scales and reaches of its impacts, that arguably
defy traditional disciplinary approaches—demands diverse and novel
approaches and perspectives. AI is at once a tool of surveillance and
policing, a military weapon, a powerful instrument of scientific
investigation, and a technology capable of changing human behavior and
inflicting trauma. Grasping these and other social and epistemic valences
of AI, as well as understanding its technical design and how social values
and priorities bear upon its algorithms, training models, and data sets is
akin to assembling multiple pieces into mosaics. Humans for millennia have
pieced together mosaics, creatively placing fragments toward a larger whole
and broader meanings. Viewers approach mosaics with different minds and
vantage points, seeing different patterns and purposes. Similarly,
understanding the complexity of AI in our world requires piecing together
varied perspectives and engaging in interdisciplinary conversation.

CBI’s MOSAICS Initiative and Symposium are forums for this kind of
sustained, critical and interdisciplinary engagement. For the MOSAICS
Symposium we seek work from scholars and practitioners that draws from (and
ideally cuts across) the arts, humanities, social sciences, information
science, and community activism. We are especially interested in papers
that explore AI and mind, mentalité, data ontologies, postcolonialism,
social hierarchies, power imbalances, inequality and intersections (race,
class, gender, disability), cultural meanings, infrastructures, landscapes,
work, users, human and machine interaction, reappropriations, resistances,
and adjacent topics and themes.

All submissions should be filed as a single document (Word doc or PDF),
labeled with your name in the file name. All proposals must include:

   - 300-to-400-word statement on your paper that identifies research
   questions, argument(s), and methodology;
   - A two-page CV;
   - Citations to five works of others (books, articles, essays…) that are
   viewed as essential to your scholarship in AI studies. We will compile this
   as a crowd sourced bibliography.

Send paper proposals (by May 29th deadline) to: cbi at umn.edu

Questions can be sent to CBI Director Jeffrey Yost at: yostx003 at umn.edu

Please note that accepted applicants will be required to share a paper
draft of at least 3,000 words three weeks prior to the event. By applying,
the applicant agrees to this and to reading the papers prior to the event
(ideally all of them, but definitely the majority of them and with close
attention to those papers in your session). We plan to do two special
issues of journals, one for papers that are more historical (likely for *IEEE
Annals of the History of Computing*) and the other interdisciplinary and
more contemporary (perhaps for *Information and Culture*). *We ask that
only those with an openness to contributing a paper for consideration to
one of the special issues shortly after the event apply for the symposium.*
**   *   *   *   *   **
*Jeffrey Yost, Ph.D. *
*Director, Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information & Culture*
*Research Professor, History of Sci., Tech., Med., University of Minnesota*

*Just Code: Power, Inequality and the Political Economy of IT (Johns
Hopkins U. Press, co-edited w/ Gerardo Con Diaz)
<https://press.jhu.edu/books/title/12804/just-code> *
*Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry (MIT Press)
<https://amzn.to/3gqe4R6>*
*Studies in Computing and Culture book series, Johns Hopkins U. Press
<https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/series/studies-computing-and-culture>
*Co-Editor
(w/ Con Diaz)
*PI, NSF-funded CBI project "Mining a Useable Past: Perspectives,
Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy."*
*Blockchain & Society* <https://www.blockchainandsociety.com>* (crit. inq.
essays & resources)* (Founder/Leader)
*Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture
<https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/interfaces> *Co-Editor-in-Chief (w/ Amanda Wick)
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