Call for Papers
mosaics logo with text.

This is a CFP for the Charles Babbage Institute's MOSAICS Symposium which will be held virtually on Thursday and Friday, October 15th and 16th, 2026. 

Submission deadline is May 29th, 2026. 

“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, caste, 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. 

Please note: 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. 

Send Proposals to: [email protected]

Questions? Contact CBI Director Jeffrey Yost.