CFP: Global Political Economy in the Age of AI
Call for Papers
The Social Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study invites chapter proposals for an edited volume exploring the relationships between digital technologies, especially artificial intelligence, and the artifacts, structures, and power dynamics of the global political economy.
As the digital turn and the recent boom in artificial intelligence have shown, digital technologies are not simply technological but also political phenomena. On the one hand, the political environment, including public policies, laws, and political cultures, shapes the development and implications of these technologies. And on the other, these technologies may be ushering in new kinds of political formations, including a broader reorganization of the global political economy. As such, this moment offers an opportunity to develop analytical, critical, and historical frameworks to understand the relationships between technology and political orders. Central to this effort is developing the Global South as a fundamental lens of theorization and analysis – not just a peripheral recipient of technologies, but as a constitutive site of labor, extraction, innovation, resistance and knowledge production.
This volume brings together scholars working across the political economy, media studies, law, geography, anthropology, international relations, media studies, science and technology studies, development studies, and related fields to examine how digital technologies are making—and being made by—a shifting global order. We are especially interested in contributions that reconnect the material and environmental foundations of digital infrastructures with transformations in global capital, labor regimes, state power, inequality, and everyday life. We welcome contributions that are theoretically engaged, empirically grounded, historically informed, and methodologically innovative. We are particularly interested in contributions that also imagine how the AI age can be organized to better serve society, particularly its most marginalized citizens.
Themes
We encourage submissions on topics including, but not limited to:
- Technology and global political economy in historical perspective: global intellectual and social histories of political economy, economic thought, and technological change, from the quantitative revolution and the industrial age to digital computing and AI.
- Critical minerals and the material foundations of AI: the global political economy of mineral extraction; energy, internet, data centers, undersea cables, semiconductors; and resource flows underpinning the AI value chain.
- The digital mode of production: contributions to digital capitalism vs. techno feudalism debate; critical theories of the structural social relations of global political economy in the age of AI; the political economy of global data flows.
- Development, dependency, racial capitalism, and digital colonialism: the ways in which digital technologies establish new theories of dependency and development; the political economy of AI in the Global South; the impacts of digital technologies on the social reproduction of structural inequalities; and how the global digital economy enforces particular values and even moral economies.
- Resistance, alternatives, and proposals: labor organizing; data cooperatives; public AI; equity and justice-focused technology development; counter-hegemonic visions of technological governance; the future of digital work beyond capitalism.
- Corporate power, finance, markets: Big Tech oligopolies; venture capital; the financialization of AI; high-frequency trading; credit scoring; and the political economy of digital currencies and monetization.
- Environmental political economy: the energy and resource costs of AI and digital infrastructures; digital waste; environmental displacement; climate change; and the reshaping of ecologies by the AI boom.
- Governance: regulation and governance of AI and digital technologies at global, regional, and local levels; cross-national analyses of AI governance; accountability, ethics, and international institutions; role of civil society in AI governance.