CfP: AI in the Asia Pacific
Call for Papers: Artificial Intelligence in the Asia Pacific
The peer-reviewed academic journal Asiascape: Digital Asia (DIAS) is now inviting contributions for a 2024 themed issue on ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Asia Pacific’.
As the launch of numerous deep learning models such as DALL-E and ChatGPT has illustrated, machine learning has made impressive strides these past years. Especially advances in generative artificial intelligence have created no small amount of hyperbole, both positive and negative, about the disruptive and transformative potentials of AI. As ChatGPT was taking the world by storm, critics were quick to announce the end of entire industries, including journalism and academia. For all types of AI, the realities turned out to be more complicated, proving more ‘disruptive’ to those in already precarious situations than to large institutional actors and industries, many of which have pivoted in their practices and embraced AI solutions. As these complex socio-technical processes unfold, Asia provides a crucial site for exploring the realities of artificial intelligence and its interactions with society. Many Asian cultural creators are now utilizing AI to create cultural products such as films, dramas, and popular music; what is more, AI is often a primary theme in their narratives. AI usage is expanding across Asia, and as talent and funding is funnelled to R&D clusters in China and Japan, South Korea and Singapore, and as start-ups launch new AI initiatives anywhere from India to Malaysia, we need to ask: what is AI doing to Asia, and what does Asia do with AI?
For this special issue, we welcome submissions from researchers from the social sciences, computer sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as from multi- and interdisciplinary backgrounds, who explore the socio-political, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, or cultural dimensions of artificial intelligence in Asia. We particularly invite authors who work on artificial intelligence and the Global South to join us in this exploration of how artificial intelligence is interacting with, and is impacting, societies, cultures, politics, and economies in the region.
Possible topics for submissions include (but are emphatically not limited to) empirical and theoretical explorations of the following:
- The cultural underpinnings of AI development in Asia,
- The impact of AI on labour practices in the region,
- The role of AI in education, academia, and fields of knowledge production,
- The effect of AI on cultural industries, cultural production, media work and journalism, and the arts,
- Government regulation and state use of AI, including AI-enabled digital governance and surveillance,
- Artificial Intelligence in Asia’s Internet of Things,
- AI in urban planning and spatial management,
- The discourses, contestations, and imaginaries surrounding artificial intelligence,
- The political economy of AI in Asia,
- Civil society uses of AI,
- The transnational social, commercial, and political dynamics of AI.
Interested contributors should first send their title, abstract (150 words), and short biography via email to the journal’s managing editor, Dr. Florian Schneider, by 10 September 2023. The editorial team will select contributions in September, and successful contributors should then prepare articles of 8,000 words, including notes and references, to be submitted through the journal’s editorial management system by 1 December 2023. All papers will be fully peer-reviewed, and authors will receive the review decision in January 2024, for potential publication in the early summer that year.
Please see the instructions for authors for further information on the in-house style requirements. For further questions, and to submit abstracts, please contact the managing editor.
Contact Email
f.a.schneider@hum.leidenuniv.nl