Artificial Societies
Artificial Societies: Confronting Social Engineering after the Techlash
Friday 7 March 2025, 9:30 - 17:30
Room [TBC] - University of Warwick
Social life is increasingly being the object of interventions from engineering and economics. Platforms, AI and Big Tech are driving a growing engineering of the social, often without transparency and accountability. This event encourages interdisciplinary dialogue to problematise our present, explore alternatives, and address societal concerns amid growing public backlash against Big Tech.
The overall aim of this one-day hybrid symposium is to bring together established scholars, researchers, practitioners, and activists to explore interdisciplinary perspectives on social engineering in contemporary society. The event will feature keynote presentations by internationally renowned sociologists and experts in the field of digital sociology. The event will also include panel presentations by Early-Career Researchers and PhD candidates from different backgrounds and disciplines, fostering dialogue across fields such as design, engineering, medicine, computer science, and sociology (check out our call for abstracts!). With a focus on stories of re-purposing, response, and resistance to the growing engineering of the social, this event aims to provoke critical discussions at the intersection of technology and society.
This hybrid event is funded by the Sociological Review Foundation and co-organised by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies with the Edinburgh Futures Institute in collaboration with the International Sociological Association’s Working Group 10 on Digital Sociology.
Links
Call for Abstracts (deadline: January 20, 2025)
Registration/Submission form
Event Organizers
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Matías Valderrama Barragan
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Addie McGowan
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Elif Buse Doyuran
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Greta Timaite
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Meenakshi Mani
Keynote speakers
Karen Gregory
Senior Lecturer in Digital Sociology in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Programme Co-Director of the MSc in Digital Sociology. She currently co-leads the Digital Social Science Research Cluster at the Center for Data, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh and is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Cultural Economy. Before coming to Edinburgh, she was a lecturer at The City College of New York, where she developed and ran The City Lab @ The Center for Worker Education. She is also co-editor of the book Digital Sociologies (Policy Press 2016).
Mona Sloane
Assistant Professor of Data Science and Media Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA). She also convenes the Co-Opting AI series, a public speaker series focused on all aspects of AI technology and its application, ranging from security to food, games, and more, and serves as the editor of the Co-Opting AI book series at the University of California Press as well as the Technology Editor for Public Books. She also serves as the co-chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine project Human and Organizational Factors in AI Risk Management. Her book Co-Opting AI: Society is under contract with the University of California Press.
Noortje Marres
Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) at the University of Warwick (UK). She is also an external faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), and a Visiting Professor in the Centre for Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen (German). She has published two landmark books: Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics (2015, Palgrave) and Digital Sociology: the reinvention of the social research (2017, Polity).
Call for abstracts (Deadline January 20, 2025)
Social life is increasingly being the object of interventions from engineering and behavioural economics, as materialised in social media, ride-hailing platforms, Automated decision-making, and the rise of large language models and generative AI. In the face of the constant scandals and controversies surrounding platforms and AI within the so-called techlash, criticism of the growing power of Big Tech draws attention to how societies are enacted within computational frames. What kinds of sociology matter in an era of growing criticism of Big Tech, and how can sociological interventions confront the ongoing engineering of the social? This symposium will create space to explore concepts, methods, and processes crucial for responding to the scandals and controversies surrounding platforms, AI, and the growing power of Big Tech, while avoiding the common tropes of technological or social determinism. As social life increasingly takes place within computational frames, and even with simulated ‘artificial societies’ between generative agents, we propose to address the frictions between artificiality, authenticity and generativity, as well as the changing role of digital sociology in activating new understandings of the social after the techlash. We seek contributions addressing the questions of this symposium in three formats:
1. Conceptual re-inventions: What concepts or theoretical frameworks can be useful in addressing the question, problematising and resisting the engineering of the social? Which concepts are inspired by engineering work, and which others can be reoriented from the world of design and engineering to sociological work?
2. Methodological inventories: Recalling Diana E. Forsythe's book, how can we study those who study us? How do we become sensitive to the non-human agencies involved in the creation and monitoring of platforms, AI and Big Tech? What methodological innovations are required for this? What epistemologies do we require to study the designers of social interaction sociologically? How do we account for the methods of engineers, economists and designers? Which engineering methodologies can be introduced into sociology in an inventive way and vice-versa?
3. Empirical explorations: How do engineers, UX researchers, social psychologists, and behavioural economists, among many others, model and intervene in the social in actual computational settings? What scandals, controversies, or disputes have arisen around this engineering of the social? What role do sociologists play in these interventions and controversies?
If you are interested in contributing a paper to this symposium and receiving feedback from senior scholars, please send us a short abstract or expression of interest (up to 300 words, excluding bibliography) by January 20, 2025, by filling out our Registration/Submission form.
We expect to notify all those who submitted a proposal by February 10, 2025.
We have limited funding for travel and accommodation. We would be happy if you could indicate as part of your proposal whether you would be able to cover the cost of your own travel and/or accommodation, in which case we would be able to cover costs for additional participants.
If you have any questions, please contact us at:
This event is part of The Sociological Review Seminar Series and has been funded by The Sociological Review Foundation.