Co-Editors: Jenny L. Davis (Vanderbilt University), Mona Sloane (University of Virginia)

‘Artificial intelligence’ (AI) permeates contemporary society, pervading individual, interpersonal, organizational, and institutional processes. AI is part of day-to-day activities like shopping, scrolling social media, listening to music, and writing emails. It also affects high-stakes decisions through medical, military, and judicial applications. Increasingly, these mundane and profound sites of AI include generative AI systems that mimic human outputs in text, speech, and image. Unpacking the ‘black box’ of AI was once posed as a mathematical task, reserved for computer scientists and engineers. Yet as AI becomes infrastructural, producing and mediating social relations (Burrell & Fourcade, 2021), the realm of expertise has expanded. Today, we are all AI experts, holding knowledge about the interplay of AI and lived experience while actively constructing a future-in-process (Sloane, 2023). Generative AI has both accelerated and solidified an expanded expert realm, as generative systems are impenetrable in ways that preclude reverse engineering by default. However, the social integrations and effects of these systems remain acutely felt, immanently observable, and open to methodical scrutiny.

A sociological lens can render AI's hidden processes legible, just as sociologists have done with complex and taken for granted social forces since the discipline's inception. Yet to date, we neither have a robust concept of AI as a social phenomenon nor a holistic sociological discourse around it, despite vibrant and dynamic work in the area (e.g., Bui & Noble, 2020; Davis, 2023; Davis et al., 2021; Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018; Sloane, 2024; Sloane et al., 2022). This special issue bolsters the sociology of AI, advancing and establishing it as an emergent and critical field.

The editors expect that AI as an object of inquiry, methodological tool, and embedded consideration will soon incorporate throughout and beyond the sociological discipline. To foreground this anticipated diffusion, they focus the special issue on a single orienting question: 'What is sociological about AI?'. From this question, the issue will highlight, ground, and spawn sociological research and practice from across cultural, economic, organizational, political, and critical race sociology, alongside STS, social psychology, and other transdisciplinary programs.

Please prepare your manuscript as per SSCR formatting requirements noting that special issue papers have a tighter word limit than the journal’s general track (i.e., 6,000-8,000 words for a full article and 3,000-4,000 words for a Comment in the special issue). Submit via the SSCR portal and be sure to specify that you are submitting to the What is Sociological about AI special issue. You can specify the special issue through a dropdown menu upon submission.

Please feel free to reach out to the editors with questions and queries at jennifer.davis@vanderbilt.edu and monasloane@gmail.com

For details, visit https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/SSC/Special%20Issue%20CFP-1718958877.pdf