This symposium begins from the premise that AI’s global significance is neither self-evident nor uniform. We approach AI as a global digital communication project that interrogates how technologies circulate and how their meanings are (re)assembled and contested as they move across different cultural and global contexts. We aim to address the slipperiness of AI: How does the moral valence of AI shift depending on the answers and tasks demanded of it across various contexts? What is gained and lost when AI is treated as a coherent entity rather than a contested terrain? Where do dominant and alternative AI imaginaries collide most visibly—and what do those collisions reveal about power, culture, human agency, labor, development, modernity and possibility in our present moment?
We invite submissions that examine the worlds in which AI becomes imaginable and contestable: the differing global narratives, infrastructures, histories, and communicative practices that make it appear necessary, desirable, dangerous, or inevitable, as well as the counternarratives, movements, and alternative imaginaries that challenge such claims and propose other futures.