Beyond Algorithmic Determinism: Resistance and Creative Responses In Turbulent Times

As algorithmic systems and applications of so-called "artificial intelligence" (AI) increasingly mediate work, mobility, consumption, intimate relationships, and public life, they not merely mediate (algorithmic) power and impose order, but provoke friction, refusal, and improvisation. This panel examines how individuals and collectives navigate, contest, and rework the algorithmic regimes that increasingly permeate and govern everyday life. It seeks to advance sociological understandings, vocabularies, and conceptualisations of algorithmic power and resistance. Moving beyond accounts of seamless control or total capture, we ask what resistant practice looks like and how it might be understood theoretically in "turbulent times" shaped by the spread of probabilistic automation: conditions under which power is increasingly exercised through predictive computational operations and (re-)distributed across data infrastructures, models, and platform interfaces.

We invite contributions that recognise (algorithmic) resistance in all its manifestations: as organised opposition in social movements, as critique on digital capitalism, and as situated, often mundane, and frequently ambivalent action: gaming recommender systems, obfuscating data, withdrawing consent, or repurposing tools. We welcome theoretically engaged and empirically grounded papers from across the discipline and adjacent fields.

Possible themes include:

• deviance and non-compliance in datafied settings
• social movements against AI/automation
• the politics of refusal and opacity
• sociotechnical imaginaries that animate or foreclose resistance
• the role of anticipation and futures in shaping present action
• the methodological challenges of studying subtle algorithmic power and resistant practices that are deliberately illegible
• theoretical accounts of algorithmic power/resistance