Contesting Tomorrow: Power, Resistance and Social Futures In the Age of AI and Automation

In turbulent times marked by geopolitical conflict, ecological crisis, economic insecurity and democratic fragility, “the future” has become a crucial site of power and struggle. AI, big data, platform infrastructures, robotics, biometric systems and predictive analytics are increasingly used to govern populations, organize labour and care, allocate resources, shape culture, police borders, target consumers and anticipate risk. These technologies produce new possibilities, but also new forms of extraction, classification, dependency, exclusion and control.

This session examines how power and resistance are being reconfigured through emerging sociotechnical regimes. It asks how states, corporations, platforms, expert communities and cultural institutions make futures governable, profitable or imaginable—and how citizens, workers, activists, artists, communities and civil society actors contest, refuse, appropriate or redesign these futures.

We welcome papers addressing, but not limited to:

• How do AI, big data, robotics and automation reshape domination, inequality and social ordering across different contexts?
• How are algorithmic systems transforming work, welfare, care, education, policing, war, migration, public discourse and everyday life?
• What repertoires of resistance—data activism, platform organizing, algorithmic auditing, technological commoning, refusal, sabotage or prefigurative politics—are emerging?
• How do social actors imagine and institutionalize alternative, democratic, decolonial, feminist, ecological or community-based futures?
• What theoretical and methodological innovations can help sociologists study future-making in turbulent times?

Contributions from diverse geopolitical settings, theoretical traditions and methods are welcome, including futures research, digital sociology, STS, political sociology, critical AI/data studies, ethnography, comparative research, computational analysis and participatory or speculative methods.