Ubiquitous AI In Everyday Life: Sociotechnical Practices, Relations, and Infrastructures

This session examines how AI becomes ordinary in everyday life across domestic, institutional, and working spaces. As generative AI, smart home devices, AI-enabled IoT systems, wearables, care technologies, and workplace automation are increasingly embedded in ordinary routines, they transform not only communication and decision-making, but also intimacy, care, labour, expertise, trust, and inequality. Moving beyond approaches that treat AI as an exceptional or purely technical innovation, the session invites theoretically informed and empirically grounded studies of AI as an ambient sociotechnical formation: one that is ubiquitous, materially situated, culturally imagined, organizationally governed, and practically negotiated. We welcome papers on AI in homes and family life; care institutions and health-related settings; workplaces, newsrooms, educational sites, and service organisations; interpersonal relations with generative AI; AI companions and chatbots; smart devices and sensor-based environments; and the domestication, resistance, or reconfiguration of AI in everyday practice. The session is especially interested in studies that connect micro-level practices with broader structures such as gender, class, generation, disability, policy, capital, institutional routines, and social imaginaries. Comparative, ethnographic, practice-theoretical, STS-informed, feminist, decolonial, and Global South/East Asian perspectives are particularly welcome. Together, the papers will ask how AI is co-evolving with social practices and infrastructures, and how digital sociology can critically analyse the uneven making of everyday AI futures.