[Air-L] CfP for 4S Panel - Power, Responsibility and Expertise at the Expanding Table(s) of AI Design and Governance

[Alphoncina Lyamuya]

Dear all,

We invite you to submit an abstract to 4S open panel "Power, Responsibility
and Expertise at the Expanding Table(s) of AI Design and Governance" at the
2025 4S Conference, which will take place in Seattle, USA on September 3 –
7, 2025.

Deadline for submission: January 31, 2025

4S Open Panel #35
<https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php>

*Title*: Power, Responsibility and Expertise at the Expanding Table(s) of
AI Design and Governance

*Organizers:*
Stephen Yang, University of Southern California
Alphoncina Lyamuya, University of Southern California
Rohan Grover, University of Southern California

*Abstract:*
The pursuits of social and ethical responsibility in AI design and
governance markedly translate to the liberal inclusion of diverse
stakeholders. This introduces a new set of experts and expertise to the
table. Beyond engineers in technology companies and policymakers in
government agencies, the design and governance of AI is increasingly
(re)configured by a growing constellation of “responsible AI” actors and
organizations — such as user experience researchers, ethics consultants,
privacy counsels, data annotators, community representatives,
inter-governmental organizations, trust and safety vendors, standard-making
bodies, civil societies, labor unions, and many more. Despite the broader
inclusion of experts and expertise, only certain methods are legitimized as
the normative lingua franca of how we ought to do responsible AI, wielding
greater political valence and epistemic authority over others. These
include legal compliance, risk assessment, algorithmic auditing, preference
elicitation, red teaming, and user experience design. By contrast, other
possibilities of design and governance, namely prefigurative design,
critical fabulation, and agonistic pluralism, are often sidelined or
outright dismissed. To understand the redistribution of power and
responsibility at the expanding table of AI design and governance, this
panel invites submissions that critically interrogate the intra- and
inter-organizational politics of responsible AI expertise. We welcome
empirical studies that scrutinize the stabilizing (and destabilizing) of
particular actors and epistemes of doing responsible AI over others. We
also welcome contributions that genealogically situate the contestation of
power, responsibility, and expertise in present-day configurations of
responsible AI within longer historical contingencies, as well as
contributions that conceptualize alternative forms, relations, and
structures of doing responsible AI in light of — or in spite of — the
organizational and epistemic politics at play. We particularly encourage
submissions that consider the politics of responsible AI expertise on the
margins, at the infrastructural level, at global and planetary scales, and
on longer temporal horizons.

Submission guidelines and additional panel details (panel #35) can be found
here <https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php>.

Best,
Alphoncina Lyamuya

Ph.D. Student in Communication
USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
Center for Information, Technology and Public Life (CITAP) Graduate Student
Affiliate
She/her