Artificially Enabled Social Change?

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Call for Abstracts – Artificially Enabled Social Change? Opportunities and Challenges of (Generative) Artificial Intelligence for Activists and Movement Organizations

Over time, social movement scholarship has confronted many technological changes. These include the development of the internet and the first wave of web applications, especially in the context of the global justice movement, and the rapid spread of social media platforms and their use in large-scale social movements, from Occupy Wall Street to the so-called Arab Spring mobilizations and the more recent Black Lives Matter protests. At the same time, social movement scholars have also grappled with the rapid incorporation of big data and algorithms into societies, reflecting on the emergence of forms of activism that place data at the center of struggles and confronting algorithms as both a potential lever and a threat to mobilizations. Recent years have witnessed a novel technological transformation that has placed Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications at the center of public debate, especially concerning Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), which allows the creation of content thanks to prompts and often through conversations between humans and chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, among others. Research on social movements is thus once again confronted with a rapid technological change that promises to be long-lasting and reshape societies and the human activities within them. This special issue aims to gather contributions that explore the nexus between (G)AI and grassroots forms of political mobilization and participation from different disciplinary perspectives in diverse parts of the world and through different methods. Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:

• (G)AI as an object of contestation and mobilization;
• Case studies of protests that use (G)AI to support activist mobilizations;
• The use of (G)AI in the day-to-day political organizing of social movement organizations;
• The discourses, framings, and imaginaries of activists related to (G)AI in the context of protests and mobilizations;
• The adoption of (G)AI and its implications for changing forms of action, organizational structures, and dynamics of contention.
• The consequences of the use of (G)AI for social movements, social movement organizations and activists;
• The challenges (G)AI poses to established social movement theories and approaches.
• The development of new methods for analyzing G(AI) in social movements and contentious collective actions, and the methodological implications of studying G(AI) in social movement studies.

Submission Instructions

To propose a paper, please submit a 500-word abstract by June 15, 2025. All abstracts and inquiries should be sent to: sms_specialissue_ai@live.unibo.it

Accepted proposals will be notified by July 15, 2025. Full manuscripts submission should be done by November 15, 2025.

Please note that an invitation to submit does not guarantee publication. All submissions must follow the SMS guidelines and will be subject to the regular peer review process. In addition, authors who do not meet the relevant deadlines may be excluded from consideration for the special issue, as everyone is affected by long delays in the submission of individual manuscripts and revisions.

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