CFP 4s Toronto: The Performativity of AI

[JOBIN Anna]

Dear colleagues,

If you are researching the performativity of Artificial Intelligence or working on related issues, we kindly invite you to submit an abstract to our Open Panel at 4s (Toronto, Oct 7-10, 2026) by April 30 via the following link: https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php

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PANEL TITLE: Artificial Intelligence as a performative phenomenon

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PANEL ABSTRACT:

STS has shown that AI is never “agentic on its own” (Suchman 2023), “never pure” (Shapin 2010) and “never alone” (Mol 2002). The ubiquity of “AI” reshapes the world not because it acts by itself, but because it is a profoundly performative phenomenon. It circulates through politics, media, investment portfolios, art, and everyday practices. The performativity of AI shows in how discourses of intelligence, autonomy and efficiency are not merely descriptive but materially shape infrastructures, economies, regulation, and visions of the future. This panel starts from AI as a phenomenon with no clear boundaries, neither from a technical, social, nor definitional viewpoint but enacted through discourses, which give it meaning, legitimacy, social and material presence. To understand its performativity we must understand how discourses become action-ascribing, and how they translate into infrastructures and policies. In short, we are interested in what AI does to the social world, to institutions, to citizens, to bodies.

We therefore ask: What makes AI discursively performative and materially consequential? How can we analyze its discursive power in ways that show the performativity and the “performation” (Callon 2006) of AI? Importantly, performative discourse does not operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but requires a material apparatus – that is, a set of arrangements, techniques, rules, and structures – to ensure the conditions of its realization. One possible focus hence lies on what this material apparatus is made of. How does it manage to transform expectations, reorganize resources, and alter social-cultural arrangements? Other contributions might examine what the performativity of AI mobilizes, highlights, hides or conceals. Although AI seems to operate across various societal arenas, the stories it tells (efficiency, growth, automation) appear strikingly homogeneous. What material, social, and ecological alternatives get sidelined when AI is performed through these dominant discourses, and what new assemblages might arise?

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Details

• Submission link (panel 207): https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php
• Submission due date: 30 April 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: 29 May 2026
• Conference: 4s Meeting, 7-10 October 2026, Toronto
• Panel convenors: Anna Jobin, Jascha Bareis, Olivier Glassey, Christopher Salter and Philippe Sormani

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Prof. Anna Jobin | Asst. Professor Human-IST; Study Advisor M.A. Digital Society 

Institute HUMAN-IST | University of Freiburg, CH-1700 Fribourg
anna....@unifr.ch