"Outlasting ‘disruption’: Empirical perspectives on practical reasoning with AI" - panel at EASST 2026 conference

[Jakub Mlynář]

Dear colleagues,

We would like to invite you to submit abstracts to our panel “Outlasting ‘disruption’: Empirical perspectives on practical reasoning with AI”, scheduled for the EASST 2026 conference in Kraków (Poland), 8–11 September. The panel welcomes empirical investigations that shed light on the lived difficulties of working with automated systems and contribute to ongoing debates on the future of work, human–machine collaboration, and the societal implications of AI-based technologies. Details of the panel’s scope and aims are attached and included below.

 

Abstracts can be submitted until 9 March via: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easst2026/p/18164

 

More information about the conference is available here: https://easst.net/conference/easst2026/easst2026-home/

 

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

 

Kind regards,

 

Dipanjan Saha (University of Liverpool)

Jakub Mlynář (HES-SO Valais-Wallis)

 

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Outlasting ‘disruption’: Empirical perspectives on practical reasoning with AI (panel P136)

 

The inflationary narratives surrounding the achievements of the ‘new’ Artificial Intelligence (AI), often propagated by the corporations developing them, hinder our understanding of the true potentials of these technologies. To get a better grasp on their rapid advancements and their future consequences for various forms of work, we need to understand how they are made relevant to their specific contexts of use. While often presented as seamless or autonomous tools, these technologies are frequently messy, unpredictable, and prone to generating outputs that users find ambiguous, problematic, or simply incorrect. This creates a critical gap between the AI's prescribed operation and the practical, situated work required to make it useful. Attending to the broad sphere of activities that goes on to make AI work provides a more measured and empirically grounded basis for evaluating their achievements and limitations in the world.

 

This panel invites empirical investigations that allow us to uncover the lived difficulties of working with these automated systems. We welcome contributions exploring, but not limited to, the following questions:

• How do a wide range of users, from domain experts to laypersons, actually manage and make sense of the results produced by these technologies in practice?
• What mundane methods and practical reasoning skills do people employ to evaluate, trust, or challenge AI’s outputs?
• How can we empirically study the multiplicity of reasoning styles and ad-hoc procedures users adopt when evaluating AI-generated results?
• What does attending to these practical difficulties reveal about the actual, rather than promised, capabilities of automation and the necessity of situated human skill?
  
  

By focusing on the ‘how’ of AI’s use, this panel will contribute to the ongoing debates surrounding the future of work, human-machine collaboration, and the societal implications of these powerful technologies.