Produced by Jordi Viader Guerrero, Dmitry Muravyov, Erica Gargaglione, Aarón Moreno Inglés, Mariana Fernández Mora, and Orestis Kollyris
https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/ai_anxiety
“In 2025, there is no shortage of research projects about AI. Spanning different disciplines, countries, and domains, AI research, whatever one means by it, is on the rise. Besides more technically minded fields, social sciences, humanities, and the arts are also part of this conversation, as evidenced by an ever-expanding list of research projects and exhibitions on AI in these areas.
If you are also an early career researcher in these fields, doing a project on AI, you may, perhaps, resonate with our sense of anxiety. It is a feeling of trouble, unsettledness, an itchy sensation that your topic is too topical. Amongst the multitude of events, publications, and discussions, one can only wonder: How did so many of us end up doing research on AI? What are we actually doing? What does our research do in the world? For whom our research is intended? And can we do it differently?
There is indubitably nothing new about this congruence between a technology that captured public interest and funding streams, changing academic interests, and institutional incentives. Yet, being researchers in the social sciences and humanities, we see the need to understand how the current moment of the “AI boom” shapes our practices of producing knowledge about the subject and engaging with it outside academia. Since there is no single, unquestionable way to do research about anything, it makes sense to pause and think about how we do it.”
With contributions by Dmitry Muravyov, Jordi Viader Guerrero, Ali Alkhatib, Marcela Suárez, Aarón Moreno Inglés, Eke Rebergen, Erica Gargaglione, Mariana Fernández Mora, Orestis Kollyris, Daniel Leix Palumbo, Alexandra Barancová, Jef Ausloos, Oksana Dorofeeva, Rasa Bocyte, Nic Orchard, Ruben van de Ven, Donald Jay Bertulfo, Michaël Grauwde, Ildikó Plájás, Marlon Kruizinga, Caitlin van Bommel, and Inte Gloerich.
