Deadline: July 15, 2025

We are seeking submissions of short chapters for an edited volume dedicated to theoretical, methodological, and practical innovations in ethnographic methods for AI-augmented and algorithmically mediated social worlds. The different sections of the volume will combine innovative conceptual frameworks, experimental case studies, and hands-on toolkits, aiming to guide researchers across disciplines and industries in applying and adapting ethnographic methods to the “synthetic situations” (Knorr Cetina, 2009) opened up by new computational technologies.

Editors and Publication Details:

The volume, provisionally titled Synthetic situations: Ethnographic methods for post-artificial worlds, will be published by Routledge in 2026. The editors are Gabriele de Seta (University of Bergen), Aleksi Knuutila (University of Helsinki) and Matti Pohjonen (University of Helsinki).

The editors will organise a chapter development seminar and a workshop with invited contributors in September 2025 at the University of Helsinki (participation optional), for which a limited number of travel grants will be available. Unfortunately no payment for authors is available.

Submission Guidelines:

Deadline for abstracts: 15th of July 2025

Notification of acceptance: 30th of July 2025

Deadline for first draft: 31 December 2025

Submission requirements: We invite researchers, practitioners and artists working across the social sciences, digital humanities, computer science, HCI and other fields to submit an abstract (max. 250 words) for a 3,000–5,000-word chapter. We welcome contributions across genres, including:

• Epistemological interrogations
  
• Methodological frameworks
  
• Case studies 
  
• Fieldnotes and experiment reports
  
• Ethical reflections
  
• Toolboxes and field devices
  
• Multimodal outputs
  
• Commented code
  
• …and more

We especially encourage submissions centred on majority world contexts, subaltern communities, marginal epistemologies, and decolonial perspectives on research methods.

For further details or to submit your abstract, please contact us at: gabriele.seta@uib.no

Editorial Vision:

In recent years, a vast variety of technologies which we call “artificial intelligence” - from Large Language Models and synthetic media generators to warehouse optimization and self-driving cars - have seen dramatic technical advancements and wide societal adoption. For social scientists and ethnographers, this has been simultaneously a source of fear and inspiration. New predictive models and large-scale datasets have given social currency to particular forms of expertise and practices of knowledge production, such as data science and big data analytics. This foregrounding of quantitative methods has often been at the expense of more qualitative ways of knowing the co-construction of social worlds and technological systems.

Our edited volume foregrounds synthetic situations: sociotechnical arrangements in which artificial intelligence is both an ethnographic object of study and a qualitative research tool. We understand ethnography in a broad sense, as a research sensibility grounded on long-term presence, immersive participation, and dialogic understanding of otherness. This book aims to explore how computational methods and artificial intelligence are not merely displacing or challenging ethnographic practices, but also augmenting them and being augmented by them. Through our curated collection of chapters, the book contributors explore how computational technologies and ethnography co-construct “post-artificial worlds” - for instance, how LLMs become entangled with increasingly mediated fieldsites, how machine learning models essentialize, reproduce or erase situated knowledges, or how chatbots function as collaborators for participatory research.