This article outlines a research agenda for a sociology of artificial intelligence (AI). The authors review two areas in which sociological theories and methods have made significant contributions to the study of inequalities and AI: (1) the politics of algorithms, data, and code and (2) the social shaping of AI in practice. The authors contrast sociological approaches that emphasize intersectional inequalities and social structure with other disciplines’ approaches to the social dimensions of AI, which often have a thin understanding of the social and emphasize individual-level interventions. This scoping article invites sociologists to use the discipline’s theoretical and methodological tools to analyze when and how inequalities are made more durable by AI systems. Sociologists have an ability to identify how inequalities are embedded in all aspects of society and to point toward avenues for structural social change. Therefore, sociologists should play a leading role in the imagining and shaping of AI futures.
Climate change is increasingly recognized as not only a biophysical and technological problem but also a social one. Nonetheless, sociologists have expressed concern that sociology has paid relatively little attention to climate change. This deficit threatens to limit the frames available to understand and imagine solutions to the climate crisis. In this paper I report the most up-to-date and expansive empirical assessment of attention to climate change in sociology in the United States (U.S.). I find little to no mention of climate change across leading sociology journal articles (0.89%), conference sessions (1.5%), and faculty biographies (2.8%) and course listings (0.2%) in the 20 top-ranked departments in the U.S. Two leading journals, the
- PAR ID:
- 10513078
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The American Sociologist
- ISSN:
- 0003-1232
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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