Dear community!
We're thrilled to invite you to submit your work to our new special issue, Global Institutional Perspectives on GenAI & Cultural Industries, hosted by the Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society.
Our full intellectual agenda is detailed in the call for papers below, but in brief, we're especially interested in how GenAI is reshaping cultural industries through new and old economic partnerships, infrastructural dependencies, and governance arrangements, and how these dynamics differ across regions. We aim to multiply our frames of reference in the field beyond its Anglo-American focus by encouraging work that takes diverse cultural, political, and historical contexts as starting points for theory-building. Contributions are welcome to focus on one or a combination of the following topics and issues:
- Economic relations between major AI companies and cultural producers
- Local AI intermediaries, funding, or infrastructures facilitating GenAI integration
- Economic objectives and incentives for cultural producers to use GenAI tools
- Hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and language, shaping the development of or access to GenAI tools
- Development of local GenAI alternatives
- Boundary resources shaping access to GenAI tools
- Embedding of access to GenAI within wider material cultures
- Friction between GenAI models and local requirements of cultural production
- GenAI models and companies shaping cultural production
- GenAI models and region- and industry-specific cultural sensitivities
- Regulation of GenAI for cultural production by governments and public institutions
- Political and cultural interests involved in GenAI governance in cultural industries
The deadline for submitting abstracts is January 19, 2026.
For the full CFP:
The editorial team,
Thomas Poell, Arturo Arriagada, Lorena Caminhas, Tom Divon, Smith Mehta, David Nieborg, Godwin Simon, and Zhen Ye.