AIYA: Artificial Intelligence and Young Adult Studies [working title]

Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, University of Florida

Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2026

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

As artificial intelligence systems reconfigure contemporary culture, scholarship across the humanities has begun to address AI as a profound socio-cultural force, a mediator of knowledge, and an engine of subject formation rather than a simple technological tool. Foundational and emerging scholarship in Digital Humanities, critical algorithm studies, posthumanism, digital rhetorics, and technology studies (including work by N. Katherine Hayles, Kate Crawford, Safiya Umoja Noble, Benjamin Bratton, Luciana Parisi, and Mark Coeckelbergh) demonstrates that algorithmic architectures shape agency, mediate cognition, and reflect systemic values.

This edited collection intervenes directly at the intersection of Critical AI Studies and young adult (YA) narrative, youth culture, and youth studies to establish a theoretical framework for an emerging, urgent conversation. On the one hand, YA literature, media, and culture offer an exceptionally rich archive of computational imaginaries, spanning early mechanical automata, classic sci-fi Android companions, and contemporary cyberpunk novels, as well as interactive algorithmic fictions, generative writing platforms, personalized social media feeds, and AI-driven smart toys. That history has yet to be sufficiently acknowledged. At the same time, creators of YA literature and media are understandably concerned about AI practices, impacts, and ethics, with many authors and illustrators (and some professional groups) taking a firm anti-AI stance. Acknowledging those concerns, this book explores how youth studies and YA narrative are already engaging AI and might engage AI in the future. Rather than solicit standard textual readings, this volume asks how literary and cultural analysis might emerge within the newly surfaced, heavily mediated spaces of AI and youth culture - and conversely, how youth culture and YA narrative might help us theorize or analyze AI.

To build this dialogue, we encourage contributors to focus on how AI and youth culture might be mutually constitutive or illuminating. Our goal is to develop flexible critical frameworks that invigorate ongoing exchanges among AI scholars and researchers of youth narrative. Consequently, we invite chapters that use cultural artifacts—whether literary texts, algorithmic recommender engines, synthetic interfaces, or speculative digital spaces—not as static analytical ends but as dynamic entry points for broader theoretical arguments and cultural explorations.

Specifically, we invite inquiries into how youth literature and culture contribute to critical AI awareness and AI enculturation. How do narratives written for and consumed by young people construct, interrogate, or normalize human-machine relationality? In what ways does YA literature model sophisticated algorithmic literacy, or, conversely, quietly naturalize predictive data tracking, surveillance capitalism, and automated decision-making? Beyond textual representations, we seek contributions that examine how global youth cultures are fundamentally shaped by algorithmic environments, data reliance, platform economics, and synthetic media. We welcome chapters that consider how AI epistemologies reshape youth culture and its scholarly study, and that ask broadly how algorithmic materialities and digital architectures disrupt, redefine, or reinforce historical and developmental constructions of childhood and adolescent agency.

Because algorithmic networks operate globally while mediating hyper-local realities, the volume prioritizes theoretical perspectives that challenge anthropocentric, Eurocentric, or purely technological definitions of youth, development, and literacy. We encourage contributors to examine how dynamic, adaptive AI systems destabilize static concepts of youth identity, cognitive and sensorimotor development, collaborative authorship, and human agency in an increasingly automated world.

Possible Topics          

• Algorithmic bias, justice, and youth identity formation
• Algorithmic literacy and critical AI awareness in youth media
• Anthropocentrism, posthumanism, and synthetic life in youth media/lit
• Automated agency, machine learning, and the disruption of coming-of-age biildungsroman) tropes
• Biopolitics, data surveillance, and predictive models in youth contexts
• Youth interactions with conversational AI, social bots, and digital companions
• DH methods and concepts
• Generative AI, creative production, and the ethics of youth authorship
• Global youth cultures and subcultures under algorithmic structures
• Human-AI co-evolution and cyborg youth
• Indigenous protocols, AI epistemologies, and alternative technological futures
• Keywords for AI youth studies
• Machine learning and automated pedagogical architectures
• Narrative evolutions and structures
• Representations of AI, androids, consciousness, and synthetic beings
• Robot ethics, care work, and mechanical parenting or caretaking
• Smart toys, the Internet of Toys (IoToys), and digital data collection with/from youth
• Social media algorithms and youth affective economies
• Synthetic media, deepfakes, and youth epistemic trust
• Techno-dystopias, climate-AI intersections, and speculative youth futures
• Theoretical approaches to AI enculturation and social conditioning
• Youth disability and/or neurodivergence

Proposal Guidelines

350–500 word chapter proposals (or the equivalent) are due November 1, 2026. Proposals should be for original works not previously published and not currently under review elsewhere. If the chapter is accepted for the collection, a full draft (5,000–7,000 words) will be required by May 1, 2027. Editors are happy to discuss ideas prior to the deadline.

To submit a proposed chapter, please prepare the following:

Chapter Proposal: A 350–500 word abstract outlining the scope, argument, and theoretical framework of the proposed chapter.

Biographical Note: A 150–200 word brief biography for each author, including current institutional affiliation.

Contact Information: Full name, email address, and preferred professional title.

Submission Format: A single Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or PDF document, titled: [your name]_AIYA_Submission_[date].

Submit to:

Sid Dobrin sdobrin@ufl.edu

Kenneth Kidd kbkidd@ufl.edu

The editors encourage early career scholars and graduate students to submit.

The editors are particularly interested in receiving proposals from non-Western perspectives.