[emcai] "Outlasting 'disruption': Empirical perspectives on practical reasoning with AI" - a panel at EASST conference in September

[Jakub Mlynář]

Dear all,

Together with Dipanjan Saha (University of Liverpool), we'd like to invite
you to submit abstracts to our panel called "Outlasting 'disruption':
Empirical perspectives on practical reasoning with AI" (P136) at the
EASST2026 conference in Kraków on 8-11 September.

Our panel seeks empirical studies (of course including EM/CA) on how
diverse users of AI practically reason with, evaluate, and manage its
messy, unpredictable outputs, moving beyond the hype of 'disruption' to
critically assess its real-world limits.

You can find a more detailed description below, and submit your proposals
by the end of February here:
https://easst.net/conference/easst2026/call-for-abstracts/

With season's greetings and all best wishes for 2026,

Jakub


===

*Panel Description*

The inflationary claims of ‘disruption’ surrounding the ‘new’ Artificial
Intelligence (AI), often propagated by the corporations developing them,
hinder our understanding of both the true potentials of these technologies
and challenges related to their integration in social life. To get a better
grasp on their rapid advancements and their future consequences for various
types of jobs, we need to understand how AI is made relevant to its
specific contexts of use. While they are publicly presented as seamless or
autonomous tools, such technologies are often messy, unpredictable, and
prone to generating outputs that users find ambiguous, problematic, or
simply incorrect. This creates a critical gap between the AI's imagined or
prescribed use and the practical, situated work required for its smooth
operation. Attending to the broad sphere of activities that takes place to
make AI work can provide a more measured and empirically grounded basis for
evaluating its achievements and limitations as part of its entanglements
with our everyday lives.

This panel invites empirical investigations that uncover the lived
difficulties of working with various applications of AI. We welcome
contributions exploring, but not limited to, the following questions:

• How do a wide range of users, from domain experts to laypersons, actually
manage and make sense of the results produced by AI technologies in
practice?

• What mundane methods and practical reasoning skills do people employ to
evaluate, trust, or challenge AI’s outputs?

• How can we empirically study the multiplicity of reasoning styles and
ad-hoc procedures users adopt when evaluating AI-produced results?

• What does attending to these practical difficulties reveal about the
actual, rather than promised, capabilities of automation and the necessity
of situated human competences?

By focusing on the ‘just how’ of AI’s use, this panel will contribute to
the ongoing debates surrounding the future of work, human–machine
collaboration, and the observable societal implications of ‘disruptive’
technologies.
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