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Call for Chapters
Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Digital Colonialism

Handbook Editors

Payal Kumar - ISH, India
Pawan Budhwar - Aston University, UK
Elham Malik - VIT Vellore, India

Publisher: World Scientific Publishers
Executive Editor: Gideon Markman, USA

We invite scholars, researchers, and practitioners worldwide to contribute to a major interdisciplinary handbook examining artificial intelligence through the lens of ethics, inequality, and global power relations.

As artificial intelligence increasingly shapes organizations, governance, economies, and everyday life, its benefits and burdens remain profoundly unequal. This handbook places digital colonialism at the center of inquiry, examining how AI systems reproduce structural inequalities through data extraction, infrastructure control, technological dependency, and asymmetrical value creation.

Unlike conventional AI ethics volumes that focus primarily on fairness, accountability, and technical compliance, this handbook foregrounds the organizational, societal, and geopolitical dimensions of AI. It engages critically with questions of surveillance capitalism, algorithmic bias, epistemic risk, labor precarity, and the concentration of technological power in the hands of a few actors.

Core Themes

1. AI Ethics, Governance, and Human Agency
   Governance, accountability, bias, epistemic risk, and human agency across organizational and public contexts.

2. Data Extraction and the Unequal Geographies of AI
   The extraction and commodification of data and its implications for knowledge, consent, and control.

3. Infrastructure Control and AI Dependency
   Dependency created through control over compute systems, cloud infrastructure, platforms, and technical standards.

4. Value Asymmetry, Labor, and Unequal AI Futures
   Uneven distribution of AI-generated value, labor precarity, and the social consequences of AI-driven economies.

A Global Scholarly Conversation

This handbook is explicitly global in scope and orientation. We especially welcome contributions from scholars based in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and across the Global South whose research addresses the lived realities of AI-driven inequality and technological dependency.

Research grounded in regional contexts, non-Western theoretical traditions, and place-based empirical work is central to the vision of this volume. Cross-national and interdisciplinary collaborations are strongly encouraged.

We Invite

• Theoretical contributions
• Empirical studies (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods)
• Comparative analyses
• Policy-oriented research

Timeline

30 June 2026 - Abstract submission (800–1,000 words)
15 July 2026 - Decision notification
30 September 2026 - Full chapter submission
15 December 2026 - Review feedback
15 February 2027 - Revised submission
15 April 2027 - Final submission
1 May 2027 - Final manuscript to publisher

Submission Guidelines

• APA 7th edition style (without DOIs)
• British English with "z" spellings
• Chapter length: 8,000–8,500 words inclusive of references, tables, and figures
• Any use of AI tools must be clearly disclosed in the manuscript

Submit abstracts to:
elhammalik77@gmail.com

For more details, please refer to the attached CfC file.

We look forward to building a globally engaged scholarly conversation on AI, ethics, and digital colonialism.

On behalf of the editorial team,

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Elham Malik
VIT Vellore, India

Springer Research Community: https://communities.springernature.com/manage/content
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elham-malik-9a160a187/
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