Guest Editor
- Carlo Giovannella, ASLERD
Important dates
- Deadline: November 13th, 2026
- Notification to the authors: January 15th, 2027
- Camera ready paper: February 26th, 2027
- Publication of the special issue: Spring 2027 (tentatively)
Overview
The transformative power of LLM-based AI is unfolding before our eyes, and we experience it in most of our daily activities. In recent months, AI use has reached a remarkably high levels of penetration among secondary school and university students – not far from 100% – and is advancing just as significantly in our daily interaction with the web – for instance, though not exclusively, through targeted answers at the top of search engine results pages, which increasingly encourage users to ask questions in natural language. During such interactions, users are no longer limited to searching for information and for learning purposes (knowledge building), and/or requesting assistance with writing and/or translating texts, but there is also a significant increase in requests for medical, legal, design and financial investment advice, and even advice on social relationships (consider, for example, the growing number of young people seeking comfort in conversational exchanges with chatbots).
When confronted with a raging river, we cannot ask ourselves how to stem it, but rather how to harness its transformative and disruptive power.
It is therefore urgent to understand how the strength of the AI river can be leveraged to generate well-being rather than harm the society, how to face today’s challenges and gaps, and anticipate future ones.
In other words: how can individuals manage the phenomenon – at a time when DIY and “word of mouth” are the most common ways of approaching it — through warnings, recommended skills, or suggested precautions?
As an example AI in reshaping and remodulating the working organizations and such transformation is not any longer solely and mainly a technological challenge, but rather an organizational challenge that involves, as well, human attitudes, behaviours and competencies.
How can, thus, educational ecosystems help young people build a future career in which it will be essential for their individual competitiveness to know how to manage interaction with AI in an appropriate and professional manner without sacrificing the indispensable advantages of developing their own critical and ethical judgement (not only as a social convention, but even more importantly as an individual conviction) and, as well, human creativity?
It is now widely accepted, in fact, that AI can have a transformative effect on many life skills by supporting the developing of a part of them and at the same time by potentially hindering some others. Which kind of transformation is undergoing our brainframe? What losses or changes are we prepared to accept at an individual level and across society as a whole, and to what extent? In exchange for what? AI also has a transformative effect on so-called digital competences, either, as part of them or as an external agent?
More in general which are the problems and issues in transferring the human agency in using AI from learning ecosystems to the everyday life and in a civic agency and engagment with the aim to try to exploit all its transformative power to support societal wellbeing? AI is able to extends our cognitive capacity but how will be possible to keep our cognitive freedom and sovereignty?
Can the peculiarities of the contexts be relevant in taking advantage of potential beneficial effects of the AI uptaking? The uptaking paths might distinguish high-income from low-income countries? AI based technopractices might oppress, marginalise and disadvantage minority groups? Which gaps and divide can be generated?
How policy and decision makers can take action to minimise the problems, maximise the benefits of AI uptaking for the individual wellbeing and that of society as a whole?
Topics of Interest
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Supporting the transfer from learning ecosystems to the everyday life of human agency in using AI
• Transformative effects of AI on individual skills and competences
• Supporting cognitive freedom and sovereignty in AI uptaking
• Transformative effects of AI in civic agency and engagement.
• Governing the transformative effect of AI uptaking to sustain social wellbeing and counteract gaps and divide
• a combination of the above topics.
Submission procedure
All submissions must be original and may not be under review by another publication.
The manuscripts should be submitted anonymized either in .doc or in .pdf format.
All papers will be blindly peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers. Prospective participants are invited to submit an 8-20 pages paper (including authors’ information, abstract, all tables, figures, references, etc.).
The paper should be written according to the IxD&A authors’ guidelines .
Submission page -> link
(when submitting the paper please choose the section: ‘SI: From education to societal wellbeing for all: governing the disruptive and transformative power of AI‘)
For scientific advice and for any query please contact the guest editors:
• gvncrl00 [at] uniroma2 [dot] it
marking the subject as: IxD&A special issue on ‘From education to societal wellbeing for all: governing the disruptive and transformative power of AI‘’‘.