Call for Papers

The Cambridge Forum on AI invites submissions for its upcoming Themed Issue The New Geometry of Language: AI Models in Critical Perspective which will be Guest Edited by Matteo Pasquinelli, Amira Moeding, and Tommaso Guariento 

Deadline for Paper Submissions: March 30 2026

Please submit an abstract of 500 words in the first instance, through this form, by December 1, 2025.

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and chatbots such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek, questions about the politics of language have re-emerged as central to the critical humanities, the history of science and technology, and political economy. LLMs embody both a novel form of language and a new relation to language, one mediated by strands of linear algebra, vector geometry, and information theory, condensed into the architectures of artificial neural networks. This ongoing mathematisation of language—initiated by engineers, physicists, and linguists since at least the early twentieth century—now confronts us with an unprecedented apparatus of language production. In turn, it forces a radical rethinking of the concepts of self, society, and politics. What does it mean for humanity that the faculty so strongly connected to human reason and socialisation is automated and that we increasingly engage with a new form of ‘artificial’ language?

As language is central to all conceptions of reason and humanity, and as humans are entwined in and infinitely dependent on language, it is urgent to investigate the socio-technical foundations that make this new form of language production possible. The focus of this issue is on the specific character of language as generated by LLMs, and on the economic logics that shape the automation of language. Already in the 1990s, scholars in political economy advocated for a linguistic turn to grasp the transformations of social relations and labour in post-Fordism. Yet the scale and intensity of language automation made possible by today’s LLMs could not have been foreseen at that time. These new ways of linguistic creation and labour organisation have restructured our social world.

We invite interdisciplinary reflections on LLMs, including hybrid contributions located between humanities, computer science, and critical engineering, on the following topics:

1. The formalisation and mathematisation of language
2. The history of LLMs and its relationship to AI
3. The political economy of LLMs between labour and market
4. The ecological cost of language automation
5. The issue of anthropomorphization of chatbots
6. Decolonial and anti-colonial approaches to language generation
7. The problem of meaning and grounding in LLMs
8. Computational linguistics and neo-structuralism
9. Philosophy of language after language automation
10. Translation studies in the age of machine translation
11. Low resources language in the world of LLMs
12. The issue of model collapse in LLMs

Contributions might speak to one or any combination of the fields and questions mentioned above. We strongly believe in a critical, interdisciplinary and hence collaborative approach to tackling the seemingly general applicability of LLMs to every aspect of life. With this themed issue we hope to provide a foundation for future interdisciplinary research on LLMs.