Call for Participation
This CSCW Special Interest Group (SIG) invites participants to explore how and why to design agentic AI systems that are explicitly situated within social and organizational contexts. We are particularly interested in engaging both practitioners building agentic systems and scholars bringing social-theoretic perspectives that can deepen our understanding of how the “social” matters in the design, operation, and evaluation of agentic AI.
Together, we will investigate the value of integrating social theory into AI design, and the potential of this move to address critical challenges of bias, equity, situated practice, and context-sensitivity. Our aim is to foster a shared CSCW research agenda that supports the responsible development of social agentics and to collaboratively imagine agentic AI systems across a range of domains.
We invite you to participate! Share your perspectives, reflect on your practices, and join in shaping a growing area of CSCW research.
Submission
Position contribution can be a short expression of interest (EoI) with one to two sentences in the submission form, a short video or slides on work-in-progress. Please submit your EoI here.
If you have any questions, please contact Matt Ratto (matt.ratto@utoronto.ca) or Ali Sutani (ali.sutani@utoronto.ca).
Details
Date/time: Tuesday, October 21, 2025, 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM
Location: Grieghallen Conference Center, Edvard Griegs plass 1, 5015 Bergen, Norway
Room: Peer Gynt-salen
Structure
The SIG will be highly interactive. Following a brief framing of themes, participants will break into small groups to map concepts, methods, and literature, before coming back together for a collective discussion.
Multiple modes of engagement will be available, including:
Digital whiteboards and posters
Small and large-group discussions
Follow-up interactions through an online forum/Discord server
SIG Themes
The overall goal of the workshop is to begin to constitute a shared area of practice from which research collaborations and shared projects can be developed.
Discussion will centre on seven thematic areas:
Social Cognitive Architectures: How can socio-cognitive theories of collective decision-making inform alternative agentic AI architectures?
Social Simulation and Modeling: How can simulation techniques help agentic systems anticipate and adapt to social complexity?
Social Relations of AI: How do agentic systems impact equity, bias, and power in organizations?
Human-AI Teaming: How can social theory improve the design and operation of collaborative AI systems?
Third-wave HCI: How might HCI’s socio-cultural perspectives support more context-aware AI design?
Socially-situated AI: How can concepts of situatedness support more socially-aware AI development?
Human-centricity and Alternative Approaches: How might posthuman and more-than-human perspectives extend beyond anthropocentric assumptions in AI design?
See the full paper for more details.