positions Statement of Principles on AI
positions understands the current rise of “generative artificial intelligence” (GenAI) to be the latest iteration of capitalist technologies of extraction, whether in terms of natural resources or labor power. As such, GenAI is operationalized precisely through reified abstraction of accumulated human* knowledge as “data,” inherently reductionist, derivative, and ultimately exploitative. While some publications have opted to treat GenAI as a tool for language editing and structural organization that may be used with proper acknowledgement, positions believes that knowledge production is inseparable from any use of language, including but not limited to conceptualizing, summarizing, drafting, editing, revising, rephrasing, translating, or organizing of text through human labor. Without precluding the potential recuperation of AI-use for the collective social good, but given the current evidence of its many harms, positions refuses GenAI in any writing and maintains its commitment to embodied human-generated work, whether by its authors, reviewers, editors, or staff. By submitting a manuscript to positions, authors acknowledge that the writing is new and original without duplicate submissions and is not the result (in whole or in part) of GenAI. In turn, the positions editorial team and collective commit to our human-generated writing toward building “critical practices that reflect on the politics of knowing…and links between knowledge and knowers as actors in existing social institutions,” as stated in our founding Statement of Purpose.
* The reference to “human” is not to privilege humans as a species or to simplistically differentiate the human from the machine, but to apply the term heuristically to reveal the current impact of GenAI that is designed precisely to optimize humans as a "standing-reserve," or raw material.
Single Paper Submissions
All single manuscripts must be submitted via ScholarOne for publication consideration.
All manuscripts should be in 12-point font, double-spaced, including quotations and endnotes, and anonymized throughout. Submissions should not exceed 9,000 words/60,000 characters with spaces (CWS), including references and endnotes in the count. They should be prepared according to the journal’s style guide. You must also submit an abstract and keywords at the time of initial submission.
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Special Issue Submissions
Please send a detailed proposal of the thematic issue to positions: asia critique, including the following:
– title
– abstract for the project; introduction and/or outline
– table of contents
– list of contributors
– abstracts for each essay