CFP: Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship Special Issue on Libraries, Humans, Machines: Old Relationships, New Entanglements

The open access, peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship (CJAL) invites submissions for a special issue entitled Libraries, Humans, Machines: Old Relationships, New Entanglements. From the call:

Libraries have long served as mediators between people and technologies, from catalogues to databases to digitized surrogates. Recent literature has called for academic libraries to position themselves as leaders in advancing AI literacy, framing its adoption as both inevitable and essential. Yet as access to information becomes increasingly privatized through corporate-controlled platforms and as generative AI comes to dominate professional discourse and reshape user expectations, the stakes of these entanglements demand critical reflection. How do libraries reconcile their commitments to access, equity, sustainability, and integrity with the next wave of transformation, one that exacerbates preexisting pressures and generates new ones around concepts like surveillance, labour precarity, intellectual property, and environmental harm?

Examples of topic areas might include but are not limited to:

• Critical analyses of AI-driven tools in library research, teaching, or administration
• Explorations of labour, professionalism, and human expertise in relation to automation
• Historical or theoretical perspectives on library technologies
• Discussions about academic journal publishing and large language models (LLMs)
• Analyses of the effects of the new AI ecosystem on notions of openness
• Reconsiderations of the collections as data movement
• Materialist analyses of calls for AI literacy in librarianship
• Perspectives on transhumanism and posthuman futures
• Case studies of how libraries are navigating the implementation of (or resistance against) technologies
• Critical engagements with policy, surveillance, or data governance in higher education

We invite submissions that critically examine the intersections of librarianship and the technologies that facilitate, constrain, and reimagine it. We are especially interested in work that foregrounds critical, creative, and interdisciplinary approaches, situating academic librarianship as both a profession and a series of worldviews entangled with society and information systems across contexts and time.

Proposals are due December 18, 2025 via email (see the call for more details).