Call for Contributions: Special Issue “Talking to Non-human Strangers”

Interaction with non-human entities, especially through conversational technologies like chatbots and other artificial intelligences, has increasingly become part of everyday human experience. These encounters raise profound questions about communication, identity, empathy, ethics, and the nature of human interaction itself. This special issue of “Letonica” invites interdisciplinary scholarly contributions that explore various dimensions of human interactions with non-human entities, whether technological, biological, cultural, or symbolic.

We encourage articles addressing a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

The philosophical and ethical dimensions of human-non-human communication.
Sociological insights into the integration of chatbots and AI into public and private spaces.
Empirical studies on how human interactions with conversational AI shape social practices and user experiences.
Linguistic and semiotic perspectives on language use and meaning-making in non-human interactions.
Phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to understanding the experience of communicating with non-human entities.
Critical discourse studies examining narratives around humanisation and dehumanisation within AI interactions.
Historical perspectives on how societies conceptualize and relate to non-human interlocutors.
Analysis of cultural representations of communication with artificial or symbolic non-human beings.
Ethical and practical challenges in the humanisation of conversational agents.

The guest editors of the special issue are Igors Gubenko un Māris Kūlis.

Timeline

20 June 2025 – Deadline for indicating interest by submitting an article’s working title and abstract (maximum 300 words) to letonica@lulfmi.lv. Authors will be notified about the acceptance or required adaptations of their proposals by 5 July 2025. The editorial team has the right to refuse the proposal.

30 November 2025 – Deadline for submitting full manuscripts (5000 to 9000 words) to letonica@lulfmi.lv. Please consult the journal’s guidelines available online.

September 2026 – Prospective publication date of the issue.

Journal “Letonica” is an interdisciplinary Scopus-indexed scholarly journal published by the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art (ILFA) of the University of Latvia. It publishes free-access, peer-reviewed articles in humanities and social sciences.

This special issue is part of the research project “Humanising Chatbots” carried out at the University of Latvia. The project aims at bridging philosophical theories of human communicative experience with empirical findings derived from chatbot-user interaction data.

Last time modified: 19.05.2025 10:51:00