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The purpose of this study is to examine how young people imagine civic futures through speculative fiction writing about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The authors argue that young people’s speculative fiction writing about AI not only helps make visible the ways they imagine the impacts of emerging technologies and the modes of collective action available for leveraging, resisting or countering them but also the frictions and fissures between the two.

This practitioner research study used data from student artifacts (speculative fiction stories, prewriting and relevant unit work) as well as classroom fieldnotes. The authors used inductive coding to identify emergent patterns in the ways young people wrote about AI and civics, as well as deductive coding using digital civic ecologies framework.

The findings of this study spotlight both the breadth of intractable civic concerns that young people associate with AI, as well as the limitations of the civic frameworks for imagining political interventions to these challenges. Importantly, they also indicate that the process of speculative writing itself can help reconcile this disjuncture by opening space to dwell in, rather than resolve, the tensions between “the speculative” and the “civic.”

Teachers might use speculative fiction writing and the digital civic ecologies framework to support students in critically examining possible AI futures and effective civic actions within them.

Speculative fiction writing offers an avenue for students to analyze the growing civic concerns posed by emerging platform technologies like AI.

From the authors’ personal and professional experiences, they have observed that autistic women are uniquely at risk of interpersonal trauma. Given the tendency for autistic women to be overlooked in research and practice, this study aims to rectify this by exploring the relevant literature and including the voices of autistic women throughout this paper.

This study completed a literature review of quantitative and qualitative data relating to exposure to interpersonal trauma in autistic women. This study also reviewed relevant discursive evidence available on in memoirs and reports. This study also included dialogue between us as authors from an auto/“Autie”-ethnographic position.

Both clinical literature and discursive evidence support the idea that autistic women are uniquely at risk of interpersonal trauma, in particular, sexual victimisation. Explanatory factors are considered. Studies exploring rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were less consistent. Further evidence is required to better understand how autistic women experience and express PTSD and to inform assessment and treatment modifications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to integrate clinical literature and discursive evidence on the topic of interpersonal trauma in autistic women. It provides useful insights into the experiences of autistic women in this space, directions for urgently needed future research and modifications to clinical practice.

This chapter addresses research on worker skill, technology, and control over the labor process by focusing on routine immaterial labor or knowledge work. Based on participant observation conducted among analytics workers at a digital publishing network, I find that analytics workers appear paradoxically autonomous and empowered by management while being bound by ever-evolving, calculative cloud-based information and communication technologies (ICTs). Workers appear free to “be creative,” while ever-evolving ICTs exert unpredictable control over work. Based on this finding, I argue that sociology’s tendency to take organizational boundaries and technological stability for granted hampers analyses of contemporary forms of work. Thus, sociologists of work must extend outward – beyond communities of practice, labor markets, and the state – to include the ever-evolving, infrastructural, socio-technical networks in which work and organizations are embedded. Additionally, research on the experience of immaterial labor suggests that ICTs afford pleasurably immersive experiences that bind workers to organizations and their fields. Complicating this emerging body of research, I find workers acutely frustrated by these unpredictable, ever-evolving, cloud-based ICTs.

THIS is the month when the public librarian again faces his annual estimates. Things are rarely exactly easy for him. This year may be no exception, as there will be in some places an effort to lop off the non‐essential works of local authorities. It is at this time that some librarians wish the service ceased to be local, because town councillors as a whole believe so much in the local character of government and do not realize that if they reduce on such things as libraries they are placing their own people at a disadvantage in relation to other towns. That is the soundest reason, and one that cannot too often be stressed, for some sort of imposed standard of service, which cannot be varied too greatly because of some temporary condition of local or national finance. We do not anticipate crippling reductions anywhere, but the signs for advance are not more propitious than in the bad old days. We shall be interested to hear of special cases this year, but hope that they will be few. We know that salaries cannot, at present, be greatly affected, but even librarians do not live for pay‐cheques alone; they want books, light, heat and many more things to revive, if not to improve, their service.