AOSIS calls on all authors to participate in The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa (TD) journal’s 2027 special collection titled: Whose New Normal? Artificial Systems: Steering or Being Steered? Cybernetic Perspectives.

As artificial systems increasingly shape society, these technologies are transforming human behaviour, social practices, and forms of work. Adapting to these changes is complex and is further challenged by persistent societal inequalities, including poverty, uneven socio-economic structures, and limited access to education and technology. These challenges are particularly relevant in developing countries such as South Africa, where socio-cultural, economic, and historical factors shape how artificial systems are experienced, negotiated, and managed.

Artificial systems are increasingly performing tasks once undertaken by humans, reshaping work, knowledge production, and human relationships. While these developments bring advances across many domains, they also introduce new challenges, often intensified by digital divides, uneven skills development, contested human values, and systemic inequalities. At the same time, artificial systems offer opportunities to bridge some of these gaps by expanding access to knowledge, expertise, work opportunities, and learning resources that might otherwise remain inaccessible or prohibitively costly.

This special collection examines whether individuals, institutions, and communities are actively shaping their adaptation to artificial systems or whether they are primarily responding to externally driven technological and economic pressures. It encourages reflection on how South African systems, in particular, can retain human-centred, culturally grounded practices while integrating artificial systems in ethical, reflective, and sustainable ways.

In this special issue, the term artificial systems encompasses contemporary AI technologies as well as the emerging conceptual prospect of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI is understood here as a conceptual horizon rather than a claim about currently deployed systems.

Cybernetics as a Framework
Traditional Western approaches to technology and society often rely on linear thinking, emphasising causality, prediction, and disciplinary separation. In contrast, this special issue frames and explores the integration of artificial systems through a relational, systemic, and transdisciplinary lens grounded in cybernetics.

Cybernetics, as a meta-theoretical and methodological approach, is not confined to a single discipline and explicitly includes the observer as part of the system under investigation. This enables analyses of feedback, circularity, goal-directed behaviour, adaptation, and drift, as well as dynamic interactions between individuals, institutions, and broader societal systems.

This perspective is valuable when considering increasingly adaptive artificial systems, which may enact human-like behaviours and participate in recursive feedback processes. From a cybernetic standpoint, such systems may be seen as exhibiting autopoietic-like dynamics, in which their outputs recursively shape ongoing operations, adaptation, and meaning-making within bounded socio-technical contexts, without implying biological life or consciousness.

Overall, a cybernetic perspective supports the design and evaluation of artificial-system-integrated environments that are responsive, resilient, ethical, and culturally grounded, while foregrounding human-centred agency within complex socio-technical systems.

Scope and Topics
This special collection provides a platform to explore the interplay between artificial systems, societal change, and human-centred frameworks such as Ubuntu (“I am because we are”), which foreground relationality, ethics, community, and cultural integrity.

We invite contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including (but not limited to) economics, healthcare, education, psychology, social sciences, ethics, law, creative arts, organisational studies, engineering, and clinical or therapeutic sciences. Topics include:

• Human–Artificial System Interaction: Work, agency, and organisational adaptation; the shift from systems as tools towards agent-like or autonomous systems; human redundancy and the systemic risks of de-skilling.
• Education: Artificial systems in learning and the evolving classroom; implications for deep learning, knowledge integration, and synthesis.
• Healthcare Systems: Clinical practice, patient engagement, and ethical decision-making; emerging forms of system-supported or system-driven medical judgement.
• Creative Arts and Culture: Practice and cultural production; questions of authorship, creativity, and autopoietic-like processes in artistic systems.
• Socio-economic Implications: Digital divides, systemic inequalities, labour transformations and economic redundancy, and access to resources.
• Ethics and Social Relations: Responsibility, accountability, and trust in artificial system integration.
• Multicultural and Cross-Cultural Contexts: Implications of system integration across local and global contexts.
• Systems Design: Rethinking early design principles for Industry 5.0 and 6.0 through human-centred and cybernetic approaches.

Submission Guidance
Authors are encouraged to move beyond purely descriptive accounts. Submissions should critically engage with the systemic, societal, ethical, and long-term implications of artificial system integration.

In line with the special issue’s cybernetic orientation, contributions may draw on concepts such as circularity, feedback, autopoiesis, structural determinism, drift, and the role of the person within the system. Submissions should demonstrate reflective engagement with the interconnected, relational, and dynamic nature of socio-technical change.

Submission procedure:

Step 1: Intention to Submit
Prospective authors are requested to submit an Intention to Submit (200–400 words) outlining the proposed topic, central argument, and the cybernetic or relational framework to be employed. This enables the guest editors to provide early feedback on alignment with the special issue’s theme. Please submit your intention via the designated Google Form: https://forms.gle/dSk2vZAbHUik3kfD6

Step 2: Full Manuscript Submission
Full manuscripts must be submitted via the journal’s online portal. After logging in, choose ‘Whose New Normal? Artificial Systems: Steering or Being Steered? Cybernetic Perspectives’ as the article type.

For further information on the submission process, visit the journal’s procedure page.
For information on word limits and formatting requirements, please consult the journal’s submission guidelines.

We will be happy to provide any assistance during the submission and application process. Kindly enquire at submissions@td-sa.net.

All submissions will undergo a double-blind review process to ensure high scientific quality and relevance to the subject. The Editor-in-Chief will make the final decision on acceptance, revision, or rejection based on the reviewers’ feedback.

Timeline

• Intention to submit: 30 April 2026 (via Google Form)
• Online full manuscript submission opens: 15 May 2026
• Online full manuscript submission closes: 30 September 2026
• Expected publication date: 1 June 2027

For enquiries regarding this call for papers, please contact the guest editors:

• Prof Philip Baron, University of Johannesburg, pbaron@uj.ac.za
• Dr Hilde Miniggio, Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University and University of the Witwatersrand, Hilde.miniggio@smu.ac.za
• Dr Eben Swanepoel, North-West University, swanepoeleh@outlook.com

We look forward to receiving your manuscript.