Community Notebook. People, Education and Welfare in the Society 5.0

Edited by Stefania Capogna and Melissa Sessa

The volume here presented constitutes the official Book of Abstracts of the International Mid-Term Conference Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Education: Towards the Future of Learning, convened at Link Campus University in Rome on 26–27 February 2026 under the joint auspices of ESA RN24/SSTNET — the Sociology of Science and Technology Network — and ESA RN36 — Sociology of Transformations: East and West. These two Research Networks, both operating within the framework of the European Sociological Association share a commitment to examining socio-technical change and the structural transformations of contemporary societies from comparative and transdisciplinary perspectives. 

The volume assembles thirty-eight peer-reviewed abstracts presented across ten thematic panels and a dedicated doctoral session, offering an authoritative cartography of the current scholarly debate at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI), educational systems, governance, labour, citizenship, and health inclusion. Across the collected abstracts, a set of cross-cutting analytical tensions emerges with particular clarity. Empirical contributions document the simultaneous promise and peril of AI integration. Theoretical contributions furnish interpretive frameworks adequate to the structural depth of the transformations under examination. Several contributions address the geopolitical asymmetry of AI development with particular rigour, noting that the dominant paradigms of AI design and deployment are concentrated in a small number of countries and corporations, while educational systems across Central and Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet space, and the Global South find themselves largely in the position of adopters rather than designers of these technologies. The volume positions itself as a resource not merely for the documentation of a single scholarly event, but for the ongoing construction of a rigorous, reflexive, and socially responsible research agenda at the intersection of sociology, educational science, computer science, law, and public policy.