Open Studio: Steven Vethman | Reflecting on AI Equality Efforts: a collaborative, critical inspection of actionable recommendations for an intersectional approach | Steven Vethman
October 27 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Join this special collaborative Open Studio with Steven Vethman where we will critically reflect on AI Equality practices and research efforts. We will start from the foundation that equality or fairness in the context of AI should go beyond technological fixes and honor the lived experiences of systemic discrimination and marginalization. But AI experts have asked: how? What exactly can I do?
By using the richness of the concept of intersectionality, rooted in Black Feminist Theory and Action, we will dive into the opportunity to reframe AI fairness efforts to social justice.
With your help we can build on recent strides that analyzed the need and potential of intersectionality in the context of AI development (Ovalle et al. 2023; Kong 2022) and showcased what intersectional feminist machine learning can possibly bring (Suresh et al. 2022). To be precise, we will use our recent work (Vethman et al. 2025) – that provided actionable recommendations for an intersectional approach for, with and by AI experts – as a springboard for this session.
What is to be expected?: (A) we start with a short presentation on the setting and our recent findings, and (B) focus mainly on interactive exercises to collaboratively and critically reflect on these findings, their usefulness, what may be missing and what other first-step actions for AI experts could be.
Steven Vethman is a researcher at the Sciences Po Law School and contributor to the European project DIVERSIFAIR. He is the co-author of ACM (FAccT) Conference 2025 Paper: Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency