USAWA AI: Building Ethical AI for Historical Justice with Marie Rodet | AI & Equality Open Studio
2026-02-19 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
Open Studio | USAWA AI is an interactive, educational experience built around an AI avatar that draws on carefully mediated testimony from West African survivors of domestic servitude. Rather than recreating historical scenes or offering total explanations, the AI is designed to speak partially and cautiously, reflecting the ethical limits of testimony and the sensitivity of slavery. USAWA AI demonstrates how AI can be designed to protect vulnerable voices rather than extract from them, embedding care and restraint into the technology itself. By foregrounding partial testimony and ethical limits, it challenges dominant AI models that thrive for ‘total knowledge’ and ‘neutrality’, showing instead how AI can support social justice and equitable representation. This work offers a concrete example of AI as an infrastructure for dignity and inclusion.
Explore it: https://jiwegamestorage.blob.core.windows.net/game-files/Usawa%20AI/V4/index.html
About the speaker:
Marie Rodet is Reader in the History of Africa at SOAS University of London. Her work explores public history, gamification and digital methods as ways of translating historical research into interactive formats that enable ethical engagement with complex and difficult histories, and support equitable, collaborative forms of innovation. She is the narrative and research lead on three educational mobile games—Usawa, Usawa AI and Umoja—all developed in partnership with Jiwe Studios. These projects transform historical research into interactive experiences that foreground equity and ethical engagement, and exemplify her broader commitment to research-led innovation and inclusive research culture.

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SafeHer: A Reporting Tool for Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in Kenya with Lilian Olivia Orero | AI & Equality Open Studio
2026-03-05 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
Open Studio | SafeHer: A Reporting Tool for Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in Kenya. SafeHer is a reporting tool developed by SafeOnline Women Kenya (SOW-Kenya) that enables women and girls in Kenya to report incidents of technology-facilitated gender-based violence. The tool completed user testing with 36 participants and recently won the National Models for Women’s Safety Online (NMWSO) Safety by Design Award from IREX and the Gates Foundation. With the Google Play Store listing in progress and national scaling planned for 2026, this is an ideal moment to receive community feedback on the reporting design, methodology and implementation framework. Explore: https://safeherkenya.org/
About the speaker:
Lilian Olivia Orero is the Founder of SafeOnline Women Kenya (SOW-Kenya), where she leads the development of SafeHer, a mobile app enabling women and girls in Kenya to report technology-facilitated gender-based violence. She holds an LLM with Distinction in Law, Innovation & Technology from the University of Bristol, where her dissertation examined how dark patterns on social media platforms enable gendered cyberbullying under EU Digital Services Act regulation.

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CSW70 | When Algorithms Discriminate: Gender Bias in Justice Systems
2026-03-11 16:30 - 18:00 (America/New_York)
Wednesday, 11 March 2026
4:30 – 6:00 PM ET
NGO CSW
10th Floor, Church Center of the United Nations
777 United Nations Plaza, New York

An In Depth Discussion: What happens when courts replace judges with computer algorithms? We are told these systems are “objective” and “fair” but the evidence tells a different story. From bail decisions to sentencing, algorithms are making life-changing choices about women based on biased data and male-centered assumptions. A woman seeking justice after assault may find her credibility automatically questioned. A mother may be flagged as “high risk” simply because of where she lives or her employment history. Meanwhile, these same systems treat men’s violence as more predictable and less dangerous.
This is not science fiction, it is happening right now in courts worldwide. Join us to uncover how technology is creating new barriers to justice for women and girls, and what policy solutions can effectively address it.

Laura Nyirinkindi | UN Special Procedures Member, Working Group on discrimination against women and girls
Africa Regional Vice President of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (Federación Internacional de Abogadas)
Fernanda K. Martins | Fundacion multitudes, Director of Strategy and Advocacy
Caitlin Kraft–Buchman | Women At The Table; CEO

Beyond the Math: Why AI Fairness Needs a Feminist Lens with Marie Mirsch | AI & Equality Pub-Talk
2026-03-26 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
🔗 Access paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-025-00926-y
Although research on algorithmic fairness is inherently interdisciplinary, many proposed fairness approaches remain predominantly technical in their treatment of societal concepts such as fairness and justice. While these approaches often claim to operationalize insights from the social sciences, they frequently do so in ways that appropriate rather than meaningfully engage with the underlying theories. This paper critiques this practice through the lens of intersectionality. Adopting a “calling in” rather than “calling out” stance toward AI practitioners, it offers actionable guidance on how intersectionality can be substantively incorporated into technical work, thereby recentring social science theory within the field of algorithmic fairness.
About the speaker:
Marie Mirsch, M.Sc., is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at RWTH Aachen University. She conducts research at the intersection of mathematics, ethics, and social sciences, intending to anchor diversity perspectives in technology. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on intersectionality in the context of algorithmic fairness – a central topic of current AI research. She also considers aspects of procedural fairness and participatory approaches, such as including citizens’ perspectives. As part of her work at the bridging professorship “Gender and Diversity in Engineering”, she also deals with ethical issues relating to using artificial intelligence in engineering. A Research Fellowship from the BMBF-funded AI Campus supports her research.
As project manager of the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Hub at RWTH Aachen University, she coordinates and implements national and international projects to strengthen social responsibility in technology development as part of the “ENHANCE – European Universities of Technology Alliance”.
Her teaching activities include the seminar “Responsible AI for Engineers” at RWTH, the online course “Responsible Innovators for Tomorrow” as part of the ENHANCE alliance, and the workshop “Responsible AI” at the University of Koblenz.

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What People in Rural Villages in Togo Can Teach Us About ML/AI and Privacy with Zoe Kahn | AI & Equality Pub-Talk
2026-04-09 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
🔗 Access paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3710968
How do people living in rural villages in Togo feel about the use of emerging technologies in humanitarian aid? This work reports on the privacy concerns of people living in rural Togo related to the use of machine learning models trained on phone data to allocate cash assistance to people living in poverty, highlighting an innovative method — sociotechnical visuals — to explain complex technical concepts so that people living in rural villages with limited literacy, formal education, and familiarity with digital tech could provide meaningful input.
About the speaker:
Zoe Kahn is a postdoctoral research at the Research Centre for Trustworthy Data Science and Security. She received her PhD in Information Science from UC Berkeley and her B.A. in Sociology from New York University. Her research lies at the intersection of computer science, law, and society. She explores how people can meaningfully participate in the design of sociotechnical systems — especially those shaping public life, governance, and digital rights. Dr. Kahn has collaborated with diverse communities across Africa and the United States, including extended fieldwork in rural Togo.
Her work combines qualitative research with creative methods such as storytelling and sociotechnical visuals to make complex technical systems more understandable, opening up dialogue with people with varying levels of literacy, formal education, and familiarity with digital tech. Beyond academia, she has worked at a civil rights law firm, tech startup, and Microsoft–where she contributed to responsible AI tooling and governance frameworks.

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Beyond Automation: Protecting Student Voice in the Age of AI with Daire Maria Ni Uanachain | AI & Equality Open Studio
2026-04-16 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
This Open Studio shares an in-progress Feminist AI–informed learning design framework that examines how power, authorship, and agency shift when Generative AI is introduced into secondary education. Drawing on classroom pilots, design research, and assessment tools such as a Student-Author Voice rubric, the work explores how LLMs can be integrated through co-creation and gradual immersion, rather than extraction or automation. The session foregrounds methodological tensions, ethical trade-offs, and policy-relevant questions emerging from real educational contexts.
🔗 More: Finding student-author voice: a rubric for assessment in the AI era.
Educational AI systems increasingly shape how knowledge is produced, evaluated, and legitimized—often without addressing whose voices are amplified or erased. This work matters because it applies Feminist AI principles to learning design, offering concrete strategies to safeguard student authorship, agency, and equity while aligning with emerging AI governance frameworks. It contributes practice-based evidence to policy discussions on responsible AI use in education beyond compliance checklists.

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Public Interest AI: Procurement as Democratic Infrastructure with Emma Kallina | AI & Equality Open Studio
2026-04-23 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
Public sector AI has the potential to harm citizens, with risks increasing as its use expands. Recent work positions public procurement as a way to shape public sector AI in line with public interests, using the state’s purchasing power to influence which AI systems are procured and under what conditions.
In this presentation, I explore how this potential could be realised in practice by drawing on semi-structured interviews with UK/EU buyers, providers, and procurement experts. More specifically, I highlight six promising procurement practices that enable the public sector to shape AI in line with public interests, alongside concrete mechanisms to support their uptake. These practices as well as derived interventions provide directions for both research and practice on how public procurement can be used as a governance mechanism for better aligning AI with public interests.
There will be time for questions and discussions – a lot of ongoing research to talk about 🙂
Emma Kallina is a PostDoc Researcher at the Compliant & Accountable Systems Group, operating across the University of Cambridge and the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security.

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AI & Equality Festival of Ideas
2026-05-22
Where the frontlines meet the code.

Algorithms are deciding who gets bail, who gets a loan, whose language gets spoken by machines, whose body gets flagged at the border, and whose labor gets automated.

The AI & Equality Festival of Ideas will convene the people working with algorithms; linguists building language models for African languages, feminist scholars rewriting the benchmarks, digital rights lawyers fighting surveillance states, health researchers exposing algorithmic bias in clinical care, and organizers connecting the dots between AI, labor, climate, and indigenous land rights.
On May 22, leading organisations will be sharing out loud, across disciplines, about what they are finding, what they are fighting to create, and what it will actually take to get there.

See full Programme: Visit the Festival Page

On the Agenda: A full day of 90-minute sessions hosted by leading organizations working at the frontlines of AI and society from around the world.

Sessions running across all time zones, from South Asia to the Pacific Coast. Wherever you are, there’s a session for you covering the questions that matter most:

What are visions of society that work for all, and how do we build it?
Whose knowledge gets encoded — and whose gets erased?
What would a rights-based, feminist, decolonial, AI actually look like?
How do we get from research to real change?

Register on our Circle community >> where the festival will be happening!

Funding AI for Good: A Call for Meaningful Engagement with Hongjin Lin | AI & Equality Pub-Talk
2026-06-04 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
🔗 Access paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12455
Artificial Intelligence for Social Good (AI4SG) is a growing area that explores AI’s potential to address social issues, such as public health. Yet prior work has shown limited evidence of its tangible benefits for intended communities, and projects frequently face inadequate community engagement and sustainability challenges. While existing literature on AI4SG initiatives primarily focuses on the mechanisms of funded projects and their outcomes, much less attention has been given to the funding agenda and rhetoric that influences downstream approaches.
Through a thematic analysis of 35 funding documents — representing about $410 million USD in total investments, we reveal dissonances between AI4SG’s stated intentions for positive social impact and the techno-centric approaches that some funding agendas promoted, while also identifying funding documents that scaffolded community-collaborative approaches for applicants. Drawing on our findings, we offer recommendations for funders to embed approaches that balance both contextual understanding and technical capacities in future funding call designs. We further discuss how the HCI community can positively shape AI4SG funding design processes.
Speaker: Hongjin Lin
Hongjin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at Harvard University, advised by Professor Krzysztof Gajos. Her research lies at the intersection of AI and social impact, through both qualitative evaluation and technology development. Her work reveals power imbalances in AI for social good partnerships, where community organizations’ goals are often sidelined, and funding agendas play a prevalent role in determining project priorities and approaches. Drawing on community-collaborative design approaches, she is currently working on projects that support participation in local collective climate actions.

Hongjin was born and raised in Guangzhou, China, and moved to the US for her undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at Occidental College. She received her master’s degree in Data Science from the London School of Economics. Before Harvard, she worked as a research fellow at Stanford Law School, developing and evaluating Machine Learning systems for environmental policy enforcement in partnership with the EPA. Outside of research, she has completed projects with nonprofits in China, the US, and Malawi, and worked as a data for development intern at UNDP in New York and Costa Rica. She is a dedicated yogi, dancer, community-living member, and a happy camper whenever she is away from her computer.
More: https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/hongjinlin

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Hidden Inequality: Why We Need to Talk About AI in the Global South with Renata Frade | AI & Equality Open Studio
2026-06-18 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
Artificial Intelligence systems increasingly shape social participation, labor, visibility and access to rights. However, the social impacts of AI are uneven, often reinforcing existing inequalities — particularly for women and communities in the Global South.
This 30-minute talk is grounded in two complementary research trajectories:
(1) extensive digital ethnography with 247 women-led technology communities, focused on platforms, communication, participation and power (not AI-specific), and (2) parallel academic studies on AI, inequality and the Global South, examining how automated systems interact with structural asymmetries, governance gaps and cultural contexts.
Rather than presenting a technical or proprietary AI framework, the talk offers critical insights and reflective lenses on how AI becomes socially invisible, how inequality is reproduced through discourse and design, and why communication is central to a human-rights-based approach to AI.
Key Themes:

What Platform Research Reveals About Power and Visibility
Insights from digital ethnography with 247 women-led tech communities
Patterns of participation, exclusion and symbolic inclusion in digital platforms
Why these dynamics matter when AI is introduced into social and institutional systems
AI and Inequality from a Global South Perspective
Findings from research on AI, gender and structural inequality in the Global South
Asymmetries in data, labor, governance and technological dependency
The risks of applying “universal” AI solutions without contextual grounding
Communication as a Human Rights Issue in AI Systems
How language, interfaces and narratives shape accountability
Why transparency alone is insufficient without accessibility and participation
The role of critical literacy in rights-based AI approaches

🔗 Explore publication: Frade, R., Wajcman, J. (2023). “Feminism and Technology: an interview with Dr. Judy Wajcman by Renata Frade”. In Technofeminism: multi and transdisciplinary contemporary views of women in technology. https://doi.org/10.48528/0wyd-p294
About the speaker:
I am an interdisciplinary feminist researcher with deep experience in advancing feminist, decolonial, and participatory ethics in technology, particularly across Latin American and Lusophone contexts. My doctoral research mapped and analyzed 247 communities of women in technology in Brazil and Portugal, applying participatory and justice-oriented methods designed to center marginalized voices—often those of adolescents and youth in vulnerable contexts. Through projects such as Fiocruz Hack Girls and the LitGirlsBr platform, I have engaged directly with adolescent participants, developing empowering digital literacy and inclusion programs.

I have acted as co-editor and lead organizer for several transnational research outputs, including the collective volume “Technofeminism” and global solidarity events like the WeColloquium at ISEG, Lisbon. My work always seeks to foreground community voices, relational ethics, and participatory decision-making, including direct experience with reviewing and designing ethical frameworks for HCI and responsible AI, both within and outside formal IRB structures. Noted for mapping and empowering women-in-tech communities, producing influential feminist research, and engaging in ethics, justice, and participatory action.

Experienced in editorial leadership, transmedia projects, and collective knowledge-making in both academic and NGO settings (such as Girls in Tech Brazil).

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Testing AI Safety: Why Current Guardrails Fail to Stop Social Bias with Anna-Maria Gueorgiueva | AI & Equality Pub-Talk
2026-06-25 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
Access paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19238
How do large language models understand the lived experiences of stigmatized groups, and when does this understanding differ from the human perspective? Can this lead to bias, and if so, do our existing safety tools help mitigate such bias? This work investigated open-source language models for bias against 93 stigmatized groups, identifying that specific types of biases (especially those deemed by humans to be ‘threatening’ such as having HIV or a criminal record) experience significantly more bias than other types of stigmatized identities. To attempt to remedy this, we test guardrail models, models from leading technology companies that are meant to identify discriminatory or bias-eliciting inputs and mitigate harmful outputs. This talk will report on our findings, identifying where existing guardrail models fail and discussing technical and legal solutions.
About the speaker:
Anna-Maria Gueorguieva is a PhD student at the University of Washington Information School and holds B.A. in Data Science and Legal Studies from UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on AI evaluations for social and political impacts and AI regulation. Her work lies at the intersection of empirical methods to investigate AI usage and behavior in combination with the necessary AI regulations needed to limit and remedy harm.

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Moving Beyond Big Tech: Blueprints for Community-Led Language AI with Claudia Pozo | AI & Equality Pub-Talk
2026-06-30 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London)
Paper: TBD (available in June)
The digital world suffers from a profound linguistic disparity, particularly in Africa where a lack of local language content and traditional, Global North-led language technology models fail to meet community needs, often resulting in data extraction and inequitable solutions. In an 18-month research project, in collaboration with the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), we highlight a powerful alternative: a growing grassroots movement of community-based language technology initiatives across Africa that adopt a bottoms-up approach, prioritizing local needs and incorporating indigenous philosophies. This approach centers technology as an act of collective creation and community survival, yet it faces significant challenges, including a heavy reliance on Global North funding that can conflict with goals for self-determination and critical concerns around data governance and ownership in regions with underdeveloped legal frameworks. Ultimately, the research advocates for a fundamental shift in technological practice to support these community-centered development models, providing blueprints for the Global Majority to decolonize AI.
About the speaker:
Claudia Pozo is Language Justice Co-Lead at Whose Knowledge? She’s a South American brown feminist, multifaceted activist, researcher, social scientist and strategist, whose work is grounded in knowledge and language justice. She holds an MPhil in Development Studies and a BA in Communications.

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