In the ‘Feminist AI and Collective Wellbeing’ symposium, we invite researchers, artists, and practitioners to explore and contest the promises and pitfalls of AI in shaping collective wellbeing.
Promises of AI include better societal wellbeing through improved healthcare, relieved workloads, or efficient usage of natural resources. Yet not everyone’s wellbeing counts evenly, as AI simultaneously depends on and disrupts collectivity, for instance, through its pressure on shared environmental resources, worker health, and data exploitation and extractivism. How can we reimagine these dynamics, and centre collective wellbeing so that it becomes a basis for caring and sustaining relationships around AI development and implementation?
Our goal is not to provide definitive answers or fixed definitions of wellbeing and collectivity, but to open a shared space for inquiry, provocation, and speculation. By foregrounding feminist, decolonial, and ecological perspectives, we aim to imagine futures in which AI development and adoption are aligned with collective wellbeing.
The symposium invites participants to explore how these relationships and entanglements might be reimagined, and how AI can be critically reshaped, reoriented, or even refused in pursuit of more collective and caring futures.
Through international keynotes and a workshop on art-based AI inquiry, we invite participants to reflect on these questions:
What collectives are prioritized in the development of AI? Whose wellbeing is valued, and whose is erased to maintain the wellbeing of others?
How can communities engage with AI on their own terms? What material resources, infrastructures, or type of data would they need to do so?
What collective futures and imaginaries might we create together, rooted in shared wellbeing rather than extractive logics?
Can AI ever be truly aligned with collective wellbeing, or are there cases where the most ‘caring’ act might be to refuse or resist AI altogether?
18 November - Part 1 | 10.00 – 15.00
Workshop on art-based AI inquiry for collective knowledge generation
Organizers: Feminist Generative AI Lab with Virginia Tassinari and Vera van der Burg
Guests: Soyun Park, Mafalda Gamboa, and Elvia Vasconcelos.
In this workshop, we explore art-based inquiry as an alternative form of knowledge generation, which can complement and enrich traditional approaches to research in AI. We invite participants to engage with new, unusual, artistic, and embodied forms of exploration, to reflect on the symposium theme.
Please note that the workshop has limited spots. Lunch is included.
18 November - Part 2 | 15.00 – 17.00
Keynotes + Discussion + Drinks
Please note you can choose to register only to this part of the symposium.
Dr. Adio-Adet Dinika
DAIR Institute
‘Neither Artificial nor Intelligent: Decolonial, Feminist, and Ecological Refusals of AI’s Myths’
In this keynote, Adio speaks about how Artificial intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent—it is built from human hands, planetary resources, and histories of exploitation disguised as innovation. Drawing from the Data Workers’ Inquiry, this keynote unmasks the labour, care, and extraction sustaining the algorithmic world. It situates today’s AI economy within longer colonial and capitalist lineages, while engaging feminist and ecological traditions that foreground interdependence, vulnerability, and care. What might it mean to refuse AI’s myths of autonomy and control—to imagine intelligence as a collective, embodied, and reciprocal practice rather than a tool of domination? This talk is a call for epistemic disobedience and for reimagining well-being as a shared, reparative project—human, planetary, and beyond.
Adio-Adet Dinika is a political scientist specializing in platform labour and platform governance. He received his PhD from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) in Germany, focusing on critiquing techno-optimistic narratives of platform labour in Sub-Saharan Africa.
At DAIR, Adio's research examines the often invisibilized labour behind AI system development, emphasizing the importance of ethical considerations in AI creation. His work combines academic rigor with insights from fieldwork across multiple African countries. Through his research, Adio aims to highlight the overlooked human contributions to AI and advocate for fair practices and ethical standards in the digital economy. His broader interests include platform regulation, workers' rights in the tech industry, and promoting responsible AI development that considers its socio-economic impacts in the Global South.
Dr. Marisa Leavitt Cohn
ETHOS Lab, IT University of Copenhagen
Dr. Lara Reime
ETHOS Lab, IT University of Copenhagen
‘Knotting Data Together: Traversing the Stack as Collective Feminist Inquiry’
In this keynote, Marisa and Lara explore how feminist inquiry can intervene across varied layers of the tech stack—from data, to protocols, to servers, to code. Tracing where and how feminist methods have been mobilized across layers of technical systems, we propose thinking with the notion of a “feminist stack,” not as a totalizing framework or scalar project, but as a situated and partial method for navigating where and how we intervene. The talk weaves together Marisa Cohn’s experiences directing the ETHOS Lab, and Lara Reime’s research on reproductive data practices. They discuss how ETHOS, as a feminist methods lab working with methodological pluralism, has enabled them to experiment with forms of collective sense-making and infrastructural critique. They further draw on Lara’s work to consider how feminist engagements with data are not only technical but also tactile, affective, and collective. Drawing on her work with knotting as a method of data materialization, they reflect on how hands-on practices can surface missing data, corporeal vulnerabilities, entanglements and alternative temporalities, and allow for thinking through data otherwise. Through this talk, they wish to consider together how feminist scholarship might imagine its modes of collaboration and intervention, not through scaling up, but by moving sideways across genres and scales, linking infrastructural critique with embodied practice, knotting together our inquiries, our communities, and our commitments.
Marisa Leavitt Cohn is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of feminist STS and design research. With a background in Anthropology (BA, Barnard College) and Human-Computer Interaction (PhD, UC Irvine), Cohn combines ethnographic and research-through-design methods to explore the chronopolitics of computational media and labor from a feminist perspective. Her research examines software maintenance labor, infrastructural decay in long-lived systems, and temporal politics of technological obsolescence, decline, and ends-of-support. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropological Approaches to Data and Infrastructure at the IT University of Copenhagen, member of the Nordic Critical Fabulations network, and a founding co-director of the ETHOS Lab.
Lara Reime is a qualitative researcher working at the intersection of feminist theory, Science and Technology Studies, and Human-Computer Interaction. She has a background in anthropology and holds a PhD from the IT University of Copenhagen. Lara combines design, ethnographic and tangible methods to investigate the social, material and political environments of digital technologies as well as the intimate data relations they foster. Her current work focuses on reproductive health and explores reconfigurations of bodies, technologies, and temporalities.
ETHOS Lab. Based at the IT University of Copenhagen, ETHOS Lab is an experimental space for digital methods and critical inquiry, founded within the Technologies in Practice (TiP) research section. TiP is internationally recognized for interdisciplinary work across STS, infrastructure studies, and digital culture. ETHOS Lab was selected in 2024 as a best practices case in Horizon Europe’s Shaping Europe’s Future initiative for knowledge valorisation in the social sciences, humanities, and arts.
19 November | 10.00 – 17.00
PhD Day
Following the symposium on November 18th, we invite PhD candidates to join us for a dedicated day of peer exchange, collaborative feedback, and dialogue. The PhD Day offers PhD candidates working on topics such as AI, feminism, care, collectivity, sustainability, digital labor, and related themes an opportunity to continue explore the theme of the symposium in relation to their own research themes and practices in an interdisciplinary environment.
The PhD day program will include peer review sessions that allow participants to share work in progress and to receive feedback from their peers; interactive activities that addresses the challenges of working as a PhD researcher; as well as community building and networking opportunities.