Whose knowledge? Anti-racist and Decolonial Perspectives on AI Governance and Knowledge Systems
📅 Tuesday, 2nd December, 2025
⏰ 5:00 - 6.30 PM (GMT)
💻 Online via Teams: Join the meeting now
Meeting ID: 338 582 610 129 4; Passcode: 399zf7AX
About the session
AI is transforming how knowledge is produced, shared, and controlled, but whose voices and knowledges are centred, and whose are erased or sidelined? This seminar will critically examine the Earthly and social resources at stake in the AI revolution, the materiality of AI, and the power dynamics behind AI governance. We will explore the ways AI is currently being used, including its role in systems of control, surveillance, and governance, and discuss anti-racist and decolonial interventions in dominant understandings of technological knowledge evolution. Participants will reflect on how AI shapes knowledge creation and dissemination, particularly in relation to marginalised communities, and consider alternative approaches that promote social justice and equity in AI systems.
About the speakers
Dr. Angela Martinez Dy
Dr Angela Martinez Dy is an entrepreneurial community builder invested in liberatory unlearning. A poet, scholar-activist and trained anti-racist and intersectional feminist community organiser, she has collaboratively built and led numerous new organisations, including Youth Speaks Seattle, Seattle’s leading vehicle for youth empowerment through arts education, Building the Anti-Racist Classroom (BARC), the Decolonizing Alliance, and the Intersectional Critical Realist Feminisms Discussion Group.
As a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Loughborough University London, her expertise, research interests and communities of practice revolve around digital entrepreneurship, intersectional feminist technoculture, and critical realist philosophy. Her research has been published in Human Relations, Sociology, Organization and ephemera. She is passionate about supporting early career women scholars and researchers of colour to find and build community and intellectual homes in academia.
Dr Ceyda Yolgörmez
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Indigenous Futures Research Centre, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Dr Ceyda Yolgörmez is a postdoctoral researcher at the Indigenous Futures Research Centre at Concordia University, working in the Abundant Intelligences Research Program. Her PhD work brought together social theory and interactive technologies to create a framework for considering how our conceptions of the social are changing through human-machine relations. She works with quirky robots, old machines, broken technologies, and others that do not conform to common sense, to form a rich conception of agency and play. Often thinking through the art and technology intersection, Yolgörmez hopes to create more vocabulary around the kinds of machinic relations that contemporary moment potentiates.
Dr Anjali Krishan
Postdoctoral Researcher in AI Safety, Digital Environment Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London
Dr Anjali Krishan is a cultural anthropologist and researcher focused on gender, precarious work, and ethics in times of rapid social and economic change. Her doctoral research at the University of Oxford explored how middle-class married women narrate the suicides of women like them, examining how gender shapes both the recognition of suffering and the ethical responses to it. She employs evocative ethnographic methods to illuminate lived experiences and structural inequalities, with a particular interest in how precariousness intersects with ethics, care, and social responsibility.
Anjali’s work with Fairwork explored labor conditions in the global platform economy and the impacts of AI on work. Her research highlights the challenges faced by gig and platform workers, including low pay, unsafe conditions, and the rise of automated management systems, while also documenting positive initiatives by companies striving to implement fairer practices. She has co-authored research on qualitative methods in international development and continues to engage with global debates on ethical labor, AI, and social justice.
About the chair
Dr Mayra Ruiz-Castro
Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management and Leadership, Queen Mary University of London
Dr. Mayra Ruiz-Castro is a scholar, educator, and social justice advocate, researching gender and inequality in organizations and households. Her research focuses on gender and intersectional inequality in work, organizations, and households. She examines how organizational practices, household dynamics, and identity shape people’s work experiences, career choices, and sense of work-life balance and well-being. Dr. Ruiz-Castro’s work has been published in leading international journals, including Organization Studies, Work, Employment and Society, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Harvard Business Review, and Gender, Work and Organization.
She has held academic positions at the University of Roehampton and Kingston University. She has an extensive international profile, having worked in both academia and the private sector across the UK, US, Germany, India, and Mexico. In the US, she was a researcher at Harvard Business School, a lecturer at Babson College, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Gender in Organizations (Simmons College) and the Women’s Studies Research Center (Brandeis University). She holds a Ph.D. in Gender and Organizations from University College London.
Artistic Offering
The seminar will also include an artistic offering; a short reading from Burnout from Humans by Aiden Cinnamon Tea and Dorothy Ladybugboss (Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti), brought to life by Angela.
Why Attend?
This seminar offers a unique opportunity to engage with AI from a critical and decolonial perspective. You will:
- Explore how AI shapes knowledge production, representation, and power
- Reflect on the social and ethical implications of AI, particularly for marginalized communities
- Gain practical insights and frameworks for thinking, creating, and acting with and against AI
- Join a global conversation that values difference, equity, and alternative ways of knowing
Who It’s For
This seminar is designed for anyone interested in the intersection of AI, society, and justice, including:
- Scholars, researchers, and students in AI, sociology, media, design, and related fields
- Activists, artists, and practitioners exploring technology, creativity, and social change
- Policy-makers, educators, and anyone curious about the future of knowledge and AI governance
About the Series
🌍 Global Dialogues Series on AI, Voice, and Decolonial Knowledge
This virtual research seminar series explores how generative artificial intelligence reshapes authorship, creative production, and human understanding through a critical and decolonial lens.
Bringing together scholars, activists, artists, and practitioners from across the Global South and Global North, the series interrogates the use and impact of AI in knowledge production, representation, and alternative forms of voice and expression.
This is not just another online seminar: we invite embodied, situated, and collective forms of engagement. Together, we aim to:
- Build a global community that creates space for difference
- Resist extractive models of knowledge exchange
- Ask difficult questions and share radical practices
- Imagine what it means to think, write, create, and live with and against AI
Who we are
Borderlines X The Institute for Creative Futures
Borderlines is an interdisciplinary research collective at Queen Mary University of London focused on social justice, decolonial practice, and radical, experimental approaches to knowledge. We bring together scholars, artists, students, activists, and organisers who work across and beyond disciplinary boundaries. Our members are based across the world, including in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Canada, Europe, India, Mexico, and the United States. We support early career researchers and student-led initiatives, and our work is shaped by collaboration, critical enquiry, and a commitment to challenging the norms of academic knowledge production.
The Institute for Creative Futures at Loughborough University London brings together research and postgraduate teaching in Design Innovation, Communication and Media, and the Creative Industries. Based in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and connected to London’s East Bank cultural district, the Institute works with global partners to explore how creativity and technology can shape positive social and cultural change. Our research spans sustainability, innovation, and the role of media and communication in power and social transformation.
Other Seminars in the Series
S2 — February 2026
Who speaks? AI and the politics of research, education, and creativity
Speakers: Carlos Eduardo Souza Aguiar (Assistant Professor at São Paulo State University), Mark Carrigan (Senior Lecturer in Education, University of Manchester) and Dr Helen Beetham (Lecturer in Digital Education, University of Manchester); Chair: Anamik Saha (Professor of Race and Media, University of Leeds); Artistic Offering: Professor Mojisola Adebayo (Professor of Theatre Writing and Performance Practice, Queen Mary University of London).
S3 — April 2026
Whose voices and stories? AI, memory and counter-narratives
Speakers: Abdullah Hasan Safir (PhD Candidate, Collective Intelligence and Design Group, University of Cambridge), Jose Sherwood Gonzales (PhD Researcher, School of Digital Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University), and Ana Santos (Investigative Journalist, Berlin); Chair: Dr Isadora Cruxen (Senior Lecturer in Business Politics and Development, Queen Mary University of London)
S4 — June 2026
Who resists? Decolonial and feminist AI futures
Speaker: Dr. Ana Cristina Suzina (Lecturer in Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University), Dr Abeba Birhane (Founder and PI, AIAL, School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin), Dr. Rafael Grohmann (Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Department of Arts, Culture and Media, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto)
