Research, advocacy, network building, data/AI governance, feminist political economy.
We focus on a socio-structural perspective to feminist AI research, tying together macro (data flows, trade, IP, global governance) and micro (livelihoods, social welfare, fin-tech) aspects. Our research and advocacy underscores the need to integrate civil, political, socio-economic and development rights in the AI debate. For instance, in global data value chains, AI ownership and control inheres in a few corporations. This is already displacing women’s livelihoods in agriculture and dairy in the Global South. AI based workplace dataveillance directly impinges on women’s bodily integrity. Welfare regimes or health tracking systems become disciplinary devices undermining women’s citizenship rights. Just AI systems are not only predicated on techno-systemic parameters of fairness (equality of opportunity). A feminist socio-structural view of AI requires an equality of outcomes goal post. AI systems must be framed through the fluid relationships between AI and institutional systems.
Challenging the neo-liberal push for data enclosures and AI-based profiteering and opaque AI systems that de-democratise governance. Moving beyond ethics into an AI constitutionalism to inform design related considerations. Reinterpreting citizenship and rights in relation to data and AI for alternative economics, politics and communicative cultures.
