- Convenors:
-
Benjamin Ibhazukor
(Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Service)
Oyinlola Ogunpaimo (Teagasc Irish Development Authority)
Olaiwola Ogunpaimo (University of Galway)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Stream:
- Digital futures: AI, data & platform governance
Short Abstract
This roundtable unpacks how AI and digital technologies reproduce hierarchies and introduce new inequalities. Moving beyond narratives of innovation and inclusion, it explores decolonial, justice-driven visions for technological futures grounded in solidarity, care and collective agency.
Description
This roundtable examines how artificial intelligence and digital technologies both shape and are shaped by entrenched systems of inequality, colonial legacies, and ecological precarity. It asks whether the current digital revolution can genuinely advance justice and sustainability or whether it reinforces existing hierarchies under the guise of innovation and progress. Framed through political ecology, decolonial theory and feminist technoscience the discussion interrogates how algorithmic systems and digital infrastructures reproduce the unequal geographies of power that structure the twenty-first century.
Bringing together scholars, practitioners, and activists, the roundtable explores the epistemic and political limits of dominant technology discourses those organized around binaries such as human/machine, innovation/regulation, resistance/resilience, and global North/South. Participants will offer critical insights into how data extraction, algorithmic governance, and platform capitalism perpetuate patterns of domination, surveillance, and dispossession, thereby undermining the goals of SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities).
Rather than seeking reform within existing systems of digital capitalism, this roundtable invites radical alternatives. It considers practices of collective design, technological refusal and the dismantling of digital hierarchies that constrain community agency, care, and ecological interdependence. By shifting the focus from efficiency to ethics and from optimization to solidarity, the discussion aims to cultivate a shared vocabulary and framework for technological justice. Through collaborative reflection, participants will identify pathways toward accountable, transparent and equitable technologies that democratize power in line with the transformative vision of the SDGs.