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Contribution short abstract

This contribution examines community data sovereignty as a decolonial practice that resists extractive AI systems and reorients digital futures toward care, collective governance, and ecological justice.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution critically examines community data sovereignty as a decolonial and justice-oriented response to the extractive logics of contemporary AI and digital infrastructures. Drawing on decolonial theory, it interrogates how dominant data regimes shaped by platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, and colonial knowledge systems reproduce racialized, gendered, and spatial inequalities. Rather than treating data as a neutral resource to be optimized, this intervention foregrounds data as a relational and contested terrain embedded in histories of dispossession, surveillance, and ecological exploitation.

The contribution explores how community-led data practices challenge prevailing binaries such as innovation versus regulation or inclusion versus exclusion by advancing alternative modes of technological engagement rooted in collective agency, care, and refusal. Through examples from Indigenous data governance initiatives, grassroots environmental monitoring, and feminist tech collectives, it highlights how communities are reclaiming control over data generation, ownership, and use in ways that resist extraction and recentralize accountability.

By situating data sovereignty within broader struggles for ecological justice, this contribution argues that technological justice cannot be achieved through reformist tweaks to existing AI systems. Instead, it requires dismantling hierarchical digital architectures and cultivating solidaristic forms of technological design that prioritize relational ethics over efficiency. The contribution offers a framework for understanding data sovereignty as both a political practice and an ethical horizon, one that reimagines digital futures not as engines of growth, but as infrastructures for collective flourishing and planetary care.