FESTIVALS
Date Care Festival 2027
Building the Library of the Incalculable
June 7-11, 2027
The Data CARE Festival returns in 2027 under the theme Building the Library of the Incalculable, bringing together researchers, artists, activists, policymakers, technologists, and practitioners to ask what AI does not, cannot, and should not calculate, from care, belonging, and cultural difference to solidarity, humor, and moral imagination. Drawing on Majority World perspectives, the Festival moves beyond diagnosing AI’s harms to explore how AI can democratize social institutions while building meaningful guardrails against risk. Across five days, four parallel themes anchor this exploration: Trust, AI Safety & Security; Creative AI, Innovation & Cultural Value; Language Models, Literacy & Learning; and Sovereign AI, Democracy & Ecosystem Thinking. The Festival also launches the Inclusive AI Summer School, bringing PhDs, Postdocs, researchers, and practitioners together across disciplines and sectors through slow conferencing, creative workshops, real-world cases, and AI-enabled methods, with North–South and South–South exchange at its core. The invitation is to leave disciplinary silos, stay with complexity, and help make inclusion common sense.
Date Care Festival 2026
Reclaiming Techno-Optimism
June 9-12, 2026
The Reclaiming Techno-Optimism Data CARE Festival brought together global leaders, artists, technologists, activists, and policymakers to move beyond the tired tug-of-war between AI hype and AI doom. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, the festival celebrated practical, hopeful, grounded AI rooted in care, repair, equity, and social imagination, and shaped by communities using technology to address everyday problems and strengthen collective futures.
