How do you turn a broad concern about AI and society into a compelling research problem? This session helps researchers identify what is at stake, sharpen their research questions, situate their intervention, and articulate what makes their perspective distinctive. We move from “what is wrong?” to “what is the question I want to pursue, and why does it matter?”

Format: Research Reciprocity Roundtables (Peer-to-Peer research workshop) followed by a one-hour practical training session focused on a shared research skill/topic.

What happens when AI enters a particular culture, place or community? What contextual conditions shape how AI is understood, adopted, adapted or resisted, and how can we identify them? This session helps researchers move beyond treating “context” as background to making context central to research and design, exploring how situated knowledge, cultural difference and lived realities can shape more inclusive and locally meaningful AI.

Format: TBA

Which gaps do we seek to address and why? What drives our mission to account for the unaccounted? What gets included in our research, and what gets left out? This session invites researchers to identify the gaps between academic agendas and societal needs, and help rethink what and who belongs in their research. How can we move beyond simply identifying gaps to building knowledge that responds to overlooked realities and enables more inclusive AI futures?

Format: TBA

AI comes with both opportunities and challenges for conducting research. In this session we focus on the question: What could AI help you see, analyse or explore that would otherwise be difficult to do? We will explore AI-enabled approaches to data collection, analysis, coding and synthesis, and how researchers can integrate AI into their own methods while remaining rigorous, reflexive and attentive to context, difference and what gets overlooked.

Format: TBA

What does it mean to research AI when our relationships to the technologies and people we study are never neutral? Through a “relationship walk,” participants explore how identity, expertise, institutional affiliations and access shape what becomes visible, whose knowledge counts, and what questions they can ask. The session reframes positionality as relational and shifting across research encounters.

Format: TBA

How do you make your research matter beyond academia? How do you translate complex ideas about AI into stories, language and formats that people can understand, question and use? This session helps researchers communicate their insights to the lay public, by developing clear narratives, accessible language and compelling ways to connect research insights to everyday lives, public concerns and possibilities for change.

Format: TBA

What can a meme, video, image or comment tell us about how people see and make sense of the world? This session explores how researchers can interpret creative online expression as cultural data, moving beyond “content” to understand context, emotion, humour, identity, participation and meaning-making, and developing ways to engage with creative expression as evidence in their own research.

Format: TBA

What happens when we stop treating AI as a tool and start treating it as something to experiment with? This session explores playful, critical and experimental methods for probing how AI systems work, respond and produce knowledge. Researchers will learn how to design experiments that reveal biases, assumptions, inconsistencies and hidden dynamics—turning the AI “black box” into an object of inquiry, interrogation and discovery.

Format: TBA