Data CARE Workshop Series

The Reclaiming Techno-Optimism Data CARE Festival invites public and private sectors to move beyond the extremes of AI hype and doom. Across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, communities are building practical, hopeful AI that addresses everyday challenges—from food security in Kenya to feminist safety networks in Latin America, creative archives in Southeast Asia, civic data commons in India, and accessible public services in rural China. Over three days, global leaders, artists, technologists, activists, and policymakers will explore AI as a relational, community-driven ecosystem, reclaiming optimism as a civic and ethical stance rooted in care, equity, and social imagination.

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The Data CARE workshop brings together interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how AI is reshaping not only infrastructures and institutions, but also the intimate worlds of emotion, desire, care, and connection. Centering decolonial, feminist, and Global South perspectives, the event foregrounds how love, secrecy, pleasure, risk, and digital intimacy unfold within historically unequal technological, economic, and cultural systems. The workshop challenges dominant narratives that flatten cultural ways of feeling, relating, and dreaming, and instead examines how AI can be a terrain of hope, repair, and re-imagination. Participants will engage with AI as both a site of oppression and possibility, exploring its role in desire, intimacy, safety, labor, and collective futures, while building transnational collaborations that prioritize ethical, reciprocal, and situated approaches to research, design, and governance.

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This Data CARE workshop explores how AI can be creatively mobilized to reclaim and remake public spaces in ways that deepen civic participation and democratic values. From experimental uses of AI-enabled film and storytelling, and data archiving that reframe public narratives, to grassroots practices of digital activism in the Global South, AI can be creatively and ethically deployed by underrepresented communities to engage in public life. Yet it also raises concerns about surveillance, exclusion, and commodification. This workshop serves a dual purpose: sharing across silos and deep dive on concrete ways to collaborate through funding, cross-institutional partnerships, mentoring, events and other such means.

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This workshop will focus on integrating diverse and underrepresented voices and perspectives of creative and cultural communities into the design and deployment of AI systems, and how these innovations impact cultural value, with a special focus on the Global South. Aligned with the CARE principles, it will explore strategies to ensure that AI tools reflect and serve the cultural and creative diversity and dignity of the Majority World and other chronically underrepresented groups. Discussions will center on operationalizing diversity in data, equitable data sourcing, fair provenance, authentic representation, and the democratization of creative tools to foster global inclusivity in AI-driven innovation.

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This is the first of the Data CARE workshop series which focuses on the impact of Generative AI tools on women, girls, and people with other gender identities, with a special focus on populations in the Global South and other groups systematically underrepresented in the design and deployment of these systems. We focus on the implications of GenAI tools in reinforcing as well as challenging gender inequities, with attention to the tools’ impacts on privacy, safety, freedoms, and empowerment. This inaugural workshop explores cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and cross-sector strategies for mitigating gender harms and violence—with the goal of ensuring that AI systems prioritize the needs and rights of women, girls, and marginalized gender groups to support their digital well being and flourishing.

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