Just Transitions Seminar series: Digital Justice

In response to their grantee partners, CS Fund’s newly launched Just Transitions program is starting a Seminar Series for political education on Global Just Transitions that focus on how communities have full agency, rights, and power in how they are governed and their development in a manner that advances social and ecological justice and is anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-exploitative. The Seminar Series will feature movement and grassroots leaders from across the globe speaking on justice for climate, labor, workers, solidarity economics, food sovereignty, Indigenous sovereignty, LGBTQIA+ peoples, human and digital rights, and more.

The next session will be on September 10th and will focus on Digital Justice. As with each seminar, a broad political analysis will be taken on how digital technologies and the technology industry intersect with human rights, collective rights, social justice, and ecological justice. The session will dive into issues of digital rights, digital capitalism and colonialism, the real social and ecological impacts and hype of Artificial Intelligence, climate and ag tech, worker justice, and how grassroots and social movements are building technologies in non-extractive and regenerative ways that build community power and self-determination.

The focus will be on bringing three different communities that are not often brought together to hear from grassroots and movement leaders and scholars: (1) presenting Social and Ecological Justice movements with an analysis and overview of digital technology issues that are necessary to their work and organizing; (2) engaging with the Digital Rights community on issues that extend outside of digital and hearing directly from social and ecological justice movements; and (3) engaging with the Digital Development and Tech4Good communities on issues of power, social justice, and ecological justice.

• Anita Gurumurthy is a founding member and Executive Director of IT for Change in India where she leads research and advocacy on data and AI governance, platform regulation, and feminist frameworks on digital justice. She serves as an expert on various bodies – including as co-chair of the T20’s digital transformation working group on platform governance and has been part of the High Level Committee of the NetMundial+10 under Brazil’s leadership, the UN Secretary-General’s 10-Member Group on Technology Facilitation, and more.
• Barbara Ntambirweki is a Ugandan lawyer and researcher working with ETC Group under the African Technology Assessment Platform, and is Digital Civil Society Practitioner Fellow at Stanford University. Barbara is passionate about promoting technology justice within food systems in Africa, particularly with regard to the emerging developments in modern biotechnology and the digitalization of food and agriculture. She currently coordinates the African Working Group on Digitalization of Food and Agriculture to raise the collective voice of civil society organizations and movements on the governance of digital agriculture in Africa.
• Sasha Costanza-Chock (she/they/ella/elle) is a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, dismantle the matrix of domination, and advance ecological survival. They are a nonbinary trans femme. Sasha is known for their work on networked social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha is presently the Head of Research & Sensemaking at One Project, and a tenured Associate Professor at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media, & Design in the United States.