Профиль

A huge thanks to everyone who joined us last Friday for @acmsigir.bsky.social 2026 JEDI Workshop. We may have laid down a few foundational bricks but the real work of building liberatory movements and research agendas within IR begins here! ✊🏽

Secondly, please go watch @valerieveatch.bsky.social's "Ghost in the Machine". It features so many of my scholarly heroes incl @abeba.blacksky.app @alexhanna.bsky.social @emilymbender.bsky.social @shengokai.blacksky.app Trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9DA... Rent: kinema.com/films/ghost-... /fin

Thank you for following along! I will add couple more resources that I dropped from my talk due to time constraints. Firstly, if you are looking for reading materials, I've been curating a list of books/documentaries that I've found instructive over the years: bhaskar-mitra.github.io/reading/ 63/

My sincerest thanks again to the #SIGIR2026 General Chairs and Program Committee Chairs for inviting me to present this year's opening keynote at the conference and for giving me the space to speak my truth. 🙏🏽 62/

When history is written about this current moment, I sincerely hope that it shows that IR refused to comply with the status quo, had the courage to REIMAGINE different futures, REBUILD something new together, and above all that we stood in solidarity with the people most marginalized to RESIST. 61/

Consequently, on the following Friday, @danachatter.bsky.social @md.ekstrandom.net @sannevrijenhoek.bsky.social @maria-murray.bsky.social and I organized the @jedi-workshop.bsky.social to develop IR research agendas that explicitly adopts normative goals of emancipation / nondomination. 60/

To summarize, critical IR presents an expansive and fertile space of research agendas. But we need real political will within the IR community to swim against the tsunami of the AI propaganda and prioritize information access research explicitly committed to realizing societal good. 59/

Ongoing human rights violations, immigration violence, transphobic violence, displacement, apartheid, war, and genocide do not just affect people out there but also members of the IR community, their friends and families. Solidarity building and collective care is core to critical IR praxis. 58/

E.g., big shout out to @djoerd.idf.social.ap.brid.gy and the team for realizing @irrj.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy as an alternative to the for-profit academic publishing ecosystem in IR. We need more such actions and experimentations on building counter-structures in the field. Website: irrj.org 57/

#6 To affect societal good, critical IR must combine liberatory research + liberatory action. This includes drawing red lines in research, building counter-structures, organizing within the IR community and raising its sociopolitical consciousness, public education, and a recommitment to DEI. 56/

#5 However, we must be wary of being trapped by the technologists-as-liberator frame. Instead, recently we started developing a notion of Freirean Design (arxiv.org/abs/2601.09600) to engage users in the active co-option and co-construction of platforms by underdesigning systems at design time. 55/

I argue that given information and knowledge are socially constructed, it is important to also recognize the need for making space for social deliberation and negotiation within IR systems. This is idea that IR systems should also be social systems is largely missing from the field today. 54/

Instead let's recognize that knowledge is socially constructed; IR systems are embedded in complex social processes influencing beliefs, info needs, and collections; and a good IR system doesn't just retrieve relevant info but grows our understanding of the world and realizes societal good. 53/

#4 IR needs to renounce positivist views of information and the traditional role ascribed to IR within capitalist logics of consumption where information artifacts are viewed as commodities and the IR system's role is to match supply (artifacts in the collection) with demand (search queries). 52/

Critical theory makes similar normative commitments towards "a classless, nondominative, co-operative, participatory democracy". Similarly, @fuchschristian.bsky.social clarifies critical information studies' commitment to be in solidarity with the dominated for the abolishment of domination. 51/

This motivated me last year to start developing a research agenda for emancipatory IR. It is my hope that universal humanization and emancipation from oppression can be a kernel that we can build a broader coalition within the IR community and mobilize towards. Paper: irrj.org/article/view... 50/

#3 IR needs to make a normative commitment to nondomination in solidarity with the oppressed. This is a challenging task for a community whose members reflect vastly different values, cultures, politics, identities, privileges, lived experiences, and understandings of history. 49/

IR should reconnect with its roots in library and information sciences that engages w/ liberatory concerns. Libraries have been at the forefront of antifascist and decolonial resistance throughout history across the globe. (Shout out to @patchedelbows.bsky.social for inviting me to #CALC26!) 48/

To do this work appropriately, IR needs interdisciplinary collaborations, to engage with critical / feminist / decolonial / other liberatory scholarships, and be informed by the body of knowledge from activism and movement organizing. 47/

We also need to consider the systemic consequences of emerging tech like AI for information access. While concerns of hallucinations and bias are important, we mustn't overlook the other mechanisms by which AI disrupts the information ecosystem, concentrates power, and marginalizes communities. 46/