[Air-L] Webinar - Humane Conversation – A Call for (Global) South to North Methodological Approaches in Critical AI Studies

[MATHIAS FELIPE DE LIMA SANTOS]

Dear AoIR members,

We are organizing a webinar with Dr. Andrea Medrado from the University of
Westminster about methodological approaches in critical AI studies. Please
see the call below:

*#19 Humane Conversation – A Call for (Global) South to North
Methodological Approaches in Critical AI Studies with Andrea Medrado and
Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos*

In this conversation, Dr Andrea Medrado and Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos
interrogate ideas of artificial intelligence (AI) for social good, drawing
inspiration from Participatory Action Research (PAR) and the work of Latin
American thinkers such as Freire and Fals Borda. Medrado presents data from
the project and paper “AI for Social Good?” co-authored with Dr Pieter
Verdegem. For the project, participatory workshops were conducted in London
with a group of students, activists and tech workers. In the paper, Medrado
and Verdegem analyse two transversal themes – AI for Social Good? And
Decolonial Perspectives of AI – and delve into three concepts – autonomy,
empathy and dialogue. They propose a South-North flow and utilise PAR
approaches that stem from Latin America. This is an attempt to challenge
the ways in which the North’s centrality is taken for granted when it comes
to epistemologies, experiences, and pieces of knowledge related to AI. They
argue that PAR can not only empower marginalised communities in the Global
South; we can also learn more from its application in the Global North, in
contexts where people deal with different struggles. Yet, there are
constraints in applying PAR. These are related to how scholarship is
organised in the Global North, often with the aim to generate top-down
impact, which stands in opposition to the open agenda and bottom-up
approach of PAR. Still, much can be learned from this research journey.
Inspired by Fals Borda’s (2003) “sentipensante” notion, they embrace an
“epistle-method-philosophical” approach in which making, thinking and
feelings are all combined. Rather than following the AI hype, we argue that
more is to be learned from everyday AI stories, which we must tell, listen
to and share in pluriversal ways.

Dr Andrea Medrado is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster
<https://camri.ac.uk/blog/staff/andrea-medrado/> in the UK and a member of
CAMRI (The Communication and Media Research Institute). She also worked as
an Associate Professor at the Federal Fluminense University in Brazil.
Andrea is the Principal Investigator for the project “AI for Social Good?”,
funded by UKRI and by the University of Westminster’s Diversity and
Inclusion Research Community. She was the Co-I for the “e-Voices Redressing
Marginality” Network (Arts and Humanities Research Council, ARHC). She is
currently the Vice President of the International Communication and Media
Research Association (IAMCR). Her first book “Media Activism, Artivism and
the Fight Against Marginalisation in the Global South: South-to-South
Communication
<https://www.routledge.com/Media-Activism-Artivism-and-the-Fight-Against-Marginalisation-in-the-Global/Medrado-Rega/p/book/9781032080833>”,
has just been published by Routledge.

*Registrations on:*
https://humane-ai.nl/events_report/20-humane-conversation-a-call-for-global-south-to-north-methodological-approaches-in-critical-ai-studies/

We look forward to having you join us in this conversation.

Best wishes,

*Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos*
Postdoctoral Researcher | RPA Human(e) AI <https://humane-ai.nl/>
Faculty of Humanities

-- 
----

É obrigatória a utilização do e-mail @unifesp em todas as 
correspondências oficiais, institucionais e no acesso aos equipamentos e 
sistemas da Universidade Federal de São Paulo, conforme a portaria Reitoria 
n. 1182/2022 <https://sti.unifesp.br/documentos/termos-de-uso-do-email> que 
define a Política de e-mail institucional da Unifesp. 
<https://sei.unifesp.br/sei/publicacoes/controlador_publicacoes.php?acao=publicacao_visualizar&id_documento=1160855&id_orgao_publicacao=0>