2024 > Keynotes
Keynotes
Eric Craven
Atwater Library and Computer Centre Presenting in Graz
Eric Craven is a creative digital media facilitator who has worked with many community groups and educational institutions in Montreal. For 12 years, he was the Community Development Librarian at the Atwater Library and Computer Centre. Eric’s work focuses specifically on using digital media to disrupt normative expectations and perceptions in the community. As coordinator of Atwater Library’s Digital Literacy Project, he has created programming that directly responds to community needs, creating spaces for participants to express themselves, find new ways to talk about things important to them and to help them build their own communities and work towards their own goals through creative digital media projects. Eric has worked with a wide range of academic and community stakeholders bringing different groups of people together, ages 6 through 96, to express themselves through digital art and media including many community new media projects focusing on seniors and digital music and video. Eric will be presenting with Kim Sawchuk (see below for her bio).
Anita Ghai
Ambedkar University Delhi Presenting in Bangalore
Anita Ghai retired as Dean and Professor in School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi, which she had joined in 2015. Anita was earlier an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology in Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. Her interests are in critical disability studies and issues of sexuality, care, psychology and gender. As a former fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum Library, Teen Murti Bhavan, New Delhi, Anita has researched on issues of care of disabled women recipients and providers of care with leanings towards feminist and disability theory. Anita has been the former President of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies. She has authored Re-thinking Disability in India, Routledge, New Delhi (2015), (Dis) Embodied Form: Issues of Disabled Women (2003), coauthored The Mentally Handicapped: Prediction of the Work Performance with Anima Sen and edited Disability in South Asia: Knowledge and Experience (2018). She is also an editor for the journals Disability and Society, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research and Indian Journal of Gender studies.
Vidushi Marda
REAL ML Presenting in Bangalore
Vidushi Marda is an independent lawyer working on technology regulation, asymmetric power relations, and fundamental rights to advance social justice. She is the co-executive director of REAL ML, a nonprofit organization that translates algorithmic accountability research into impactful interventions that benefit the public interest. Marda’s work engages with technical, legal, academic and advocacy communities. She has produced pioneering research on machine learning, particularly in non-Western jurisdictions including India, China, and Myanmar. She has been involved in advocacy efforts at the EU level related to the EU AI Act, and is a regular contributor to United Nations resolutions on privacy, freedom of expression, and digital technologies. She also actively engages with technical communities at standardization bodies like the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and research venues including the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Marda’s work has been cited by the Supreme Court of India in a historic ruling on the right to privacy, by the United Kingdom House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, and by multiple United Nations special rapporteurs. She is an advisor at Data and Society, a member of the IPIE Scientific Panel on Global Standards for AI Audits, and the UN Global Pulse Expert Group.
Kim Sawchuk
Concordia University Presenting in Graz
Kim Sawchuk is the Director of engAGE: Centre for Research on Aging Montreal and the ACTLab (Aging + Communication + Technology), Concordia University is the Director of the Aging in Data project. She holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Mobile Media Studies, which focuses on how older adults engage with digital technologies in their everyday lives (www.actlab.ca) as well as critical disability studies. Dr. Sawchuk has written articles, book chapters, policy reports and edited books and special journal issues on aging with technology. Her research often involves participatory action methods, and finding creative collaborative solutions to shared social issues, in the name of social justice. Kim is an active member of the Board of RECAA: Respecting Elders Communities Against Abuse. Most recently she has co- developed an escape room on older adult mistreatment with community organizations and experts in older adult mistreatment. Kim will be presenting with Eric Craven above.
Lucy Suchman
Lancaster University Presenting online
Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of the Anthropology of Science and Technology at Lancaster University in the UK. Before taking up that post she was a Principal Scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where she spent twenty years as a researcher. Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the fields of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction to the domain of contemporary militarism. She is concerned with the question of whose bodies are incorporated into military systems, how and with what consequences for social justice and the possibility for a less violent world.