Over the past two years, we have simultaneously witnessed worrying excess and malpractice by Big Tech with grave social, political, and economic outcomes — data extractivism, the exacerbation of worker precarity, reversal of gender justice gains, the infrastructural takeover of much of the developing world, hijacking of global-to-local governance spaces and fora, and ecological plundering — to name but a few. These trends have instigated an important civic and political reckoning as civil society actors have begun to recognize the contours of the challenges the digital presents. Nurturing this groundswell into an enduring local-to-global movement for change requires perspective-building and deepening of next-generation leadership in civic spaces, cross-movement dialogue, and coalition-building, rooted in a Southern standpoint for equity and justice.
IT for Change’s five-day residential institute on Frontiers and Frames for a New Digitality in Chiang Mai, Thailand, is a significant step in this direction. The institute aims to capacitate civil society actors with the necessary vocabulary and tools to appropriately frame and approach emerging digital intersections with their work, as well as develop strategies for effective political organization. (Read the call for applications put out for the institute in 2022, here.)
This institute is part of IT for Change’s flagship track — School of Digital Justice, a pedagogical vehicle to further the vision of re-imagining and realizing socio-structural transformation for a just digital economy. The School of Digital Justice seeks to democratize discourse and perspective-building on the digital through legal-institutional, feminist, and political economy approaches.
The institute will be conducted in Chiang Mai from 30 January-3 February, 2023.