events / research

Harvesting Our Learnings – Global Dialogues Series on AI, Voice & Decolonial Knowledge

Angela Martinez Dy

In collaboration with Dr Mayra Ruiz-Castro, Queen Mary University of London

In Management and Business Schools, AI is usually spoken about in terms of efficiency, productivity, and profit. The dominant conversation is about who benefits, including how organisations can gain competitive advantage, how processes can be optimised, how value can be extracted. What gets left out is everything else: whose knowledge is being displaced, who speaks and who is silenced, whose stories are told, and who resists. These are questions about power, coloniality, and whose futures get to be imagined and by whom. Borderlines, an interdisciplinary research collective based at Queen Mary University of London led by Dr Mayra Ruiz-Castro, decided to address these issues through the Global Dialogues Series – our flagship annual event.

As Borderlines, we seek to do things differently in academia, not only in terms of the issues we discuss and study, but also in how we gather. The Series was thus designed to generate discussion around topics that fall outside mainstream management topics, bring together scholars from the Global North and South, include ECRs alongside more established academics, and to create space for artists and activists whose knowledges are rarely centred in academic settings. We wanted to bring together theory, lived experience, and artistic expression as ways of knowing that belong together. This is where a collaboration with Dr Angela Martinez Dy of the Institute for Creative Futures at Loughborough University London became crucial. This collaboration sparked creative ideas on how to run seminars differently, like including invitations to tune into the land and our bodies, acknowledge our emotions, connections and responsibilities to each other and the Earth, and artistic contributions in order to engage affective, intuitive ways of sensing, digesting and knowing.

In collaboration, we organised four online seminars involving 18 speakers, chairs, and artists. The seminars took place between December 2025 and June 2026, and were attended by 241 people (with 330 registrants) from 40 countries – spanning Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Across these seminars, a diverse and international group of chairs and speakers tackled a range of crucial questions, made incisive interventions in conceptualising the current era of AI from critical and decolonial feminist perspectives, and explored how to deepen and complexify our perspectives on AI technologies, and use them in less harmful ways. We thought in conversation with existing decolonial work on AI, inviting speakers from initiatives such as the Indigenous Futures Research Centre at Concordia University (Abundant Intelligences) and the recently ended Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective – communities that are doing vital work in reimagining AI beyond colonial and extractive logics.

Seminar 1, Whose Knowledge? Anti-racist and Decolonial Perspectives on AI Governance and Knowledge Systems (December 2, 2025) laid the groundwork for the series by drawing together fundamental concepts from critical race and data studies on AI and decolonial feminist perspectives on planetary extraction, intentional relationality, and satisfiability. Speakers explored the possibility of doing technology differently by highlighting Indigenous-led research initiatives based on Indigenous knowledge systems, and emphasised learning from women in platform work’s experiences of encountering and resisting technosolutionist colonial practices in algorithm design. The artistic offering for the session was an excerpted reading of the book Burnout from Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI.

Seminar 2, Who speaks? AI and the politics of research, education, and creativity, (February 10, 2026) brought additional nuance to the debates while deepening their critical perspective. Speakers and chair highlighted connections between AI and histories of extractive scientific logics and practices tied to imperialist occupation, critiqued the way AI homogenises voices, knowledge and creativity, and posit that rather than this being the dawn of an AI age where it improves from here, we can expect increased monetisation and enshittification. We were then transported with a powerful reading by Prof. Mojisola Adebayo (Professor of Theatre Writing and Performance Practice, Queen Mary University of London) from her play Family Tree, exploring Henrietta Lacks’ complex experience as a Black woman who was subjected to immorally extractive science and technology, yet whose immortal cells formed the foundation of many contemporary medical innovations.

Seminar 3, Whose voices and stories? AI, memory and counter-narratives (March 24, 2026) interrogated questions of ownership and authorship introduced by the influx of AI. The artistic offering featuring Jon Ross of Bionic and the Wires, a duo making intriguing and delightful experimental electronic music using the bioelectrical impulses of mushrooms, artistically destabilised our conceptions of non-human agency. Speakers and chair explored AI as an amplification of uneven and power-laden archival representations and enabler of gendered representational violence, the complexities involved in notions of rematriation and the potential return of artefacts stolen from formerly colonised regions, and how digital technologies can be creatively and sensitively used in this work, and the challenges in representing subaltern and decolonial imaginaries using mainstream AI tools.

Seminar 4, Who resists? Decolonial and feminist AI futures (June 30, 2026) had speakers and chair explore academia’s role in facilitating and legitimating technologically driven linear notions of progress, and contributing to the denial and erasure of Indigenous and peasant communities’ knowledge-making practices. They critiqued the use of AI for digital surveillance and traced algorithmic colonialism to longer histories of colonialism, enslavement, and caste supremacy. The artistic offering was an original poem read by Dr Martinez Dy, Carbon Copy.

Alongside the incredible presenters who gathered for the seminars, we were privileged to host and record a podcast conversation – AI, Decolonial Futures & the Crisis of Modernity – with an international thought leader in this space, Dr Vanessa Machado de Oliviera Andreotti. In this conversation, Dr Andreotti reoriented our definition of colonialism away from the subjugation of peoples and land, and towards the separation of humans from nature. Thus, undoing the logic of modernity means rejecting this belief in our separateness, as well as in the myths of superiority that come with it.  And if there is nothing outside of or beyond nature – including AI – a new set of possibilities opens for thinking about the future, centred upon repair and reweaving. Amongst the many fascinating insights and propositions she shared was the notion that the development of AI is linked to the current psychedelic renaissance, and that, despite the exploitative and extractive practices used to access them, sacred plants have been agential in the challenge AI currently poses to the supremacy of the rationality upon which modernity is founded. Her contribution also modelled inspiring decolonial pedagogical innovations, centred upon storytelling and nervous system regulation – check out the podcast and this video on Dr Andreotti’s Substack for more.

Together, these five collaborations established new international connections between ideas, people, and practices, and highlighted a number of key themes crucial to the developing array of decolonial and critical feminist perspectives on AI. This includes the perpetuation, heightening and amplification of colonial relationships, extractivist capitalist logics and power and inequality, its embeddedness in Western Enlightenment rationalities of technology, progress and linear time, and the way it has been enabled to shape our collective social imaginary through the use and influence of uneven and biased datasets that enable harms such as cultural erasure and material violences enacted on women, poor, racialised, queer, trans, and otherwise minoritised communities. At the same time, we heard that the poison can also be a remedy: new technologies like AI have the potential for ethical use, if seen as part of nature and embedded in fundamentally different frameworks of relationality and practices of knowledge creation, such as those that support and serve community autonomy rather than reduce and deny it. But the dialogues in the series also affirmed an abolitionist approach, wherein a turning away from AI, and towards other kinds of traditional and ancestral knowledge making practices, can be a valid and legitimate way to challenge the coloniality inherent in digital technologies and recover kinship with the land, ourselves and others.

We would like to sincerely thank our Borderlines Coordinator, Bente Fatema, our podcast producer, Thomas Higgins, Queen Mary Business School at Queen Mary University of London, and Institute for Creative Futures at Loughborough University London for all their support. We are incredibly grateful to all speakers, chairs, artists and participants for their contributions, attention and interactions that have produced this collective knowledge, which will resonate with this community and in our work for years to come. Thanks very much also to those who reviewed this summary blog to help us accurately reflect our shared work. While our seminar series has now finished, to deepen your engagement with the themes that emerged, we share these resources by some of the individuals and collectives featured in our series:

We also recommend the one-of-a-kind online course A Meta-Relational Approach to AI, developed by Dr Vanessa Andreotti, our podcast guest, and facilitated by members of her team at the University of Victoria. This 6-week depth education course is designed for people seeking to engage with generative AI “in ways that challenge modernity’s extractive programming”, and prioritise building capacity instead of mastery, in order to explore complexity around AI as symptom, amplifier and portal.

Finally, please consider responding to this poll so we can hear your thoughts on the 2025-6 Global Dialogues series, and your ideas for what, in the words of adrienne maree brown, the ‘next most elegant step’ might be. We plan to share some of the outcomes of the poll, especially opportunities to stay connected or join similar initiatives, with the group, and can commit to exploring potential for future collaborations.

Our big thanks and best wishes to all! – Mayra and Angela

Seminar Guests

Seminar 1: Whose knowledge? Anti-racist and decolonial perspectives on AI governance and knowledge systems (December 2nd, 2025)

Speakers:

  • Dr Angela Martinez Dy (Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, Loughborough University London)
  • Dr Ceyda Yolgörmez (Postdoctoral Researcher, Indigenous Futures Research Centre, Concordia University, Montreal)
  • Dr Anjali Krishan (Postdoctoral Researcher in AI Safety, Digital Environment Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London).

Chair: Dr Mayra Ruiz-Castro (Senior Lecturer in HRM and Leadership, Queen Mary University of London).

Artistic offering: Dr Angela Martinez Dy reading from Burnout from Humans by Aidan Cinnamon Tea and Dorothy Ladybugboss

Seminar 2: Who speaks? AI and the politics of research, education, and creativity (February 10th, 2026)

Speakers:

Chair: Professor Anamik Saha (Professor of Race and Media, University of Leeds).

Artistic offering: Prof. Mojisola Adebayo (Professor of Theatre Writing and Performance Practice, Queen Mary University of London), reading from her play Family Tree

Seminar 3: Whose voices and stories? AI, memory and counter-narratives (March 24th, 2026)

Speakers:

Chair: Dr Isadora Cruxên (Senior Lecturer in Business Politics and Development, Queen Mary University of London).

Artistic Offering: Jon Ross of Bionic and the Wires

Seminar 4: Who resists? Decolonial and feminist AI futures (June 30th, 2026)

Speakers:

  • Dr Ana Cristina Suzina (Senior Lecturer in Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University)
  • Dhaksh Sooriya (PhD Candidate in Critical Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University).

Invited speakers who could not attend:

Chair: Dr Sadhvi Dar (Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Global Management, University College London).

Artistic Offering: Dr Angela Martinez Dy (Reader in Critical Entrepreneurship and Feminist Technocultural Studies, Loughborough University London) reading Carbon Copy

Podcast: AI, Decolonial Futures & the Crisis of Modernity – Dr Vanessa Andreotti and Dr Angela Martinez Dy