- Sarah Chander, Senior Policy Advisor, European Digital Rights (EDRi) network
- Laurence Meyer, Racial and Social Justice Lead, Digital Freedom Fund (DFF)
- Anasuya Sengupta, Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow, Robert Bosch Academy; Co-founder, Whose Knowledge?
About the event:
What does “decolonizing the internet” mean? The discussion will deepen our understandings and practices of digital rights and internet infrastructures in Germany and the European Union, so that the internet becomes “for and from us all”. In particular, we will explore the intersections of digital rights with racial and social justice imperatives, including in the current Artificial Intelligence Act. We will discuss how to make EU regulatory policies around digital technologies more representative of the different needs and imaginations of German and EU populations, as well as the Global South/ Global Majority.
This is an urgent and critical conversation because while Germany and the European Union provide the most powerful regulatory check and political counterweight to Big Tech or Silicon Valley’s problematic practices, our institutions continue to confront their own biases of class, race, gender, ethnicity and other intersections of power and privilege.
The discussion will touch upon the following questions: What does “decolonizing the internet” mean specifically for and from Europe? How do we connect our issues, approaches, and hopes to ensure the internet is truly the emancipatory, liberatory knowledge infrastructure we imagine it to be?
A light meal and drinks will be served after the debate.
About the speakers:
Sarah Chander (she/her) is Senior Policy Advisor at the European Digital Rights network (EDRi). She leads EDRi's policy work on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and specifically the EU’s AI Regulation. She also works on issues of discrimination in a digital context, migration-related technologies, and works on a process of decolonising the digital rights field alongside the Digital Freedom Fund (DFF). She looks to make links between the digital and other social justice movements. Sarah has experience in racial and social justice and previously worked at the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) on a wide range of topics including anti-discrimination law and policy, intersectional justice, state racism, racial profiling and police brutality. She was actively involved in movements against immigration detention.
Laurence Meyer (she/her) has a master's in European comparative public law from La Sorbonne university (Paris). She is a jurist and currently works as the Racial and Social Justice Lead at Digital Freedom Fund. She co-leads the “Decolonising the digital rights field” process, jointly with EDRi, and leads the “Digital Rights for All” initiative. Following the phase II of the decolonising process, she will co-direct “Weaving Liberation“, a new entity hosted at Digital Freedom Fund, specifically dedicated to supporting work in Europe at the intersection of racial, social, transfeminist, economic, environmental and digital justice. She is part of the magazine AssiégéEs, and co-founder of the Ẅ XOOL (wou Rol) film festival dedicated to Afro-descendant women and non-binary filmmakers in France. Laurence works on issues of digital rights and the notion of race in law and has written articles on these topics for French and German newspapers. She speaks French, English and German and is based in Berlin.
Anasuya Sengupta (she/her) is a current Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy. She is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign and feminist collective to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. She has led initiatives across the global South, and internationally for over 25 years, to collectively create feminist presents and futures of love, justice, and liberation. She is committed to unpacking issues of power, privilege, and access, including her own as an anti-caste savarna (dominant caste) woman. She is a co-founder and advisor to Numun Fund (the first feminist tech fund for and from the Global South), the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women.
Registration for this event is closed.