It is an advocacy and reading group that brings forward humanistic and social scientific inquiry on AI or ‘Artificial Intelligence’.
Critical Inquiry
We examine AI beyond its dominant narratives of progress and harm, and instead focus on infrastructures, histories, and power structures. We foster literacies about data, algorithms, and AI transcending disciplinary and social boundaries.
Majority World(s)
We centre voices, experiences, and knowledge systems in/from the Majority World to look at algorithmic lives within its lived and situated contexts. We use ‘world(s)’ to draw attention to the social lives inherently embedded in/around AI systems.
Collective Interpretation
Reading together in an act of collective interpretation. CLAIM holds space for an open, empathetic, and respectful dialogue about “AI” interventions across disciplines and geographies. We focus on a low-entry barrier conversation for everyone.
Data Colonialism
Care, Ethics & Resistance
Infrastructure & Inequality
AI & Power
Governance & Policy
Decolonial AI
What we do?
We hold a space for slow reading, careful thinking, and difficult conversations about how AI is shaped by power, history, labour, culture, and knowledge.
Curated focus
Reading texts are selected with care to foreground overlooked questions and unsettle dominant assumptions with AI’s complexities and manifestations. This operationalises humanistic and social lenses to critically look at data, algorithms, and AI beyond surface level debate.
Situated thinking
Conversations are grounded in specific social, cultural, and political contexts, recognising that knowledge in/about AI emerges from lived conditions—positioned and embodied, rather than objective and detached. This encourages not just a peek behind the technical mysteries and also positions AI as a social artifact.
Dialogic format
Sessions prioritise exchange over presentation. Members actively participate to lead discussions as well as share their work with the community. A low-entry barrier is encouraged and practiced to keep the engagement accessible.
Shared responsibility
The space is maintained through mutual care and accountability. Attentiveness to experience, power, and differences, is encouraged. Participants are expected to engage thoughtfully and empathetically.
Open-ended inquiry
CLAIM values questions over conclusions. Participants listen, respond, and reflect together, allowing ideas to develop through collective conversation. The work lies in keeping complexity visible and allowing uncertainty to be part of the discussion.
CLAIM welcomes scholars, artists, and thinkers committed to engaging critically with AI from perspectives rooted in or attentive to Majority World contexts. As long as you share this interest, you should call this group your home and brave space.
Who we are?
CLAIM was founded in 2024 by researchers committed to creating space for Critical AI discourse rooted in Majority World perspectives. It is a space to nourish visions and curiosities of anyone invested in everyday sense-making of their lives since “AI”.
