Beyond Big Tech: Building Community-Centered Language Technology in Africa 🌍 a roundtable we hosted last week in Abidjan 🇨🇮 at the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum.
We’re so grateful to our fantastic speakers & research partners -
💫 Gloria Monica Tobechukwu Emezue Professor, linguist and pioneer of the NaijaVoices community & dataset
💫 Kathleen Siminyu, AI Researcher working in Natural Language Processing at @DAIR@dair-community.social
💫 Sadik Shahadu, co-founder of Dagbani Wikimedia
Whose Knowledge?
We are a Global-Majority led organisation, working on knowledge and tech justice by recentering the majority of the world on the internet.
Weaving a Wiser Web: Centering Marginalized Knowledge in Digital Spaces 🎯
That's the roudtable we'll be hosting at #RightsCon2026 with our co-conspirators from @DAIR@dair-community.social and the Feminist Internet Research Network 💫
Mark the date! And if you’re working on topics at the intersection of Tech and Knowledge justice and that you’d like to connect in Lusaka, drop us an email at info@whoseknowledge.org 💌
If you’re interested in the connection between memory, activism, and community, you'll definitely enjoy reading this reflection piece on living memory by our brilliant intern, Victoria Lu, a labor organizer and activist.
"What stayed with me most is the idea of living memory: memory that is rooted in community, carried through struggle, and transformed into collective action."
Read Victoria’s full piece: https://www.liberatoryarchivesmemory.org/reflections-on-living-memory-in-nairobi/
Our dearest Tigist S. Hussen attended the Just AI Conference 2026 by Research ICT Africa on behalf of Whose Knowledge? and presented "From Extraction to Embodied Praxis: Decolonising AI through Community-Centric Language Technologies in Africa," highlighting how community-centred language technologies can shift AI away from extractive models and towards approaches rooted in sovereignty, care, and the preservation of linguistic and cultural knowledge.
Read more here: https://researchictafrica.net/2026/03/31/what-does-just-ai-look-like-in-practice-reflections-from-day-1-of-the-just-ai-conference/
Our Newsletter is coming up this week and you don't want to miss it! 💌
"The Internet We Want" drops every last week of the month, and features:
👣 Upcoming Tech justice shenanigans we’ll take part in
🦋 Inspiring content from friends organisations and comrades
👩🏽💻 Uplifting publications and events we’re working on
💫 Soft things that are bringing Joy
Sign up here! https://whoseknowledge.org/join/
As we celebrate International Afro-Descendant Women's Day, get to know ✨ Hidden Caribbean Figures ✨ a fantastic initiative working towards improving Wikipedia's coverage of Caribbean literature, where volunteers are helping ensure that Afro-descendant women writers and cultural figures are more visible, more discoverable, and more accessible to readers everywhere.
Read more about it here ➡️ https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/07/19/hidden-caribbean-figures-an-editing-event-to-make-caribbean-literature-visible-on-wikipedia/
Today we celebrate the generations of Afro-descendant women who have created, treasured, and uplifted knowledge, often without recognition, resources, or institutional support.
Support Afro-descendant women archivists, memory workers, and knowledge workers. Invest in their leadership. Fund their initiatives. Cite their work. Partner with their organizations. Create opportunities for them to lead the conversations and technologies that shape our collective future! 🤎
Wikipedia is turning 25! 🎉
For the occasion, we're in Paris for Wikimania 2026.
On Saturday, July 25th 🗓️ our beloved Mariana who co-leads the Decolonizing Wikimedia program, will host a Lunch meetup to share key lessons and inspiration on the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign that has been running for 10 years, and is a rich hands-on experience of challenging the systemic erasure of marginalized bodies and knowledge within digital spaces ✊🏾
If you're attending, come say hi! https://wikimedia.eventyay.com/wm/wikimania2026/talk/EM3AJZ/
Research on disability often overlooks disabled people as active participants and leaders.
ALT: Accessibility, Language and Tech for the People, is a research-in-action initiative led by our Language Justice co-leads Claudia & Maari, that prioritises active co-creation by persons with disabilities and improve online experience for persons with visual impairments, both as users and producers of digital knowledge.
Read the full article here: https://thewire.in/rights/why-researchers-with-disabilities-are-pivotal-to-research-on-disabilities
New report alert! 🚨
Our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign has been running for almost a decade, so we wanted to pause and examine its impact, through an intersectional feminist, anti-racist, queer, and decolonial lens.
The result is a powerful collective reflection on knowledge production, community-led documentation, and the power of decentralized organizing in the age of generative AI.
Grab your copy here ➡️ https://whoseknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Whose-Images-Tell-Our-Stories-VisibleWikiWomen-Whose-Knowledge-2026.pdf
🏳️🌈 ¡En este Mes del Orgullo, celebramos a nuestra comunidad de compañeres queer de la Mayoría Global!
Invitamos a las comunidades queer, a las organizaciones LGBTQIA+, a Wikimedistas, archivistas, activistas, fotógrafes y aliades a que se unan a nosotra.
🌈 Juntes, asegurémonos de que el conocimiento queer sea accesible, esté interconectado y se conserve en la memoria: https://lnkd.in/eJ3--kMq
At #DRAPAC2026 earlier this month, we joined Digital Rights activists, storytellers, archivists, technologists, and movement builders from across the Asia-Pacific region to explore how memory, storytelling, and collective action can strengthen resistance in a time of deepening erasure, surveillance, and shrinking civic space.
Massive thank you to our friends at A New Burma, DAKILA, Roemah Inspirit & Active Vista, and to everyone who shared their experiences, wisdom, and visions 🦋
🏳️🌈 This Pride Month, we celebrate our Queer comrades, siblings and community members from the Global Majority!
As part of the 9th edition of #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, we invite queer communities, LGBTQIA+ organizations, Wikimedia contributors, archivists, activists, photographers, and allies to join us!
Together let’s ensure that Queer knowledge is searchable, connected, and remembered: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:VisibleWikiWomen_Curation_-_Pride_Month
¡Estamos muy emocionadas de lanzar la novena edición de la campaña #VisibleWikiWomen! 🥳
Te invitamos a unirte a nosotras no solo para resistir, sino también para reinventar y construir sistemas de datos estructurados donde nuestras historias no solo sean visibles, sino también debidamente nombradas y valoradas, haciendo que la pluralidad de nuestros cuerpos y conocimientos sea imposible de ignorar ➡️ https://lnkd.in/epjdf4Xd
We’re so excited to launch the 9th edition of the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign! 🥳
You’re invited to join us to bring justice to the gender visibility gaps online, reshape and build structured data systems where our stories aren’t just visible, but properly named & valued, making our selves and knowledge plurality impossible to ignore. Start contributing here: https://whoseknowledge.org/visiblewikiwomen-2026/
How accessible is the internet if it doesn't speak your language?
We are working on Accessibility, Language and Tech for the People, and will share insights on this research together with beloved contributors Nirmita Narasimhan, Dr. Ishan Chakraborty and Subhashish Panigrahi, during an online talk hosted by Future of Commons on accessibility, language justice, and technology, and what it takes to build a truly multilingual and inclusive digital commons.
Register here! https://foc.oki-india.org/
On the #InternationalArchivesDay today, we're reflecting on why documenting our stories matters, not only for preserving the past, but for shaping the future. Haneen Maikey shares how Queer Palestinian memory-making is a practice of resistance, collective care, and community-building by drawing experience of creating Palestinian Queer Movement Archive, alQaws.
Listen to the first episode of Archiving Our Movements: https://www.liberatoryarchivesmemory.org/alqaws/
Are you attending #DRAPAC2026? If yes, let's connect and make sure to lock your calendar for two sessions we'll be part of ⤵️
🌀 Reimagining archives as living spaces of memory, care, and liberation through feminist and community-led archival practices
❇️ A collaborative storytelling space on shrinking digital civic space across Asia-Pacific
Looking forward to sharing, learning, and building solidarities alongside incredible co-conspirators from across the Asia-Pacific region ❤️🔥
Inclusive technology cannot exist without equitable access ❌ In this Wire article, our Language Justice leads, together with Disability Justice advocates Subhashish Panigrahi and Nirmita Narasimhan, highlight the realities that visually impaired communities in South Asia continue to face in navigating the digital world.
Reaf the full article here ➡️ https://thewire.in/rights/accessible-futures-unequal-present-how-tech-gap-affects-visually-impaired-people-in-south-asia
Full house in London last Saturday for the launch of 💫 We, the living archive 💫 - a labour of love nurtured by our Liberatory Archives and Memory program co-leads 🦋
Massive gratitude to the UK Community of practice, to all the archive-lovers, the poets, the writers, the researchers, the artists and everyone who trusted us along the process to make this publication happen 💐
Make sure to download the publication here! https://www.liberatoryarchivesmemory.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/WTLA_MediumRes.pdf
Research practitioner passionate about how people engage with knowledge, Devika argues that play functions as a decolonial, participatory methodology; shifting archives from "sacred, untouchable" repositories toward spaces of intimacy and agency.
Indulge in this really insightful read: https://www.liberatoryarchivesmemory.org/playing-with-the-past/
Some of the beautiful offerings to be found in our upcoming collective publication:
✊🏽Reflections on the cultural production of political movements
🇻🇳Family Photographs from the Vietnamese Diaspora Set in Motion
🛝A piece around playing with the past through handling archives
🖤An essay on The Politics of Black Cultural Memory
Don’t miss the launch happening this Saturday, May 2nd at Pelican House in London!
Registrations this way ▶️ https://www.liberatoryarchivesmemory.org/publication-launch/