School of Social and Political Science

Description

Controversies in the Data Society 2026 series - Session 3

Srravya Chandhiramowuli will give a talk called Beyond the label: repairing data work, rethinking AI. 

Dr Beatrice Bonami will give a talk called Sustainability kaleidoscope to shield predatory corporations fostering AI green economy.

About this session

Srravya Chandhiramowuli: Beyond the label: repairing data work, rethinking AI 

Despite recent advances in AI’s computational capabilities, data work—the human labour required for training, fine-tuning, and evaluating AI systems - remains indispensable to AI production. Yet, data work is constituted as a routine and repetitive activity, with little scope for applying expertise and skill, and often conducted under unfair conditions of work. 

As the restrictive, uneven structures shaping data work become increasingly visible, there is a crucial need to consider how data work might be repaired and reoriented towards a more just and equitable practice. In this talk, I will present reflections on some of the work that lies ahead in this regard, drawing on my ethnographic engagement with a civic-tech initiative based in India that builds datasets for training and evaluating online safety systems. 

Adopting a feminist orientation, they produce safety datasets by collaborating with those most impacted by online harms, inviting them to contribute and annotate data on online harms. Drawing on insights from two dataset projects developed in this orientation, I highlight how this approach reorients data work as a site for repair and redress by enabling a wider scope for contributions beyond discrete tasks and recognising contributors as experts. This recognition then surfaces limits and tensions in advancing just reward for data work, and contributors’ role in governing the datasets they help produce. Thinking with this case, I will share insights into the open challenges in translating alternative, feminist visions for data/AI into actual practice.

Dr Beatrice Bonami: Sustainability kaleidoscope to shield predatory corporations fostering AI green economy 

Sustainability’ is a kaleidoscope concept to overshadow artificial intelligence (AI) corporations’ predatory activities, strategically positioned in environmental reports to divert attention from the material aspects of AI’s networks of production and value chains. Sustainability is often semantically associated with preservation and/or longevity of organic and inorganic systems. In the spectrum of climate change and environmental preservation, sustainability has gained traction in promoting actions that could revert the societal and environmental impacts of human actions embedded by the Anthropocene. However, as any mainstream concept and buzzword, sustainability might be used to overshadow a myriad of meanings and a part of them tailored to cover environmentally damaging activities sponsored by private corporations and companies worldwide: a phenomenon broadly known as greenwashing. 

When it comes to AI, the corporate promises regarding AI data models often fall around the premise of AI being a green industry or technology. However, AI is far from being green or sustainable if we consider the material aspect of its networks of production. Yet AI environmental reports still insist on the green technology narrative by articulating the sustainability kaleidoscope to AI, a metaphor we deploy to explore how ‘sustainability’ can give an illusion of depth when articulating mirror concepts, which brings to the fore the impression of an environmentally sound agency without providing evidence of how these actions have taken shape.

About the speakers

Srravya Chandhiramowuli is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow and Thematic Lead on Data Work in the Planetary AI project at the University of Edinburgh. Her research closely follows the on-ground practices of dataset production for AI, bringing particular attention to systemic challenges and frictions in data work and AI supply chains. Building on scholarship in human computer interaction and science and technology studies, Srravya's research seeks to contribute towards just and equitable futures in technology.

Dr Beatrice Bonami is a scientist, author, digital ethnographer, and digital transformation and tech decolonisation specialist.