JEDI Workshop at ASIS&T 2026
The fields of information science (IS) and information retrieval (IR) have long had different dominant values, meaning that concepts that have been well understood in IS have gained less traction in IR. One such issue is the profoundly political nature of information and access to information. IS as a discipline has long understood that search systems are sites of tension between oppression and emancipation. In contrast, IR, the field of research that has given us information systems such as search engines, recommender systems, and chatbots, has steadfastly resisted the idea that such systems are political, and thus ignored the social justice, emancipatory, and democratic implications of the tools the field has developed.
This workshop is an explicit act of bridge-building to engage members of both the IS and the IR communities in dialog on how to realize information access as an emancipatory force and safeguard our information ecosystems from authoritarian and corporate capture. The workshop will be highly interactive and collaborative, and aims to produce a draft manifesto for tools that meet social justice expectations. We welcome participants from all interested disciplines, including but not limited to social science, human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, critical theory, law, and of course information science and information retrieval.
Important Dates
To be announced.
Positionality
This workshop takes an explicitly political lens, recognizing that information and access to information are both profoundly political and represent sites of tension between oppression and emancipation. We reject any ambivalence or false neutrality with respect to oppressor-oppressed relations and situate our work in recent calls (SWIRL report / IRRJ paper) to explicitly align information access research with humanistic, democratic, and emancipatory goals, and the elimination of all structural forms of oppression including colonialism, racism, cisheteropatriarchy, classism, casteism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and ableism.
Code of Conduct
We welcome all attendees who support justice-oriented, emancipatory, and democratic futures. This workshop is intended to be a space to connect and foster shared understanding of how information access can aid universal humanization and struggles for social justice and emancipation for all. Please note that this workshop is not a forum to debate whether any group of human beings deserves or should expect justice and emancipation, and any participant who attempts this will be strictly asked to leave. We note, too, that loss of historical privilege does not constitute oppression, and anyone attempting to frame it as such will be warned, and then asked to leave.
