JEDI Social at FAccT 2026
Information, and access to information, are profoundly political. Information access tools can be emancipatory or used to further invisibilize and oppress historically marginalized groups. Despite this social reality, Information Retrieval (IR), a field of research that has played a significant role in the advancement of information systems such as search engines, recommender systems, and chatbots, often overlooks or even resists the political implications of its work, and thus pays insufficient attention to their responsibility towards social justice and emancipation.
This virtual FAccT social is an explicit act of bridge-building between the FAccT and the IR communities. The social will be a space for members of both communities to collectively engage in dialog on how to realize information access as an emancipatory force and safeguard our information ecosystems from authoritarian and corporate capture. We welcome participants from all disciplines (including IR, FAccT, information science, human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, and critical theory) and practices (including law, policymaking, and movement building) interested in the intersection between digital information access tools and the struggle for social justice, emancipation, and democracy.
Schedule
TBD.
Registration
TBD.
Program
TBD.
Positionality
This social 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 social 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 space 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.
