JEDI workshop at SIGIR 2026

Information, and access to information, is profoundly political. Information can be emancipatory, or used to further undermine and oppress minoritized groups. Despite this social reality, Information Retrieval, 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 will be a forum for those from any field interested in the intersection between digital information access tools and the struggle for social justice, emancipation, and democracy. 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 law, social science, information science, human computer interaction, science and technology studies, critical theory, and of course information retrieval.

Important Dates

Proposal submission: ~~April 16~~ April 30 (extended), 2026
Proposal notifications: May 21, 2026
Workshop: July 24, 2026

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.

Call for Presentations

We are soliciting proposals for presentations from the community in the form of extended abstracts. Accepted proposals will be invited to present a poster at the workshop, and a few selected proposals may be invited to give a short talk. Relevant presentations may explore questions like:

How can we safeguard information ecosystems against authoritarian and corporate capture, and the public from mass surveillance and manipulation?
What role do current systems and practices of the information access field play in the conflict between (i) democracy and authoritarianism or (ii) emancipation and oppression?
What practices can help us shift the field towards supporting social justice, emancipation, and democracy?
How can we make visible and understand how information access facilitates collective understandings of complex issues, particularly those that remain implicit, and challenge normative sense-making?
How can information access safeguard marginalized perspectives and knowledge from erasure; and promote critical thought and sociopolitical awareness?
What can the information access discipline learn from feminist, queer, decolonial, anti-racist, anti-casteist, anti-ableist, and abolitionist perspectives?
How do we move our community beyond just talking about DEI and fairness / bias, and towards actively challenging power and structures of oppression?
How should information access research situate itself in ongoing social justice movements against oppression and authoritarianism and realize its work grounded in practices of organizing and movement building?

We particularly encourage submissions informed by cross-disciplinary perspectives and justice-oriented scholarship; and those situated in organizing and movement building for social justice.

Submission and Review Process

We welcome extended abstract submissions via EasyChair. Make sure to select the "Justice, Emancipation, Democracy, and Information Access (JEDI)" Track when creating a submission.

Abstracts should be 1-2 pages (excluding references), and must be submitted in PDF format. We do not require adherence to a specific ACM template; but submissions should be in single-column format with at least 11-point font size.

Submissions will be reviewed by a Program Committee through a single-anonymized peer review process. Submissions should include the list of authors, and optionally a positionality statement.

Submissions will be evaluated based on quality, clarity, and relevance, with an emphasis on fostering engaging discussions at the workshop.

All accepted abstracts will be non-archival. Presentation proposals based on unpublished, currently under review, and previously published work are all welcome.