AFU. This is not a hackerspace (2021). Photo: © Nora Al-Badri 31 Oct 2025
11:00 - 17:00
Workshop: Counter-Institutional Data Activism
Taking place on Friday 31 October, the Counter-Institutional Data Activism workshop opens up a discussion about liberatory data practices from a decolonial and antiracist perspective. Speakers include Dr. Monica Hanna, Nora Al-Badri, Yaseen Aslam and Mariana Fernández Mora, who bring activist expertise from across various disciplines.
This workshop rethinks data rights and freedoms against museums and industry, working collaboratively towards a document of grassroots ‘best practices’ that may be utilized by activists, artists, scholars, and others working towards more just and liberatory digital futures. With invited guests including Dr. Monica Hanna (scholar, AASTMT), Nora Al-Badri (artist, Berlin), Yaseen Aslam (union organizer, London), and Mariana Fernández Mora (artist/researcher, Slow AI) the discussion will centre strategic efforts to counter data monopolization and surveillance, digital freedom and privacy, and community-based work to repair and restore archives and knowledges.
The intended outcomes of this workshop are twofold: in the short term, this event will provide a forum for meaningful exchange between participants with diverse experiences related to organizing, activism, and advocacy related to digital & data decolonization, providing audiences with valuable and actionable strategies for countering institutional knowledge monopolies. In the longer term, the intended aim is to work with the invited guests (with the possibility of including other participants) to transform the workshop outputs into an open-access publication – scholarly or otherwise – as benefitting the participants’ respective practices. Doing so, the event’s reach may extend beyond those able to attend the workshop to other audiences outside the Netherlands.
The invited speakers bring expertise in decolonial and antiracist activism across the West and Global South, with an emphasis on Middle Eastern contexts and communities. By centring these practices, this Repair Lab foregrounds issues of counter-institutional freedom and autonomy, particularly relating to ways that bodies and knowledges strive to be made knowable or unknowable. Working collaboratively from a foundation of activist practices, Counter-Institutional Data Activism strives to imagine liberatory data futurities at both the community and institutional levels.
This event takes place in person as well as online. Register here.
Speakers
Nora Al-Badri is a multi-disciplinary and conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background. Her works are research-based, paradisciplinary, post-colonial, and post-digital.
Yaseen Aslam is a union organiser who has played a key role in establishing various driver organizations and trade unions. In 2020, he founded the International Alliance of App-based Transport Workers (IAATW).
Dr. Monica Hanna is an associate professor and the acting dean of the College of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Aswan.
Mariana Fernández Mora is a researcher, writer, and artist at the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS). She is the initiator of the Slow AI project, host of the Restless Grounds podcast, editor of its annual journal, and author of Dear Machines (2022).
Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK); Municipality of Amsterdam; and VriendenLoterij Fonds.
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Workshop / Digital commons & democracy / Politics and technology /
Exhibitions
Exhibition: Shapeshifters
A group exhibition examining how colonialism has shaped museums, archives and other institutions of knowledge
Network
Yaseen Aslam
Union organiser
Monica Hanna
Scholar
Nora Al-Badri
Artist
