This interdisciplinary summer school explores AI’s cultural blind spots from a global angle and imagines how it can democratize social institutions while safeguarding against harm and advancing inclusive and hopeful digital futures.
The Data CARE Festival returns in 2027 under the theme Building the Library of the Incalculable. The Festival brings together researchers, artists, activists, policymakers, technologists, and practitioners to explore what is left out when human value is reduced to what can be measured, predicted, and optimized. We ask what AI does not, cannot, and should not calculate: care, belonging, humour, solidarity, cultural difference, moral imagination, and the many forms of human life that do not fit our quantification regimes. Drawing on Majority World perspectives and diverse forms of knowledge, the Festival creates a space to challenge extractive models of technology while imagining more relational, caring, and hope-oriented digital futures. It is a space not simply to diagnose what is wrong with AI, but to explore what becomes possible when we leverage AI to democratize existing social institutions while investing in building guardrails to mitigate harms and risks.
Across five days, the Festival will bring this inquiry into conversation through four parallel themes: Trust, AI Safety & Security; Creative AI and Cultural Value; Language Models, Literacy & Learning; and Sovereign AI, Democracy & Ecosystem Thinking. As part of the Data CARE Festival, we are proud to launch the Inclusive AI Summer School, an interdisciplinary joint venture creating a dedicated space for PhDs, Postdocs, independent researchers, and practitioners across the cultural and creative industries, technology, government, the civic sector, and beyond. The Summer School brings North–South and South–South perspectives into genuine exchange through slow conferencing, while bridging the humanities and computational sciences. It moves away from the usual talking shop, and has been formatted to carve out workshops to deeply engage with real-world cases, pioneer AI-enabled methods for studying global societies, get out of your comfort zones by engaging across disciplines and sectors, and strengthen the ability to translate research insights into societal impact. The invitation is to leave disciplinary silos, stay with complexity, engage openly across difference, and become part of a global community working to make inclusion common sense.
For the workshops on June 8th to 10th, attendants can dive deeper into one of four themes. Experts from civic, creative, policy, academia, and business will lead the three day workshops.
Trust, AI Safety & Security
Design, policy and scholarship on AI privacy, security and safety have become increasingly risk-centric and harm-focused. This theme challenges that logic by centering fundamental rights, expanded human capabilities, and the freedoms to reclaim digital public spaces for systematically underrepresented and disadvantaged communities. Bringing together perspectives from research, policy, design and civic practice, participants explore the practical challenges of building trustworthy, secure and freedom-enhancing AI systems, examining how cultural and social contexts shape risks, trust and safety across communities. We will explore how to best leverage AI to help detect abuse and persuade us towards safer behaviours, while addressing questions about power, consent and the boundaries between protection and control in the design of such interventions. Participants will engage with experts from academia, policy and the civic sector across China, the USA, the UK, Switzerland, South Africa and the Netherlands, drawing on experience from organisations including the University of St. Gallen, the Austrian Academy, Careful Industries, the Digital Impact Alliance and Unfurl Futures to develop approaches to AI that strengthen rather than constrain human freedoms.
Creative AI & Cultural Value
As fears grow that AI will replace human creativity, creative unions are pushing back and mainstream media are warning of the death of our creator economies. Yet this culture of fear can also romanticise copyright and other systems that have long failed to serve the majority of creatives worldwide. This theme invites participants to move beyond the AI-versus-human binary to explore how AI is transforming creative practices, enabling new forms of expression, and democratising digital storytelling and the ways we imagine and represent the world. We will also confront the urgent questions of fair attribution, redistribution and remuneration in a changing global creative economy. Through encounters with scholars, practitioners and AI artists from India, South Korea, Hong Kong and Chile, and organisations including the University of Zurich, UNESCO, Fontys Bold Insight, AIAF and You’re Not a Robot, participants will be challenged to rethink what creativity, cultural value and creative justice can mean in the age of AI and how that can translate to better designs, fair policies, and creative data justice.
AI Language & Literacy,& Learning
Educators, teachers, parents and others involved in everyday learning are increasingly worried that AI is making us "stupid", undermining critical thinking and putting the future of education at risk. Much of the scholarship currently focuses on possible cognitive decline and institutional crisis, on banning social media and blocking AI in schools, with limited attention to children and learners across the Majority World, for whom AI can open access to knowledge in their own languages and dialects. This theme challenges participants to move beyond protecting existing measures of intelligence and literacy to ask more fundamental questions: what kinds of intelligence and skills do we need for the future, and how can AI nurture critical and creative thinking while expanding access to quality learning for those long excluded? Participants will engage with perspectives from academia and practice, including experts from IKEA on AI ethics, Deakin University on indigenous knowledge making with Large Language Models, Holon Institute of Technology on pioneering new AI assessments, and Istinye University and Maastricht University to help us rethink how AI can enrich learning, teaching and human potential.
Sovereign AI & Ecosystem thinking
Sovereignty has become the new buzzword in AI geopolitics, as declining trust in global institutions pushes countries to assert greater control over data, infrastructure and AI governance. Yet when independence becomes synonymous with isolation, we risk losing the appetite for cooperation needed to address challenges that transcend borders and affect all of our planet and our people. This theme invites participants to rethink sovereignty not as a choice between dependence and self-sufficiency, but as the capacity to build interdependent, equitable and collaborative AI ecosystems. Through concrete cases, participants will explore venture capital for social change in Brazil, African AI ecosystems through the lens of a veteran Nigerian journalist, Ubuntu ethics as a basis for cross-border collaboration, new justice systems to hold algorithms accountable with Georgetown University, and new forms of intimacy that connect the personal and political with experts from the University of Cape Town. We will also draw on science fiction and futures thinking with a Siemens expert, and the experience of a former AI advisor to the Mexican government, to imagine how diverse actors can build sovereign capabilities while creating shared resources, new alliances and more just technological futures.
The summer school is provided by an interdisciplinary and global group of academics and professionals from the civic, creative, policy, and business sectors, including diverse perspectives from Nigeria, Mexico to Brazil and South Africa.
Participating organisations include, among many others, Siemens, IKEA, Careful Industries, IDEO, The Digital Impact Alliance South Africa, and Canal Sabiar.
Organising Team & Partners:
Payal Arora, Lucie Chateau, Yichen Rao & Dennis Nguyen Utrecht University
Roberta Calegari, University of Bologna
Veronica Barassi, University of St. Gallen
Tanja Bosch, University of Cape Town
Julia Backhaus, RWTH Aachen University
Toija Cinque, Deakin University
Jensine Larsen, Unfurl Futures
V2 Institute of Unstable Media
Academics across career stages, independent researchers, and professionals interested in tackling AI and shaping its impact from a cultural perspective.
Aim of the course
Please note that we do not cover any accommodation, travel- or visa costs!
For this course you are required to upload the following documents when applying: