Join We and AI for a full day programme of reimagining and reclaiming AI at King’s College London for London Data Week 2026
Many argue that the current trajectory of AI is inevitable and that the only option left for us is to accept and adapt. Dangerous political narratives about the technology prevail such as when politicians describe AI as a “revolution”. Many governments such as in the UK also fail to provide critical AI literacy to enable people to participate in the discussions and decisions on AI development.
There are however many ways in which people can, and already do, challenge the current trajectory of AI. Many initiatives and projects show us that the extractive direction of AI does not have to be inevitable. To highlight this, we are hosting a full day of workshops, talks and interactive activities during London Data Week focused on reclaiming and reimagining AI.
The programme includes an inspiring line-up of activities such as a workshop on co-creating new tech futures, one on zine-making and quiet refusal, and a workshop where we will discuss how critical AI literacy is key for building community-centred visions of AI.
The programme will end with the UK launch of our most recent project, the AI Resist List (airesistlist.org), bringing together researchers, scholars and practitioners for an interactive event with short lightning talks and audience questions aimed at centering hope, community as well as sharing knowledge, challenges and tactics on countering the inevitability narratives of AI.
You can find the full day programme here below, and more information about the London Data Week programme here.
Detailed Programme
Please note that you need to sign up separately to each workshop/event that you want to join.
09:30 – 10:55: Crafting Participatory Tech Futures
by Ismael Kherroubi Garcia, Ramla Anshur, Ve Dewey and Obhi Chatterjee
An interactive workshop led by the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN), this session invites civil society, academia and non-profits to affirm imagination as a collective practice.
What if AI futures were not something delivered to us, but something we could deliberate, contest, and build together? What if diverse publics could gather to imagine technological futures grounded in real societal and ecological needs, and chart practical pathways toward them?
This session invites participants to affirm imagination as a collective practice. Through participatory world-building, we will move beyond abstract optimism or dystopian critique, and instead co-define actionable, justice-oriented AI futures.
- Discovery: Discover futures thinking as a critical practice that examines how imagined futures shape present decisions, power structures, and technological trajectories.
- Encounters: Through dialogue and reflection, collaboratively articulate future scenarios that feel socially, environmentally, and politically meaningful. Rather than tightly scripted facilitation, this phase encourages emergent conversation, prioritizing story-telling over theory.
- Crafting: Tell new stories and potential journeys that link the diverse futures that you imagined together
11:00 – 12:00: Data, Power, and Possibility: Mapping Pathways Beyond AI Inevitability
by Carolina Ossa
If AI systems depend on vast amounts of data generated through our actions, relationships, communities, and everyday lives, what influence might we already hold in shaping technological futures?
This interactive workshop invites participants to explore a different response to AI inevitability. Before we can reimagine technological futures, we must first understand how power, value, and influence already flow through the systems around us. Together, we’ll examine the relationship between data and AI, and envision it as a source of power and possibility.
Through collaborative mapping activities, we will explore where in our lives data is generated, captured, and transformed into value; who benefits and who bears the costs; and reimagine those sites as opportunities for collective empowerment, negotiation, agency and preferred forms of stewardship.
Drawing on participatory design, systems thinking, and futures practices, participants will create a shared map of the relationships and infrastructures shaping our digital lives while exploring how communities might exercise greater agency over the data they create together.
11:00 – 12:00: Breaking down AI: Technologies, Myths, Realities
by Dylan Orchard
Join Reclaiming Futures at King’s College London for a panel of three researchers describing three different faces of AI, offering a simple introduction for the general public, and anyone curious to understand more about it.
We will explore AI, not as a monolith, but as a complex, multifaceted and sometime contradictory ecosystem.
Each researcher will give 10 minute presentation, leaving 30 minutes for questions and open discussion.
12:15 – 13:55: Developing Critical AI Literacies: Towards more participatory futures
by Bruna Martins, Tania Duarte, Aphie Gover, Mhari Aitkin and Cinzia Pusceddu
A workshop for people in charities, education, research, policy, public sector and community roles to explore the theory and practices of developing critical AI literacy (CAIL).
We start with: the reasons for the emergence of Critical AI literacy and how it is defined, why it is a necessary intervention prior to, or alongside skills and technical education on AI, and how it can enable more participatory, community focused input into if, when and how AI is used.
Then we will explore principles, delivery methods and creative practice. This includes breakout sessions on: empowering children and young people or lifelong learning, conducting participatory research and code design that can better reflect participants’ values and imagination for more community-centred visions of AI.
Finally, get a sneak peek demo of a new resource library for those delivering critical AI literacy interventions for different audiences, developed by We and AI with support from Our AI Collective CIC and Tecer Digital.
14:10 – 15:25: Co-developing a responsible AI framework: a working session for civil society organisations
by Bruna Martins
Civil society and community organisations are being asked to make decisions about technology faster than most of us feel ready to make them. We are weighing up tools whose risks we do not fully understand, developed in ways that don’t align with our values, while the same technologies are being used in ways that affect the communities we serve, the people who trust us with their information, and the work we do. Most individual decisions, anchored in principles of resisting, refusing, reclaiming and reimagining AI, don’t easily translate into organisational settings where risks and opportunities are shared.
In this session, participants map the risks of using AI inside their own work and the risks of AI being used against them and the communities they serve. What the room produces becomes the raw material for an open framework, co-developed with a working group drawn from participants and published with named co-authors.
14:25 – 15:25: Zine against the machine
by Dylan Orchard
What if the future wasn’t digital? This zine-making workshop encourages you to explore, via visual storytelling, on paper, a world where technologies like AI are rejected and resisted. The zine – a handmade magazine that’s low-cost and made with passion – has a long history in counterculture. Join us to create, learn, and express your ideas in your very own zine. No prior experience is required, just a willingness to experiment.
15:30 – 17:30: Launch of the AI Resist List: Community forum for Possible Futures
Some say that AI – run by a small group of billionaires and consuming an unfathomable amount of data, land, energy, labour, and water – is inevitable.
But the recent release of the AIResistList.org shows how people around the world are proving that alternative futures are possible. And that communities are finding many creative ways to push back against extractive AI.
This UK launch of the AI Resist List brings together researchers and scholars who documented the featured projects and those leading them, alongside people in London working on their own projects or wanting to find out more. We invite participants to join the forum with short lighting talks followed by questions for each other, aimed at sharing challenges, knowledge, ideas, tactics, hope and community. The list is not exhaustive and these are far from the only projects which centre human agency, and reimagine AI.
So we will consider where we go from here, what role Londoners as representatives of a global city can learn from and contribute to nourishing visions of the future that work for all of us.
Image created by Yemariam Mamo and Pauline Wee for the AI Resist List