The JUST AI network: is there an ethical prototype for networking?
Louise Hickman, LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science; Alison Powell, LSE; Imre Bard, LSE
Toronto 2021: Inventive AI
Supported by the AHRC and the Ada Lovelace Institute, the JUST AI project has been experimenting with ways to connect and reflect on the changing ways that researchers and practitioners engage with data and AI ethics. Tasked with describing and intervening in the field of data and AI ethics by creating a ‘research network’, the JUST AI team experiments with new prototypes of engagement for practices that both engage with, account for, and transform the potential for networking: research makes a network appear, rather than describing one that exists.
Approaching these networks as neither complete nor ahistorical, we have centered the values and practice of care, solidarity and justice to find new connections with researchers and practitioners embedded in, or residing at, the periphery. As facilitators of ethical networks, we challenge the ideas of networking as a straightforward means to find research clusters; rather, we seek to organize the participation of practitioners and researchers committed to a diversity of (technical, social scientific, creative) approaches to collaborative engagement and sustainable connections that centres community building.
