On the 15th of May 2024, the Policy Futures International Webinar Series hosted an insightful keynote presentation by Radhika Gorur, Associate Professor of Education, Deakin University. In her address, Gorur explored the concept of data colonialism and outlined more equitable and inclusive data practices, summarized in the following abstract

Recent advances in digitisation enable vast amounts of data to be routinely generated at a relatively low cost. The ability to produce and distribute data is now in the hands of anyone with a smartphone and an app or a social media account. These new data technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to redress historical inequities, but they can also reinforce them and indeed create new forms of data colonialism. These issues have provoked calls to ‘decolonise’ data. But what does this mean and how can it be done? In this keynote, I explore the concept of ‘data colonialism’ and examine contemporary visualisations of more equitable and inclusive data practices, and how they might be deployed in education. Reiterating the urgency of attending to the project of decolonising data, I argue for its importance not only for the sake of equity, but as a key requirement of social and environmental sustainability.

Serving as dissusants were Michalinos Zembylas, Faculty of Economics and Management, Open University of Cyprus and Catriona Gray, University of Bath’s ART-AI centre, while the event was chaired by Susan Robertson, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge