This year summer schools’ online format enabled us to develop an exciting programme of invited speakers and workshop leaders from all over the world. From unpacking digital commons to exploring the body as a site to explore social (in)justice in the digital economy, we went on a week-long journey into the evolution of social (in)justice in the age of machine learning and digital networks.

Alongside the daily sessions, our evening webinars were open to the public. These sessions ranged from a lively panel discussion on equitable digital economies to considering what the multifarious expressions of sheep (MEOS) can tell us about social justice.

We had over 500 people sign up to the webinars, which are available to watch back here.

The Not-Equal Summer School

Speakers from a broad range of disciplines – worked with the cohort to explore different tools they could use in their social justice endeavors.

Over a week-long journey into the world of social justice and the digital economy, the cohort created microfictions around bodily gestures, took part in a Live Action Role Play about inter-species politics, and scrutinized the power relations and structures in their workplaces and collaborative research projects at our Solidarity Clinic.

The Summer School foregrounded dialogical spaces where speakers, workshop leaders and attendees shared their expertise, interests and experiences of doing social justice work in the digital economy.  This resulted in many different ideas and approaches discussed and developed in each workshop—from different responses and takes on SolarPunk in our Design Fiction session to exploring different ways to adapt strategies for building equity in collaborations according to domains and contexts.

It was amazing to see what attendees developed at each session —from redesigning an optimistic future using design fiction or exploring commoning as a way to consider alternative data economies.

The school was chaired by Clara Crivellaro, Newcastle University, and Ann Light, University of Sussex.

You can find the full workshop and webinar schedule here.

Summer Webinar Series

The webinars were open to the public, and included talks exploring Machine Learning data pipeline, the seven principles of data feminism and eliciting alternative economies using speculative co-design.

All the webinar series is available online to re-watch and there are more details about each of the sessions on the page.

The week in brief

The summer school kicked off with our first webinar on The Evolution of Social Justice in the Age of Digital Networks and Machine Learning. We invited guest speakers Irina Shklovski, University of Copenhagen, Michael Muller, IBM and Prof Lorna McGregor, Human Rights Centre, Essex University to help us explore AI as relational infrastructure, the ‘life’ of data and human right implications of digital transformations.

On Tuesday we had our first workshop with the Summer School Cohort, where we explored the body as a site of social (in)justice with Cally Gatehouse, Northumbria University. The summer school attendees considered how digital technologies and economies shape bodies in ways that both reinforce and reconfigure inequalities.

As part of the workshop, they took photos of gestures representing an experience they had at the intersection of digital technology and social justice, and then in groups they created microfictions about imaginary technologies in response to these gestures.

In the afternoon, attendees were joined by Ruth Catlow and Cade Diehm, Furtherfield who introduced the cohort to The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025, a Live Action Role Play game facilitating inter-species politics. They were asked to choose their more-than-human mentor, don a digital mask and join the first multi-species people’s assembly.

The day concluded with our second evening webinar— a panel discussion on Equitable Digital Economies, with Tawanna Dillahunt, University of Michigan’s School of Information (UMSI), Pitso Tsibolane, University of Cape Town, Ann Light, University of Sussex, Maurizio Teli, Alborg University & Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield.

On Wednesday Maurizio Teli, Aalborg University and Andrea Botero, Aalto University started the day with a workshop on Creating and Sustaining Digital Commons. They used a pluriversal slide-deck created at the Participatory Design Conference 2020 to foster discussions on collaborative efforts involving people with different interests, skills, and backgrounds but united by a shared curiosity on commoning and design. The workshop explored the relevance of the commons for Participatory Design, and as a way of practicing being and making together.

In the afternoon, attendees considered Strategies for Building Equity in Collaborations, working in groups exploring how to collaborate across different sectors.

In the evening we were joined by Catherine D’Ignazio, MIT and Giselle Cory, DataKind who presented talk on data science for social justice. Catherine D’Ignazio discussed the seven principles of Data Feminism explaining how feminist thinking can be operationalized in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices. Giselle Cory talked about real-life case studies drawing from the work of DataKind supporting social change organisations use data science.

On Thursday, the cohort took part in the Solidarity Clinic with Angelika Strohmayer, Northumbria University, Vasilis Vlachokyriakos, Newcastle University, Ann Light, University of Sussex and Clara Crivellaro, Newcastle University.

They discussed their experiences of navigating power dynamics, and looked at their own institutional working cultures. They broke into groups to reflect on different areas: negotiating positionality and reflexity, community activism, changing academia, and power dynamics in context.

In the afternoon, Yvonne Mc Dermott Rees, Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University and Friedhelm Weinberg, HURIDOCS led a workshop on the benefits and challenges of collective intelligence for human rights.

In the evening, we held our last webinar in the series. Carl Di Salvo, Georgia Institute of Technology, Al Robertson, Fiction Writer and Sarah Naomi Lee, Plenty Productions, took us on a journey to explore creative responses to previous evenings webinars in the form of sheep facial expressions and sci-fi stories; and how experimentation can be used as a means of cultivating and sustaining imagination for social action and social change.

On Friday—our last day of the summer school, the cohort spend the day learning about design fictions with Joe Lindley, Lancaster University and Miriam Sturdee, Lancaster University. The groups created exhibitions for the museum of SolarPunk – an

After a long week of thinking, discussing, creating and more – we said our goodbyes. We want to say a huge thank you to everyone who made this summer school such a wonderful event! Our speakers, workshop leaders, the team supporting it all behind the scenes, our Summer School delegates and those who attended our evenings webinars. Keep up the good work, everyone!

If you would like to keep in touch and find out about other Not-Equal events, you can join our mailing list here.

The Invisible Worker is a project that aims to explore the interface between work and technology in contemporary capitalism. It looks at the various ways in which technology is changing the lives of people in numerous forms of precarious work, aiming to expand our knowledge and understanding of the impacts of technology, but platforming the voices of those most affected. Principally the project takes the form of a print zine, but we wanted to expand the mediums in which we engaged to reach new audiences and challenge ourselves.

As the pandemic erupted around us and we entered into a new world that was unknown, scary and, for most of us, totally unforeseen, it became immediately clear that who and how people were affected would be based on existing vulnerabilities. As such, those in already precarious work, those on the fringes, in work that was stigmatized or insecure, and those who were already just about managing would be those who would be most affected as our economy was put to sleep and our society went into lockdown. At this point our small team of 4, began a storytelling project. We began putting the word out, asking people to write about their experiences during this period and paying them for this.

We heard from Sex Workers, Builders, Writers, Couriers, Cleaners and more and their writing forms our third issue ‘Tales From a Crisis’.

But with the backing of not equal, we wanted to do more than just create a print and online publication. The stories that we collected were beautiful, they were real and they mattered. We wanted people to read them, and we wanted the people who wrote them to know that their experiences were important and that their voices needed to be heard.

I’ve always felt that there’s immense power in taking words and pasting them on the walls, repurposing the cityscape and using it as a canvas onto which messages, ideas, ramblings, can be shared. Typically we keep this power for the highest bidder, leaving us with cities awash with car adverts, but what if we harnessed this power to put the words of everyday people? What if we took these stories and pasted them where everyone could see them, turning the street into a space of encounter? Thus was born the idea of and outdoor exhibition. Luckily the amazing, People’s Republic of Stokes Croft allowed us to use their outdoor gallery space and we took five of the pieces from issue 3 and displayed them for the entirety of September. The space is directly on the street, passed by hundreds of people every day.

The exhibition took many days to put up undertaken principally by me and Diego Jenowein alongside many helpful volunteers. Over those days I had many wonderful discussions with people, interested by what we were doing. People came up and asked questions and in return they offered their own experiences, talking about how the stories resonated with them, where they saw parallels and where their own stories diverged. It was a powerful experience, speaking to people about the multifaceted ways in which the pandemic effected their own financial stability.

The second part of the residency took place in a very different setting, located in the City Hall. This part was an indoor space, in which we displayed a range of work from issues 1-3 of the Invisible Worker. It was a chance to look at the material we had created over the last 4 years, brought into new focus by the changing socio-economic conditions of 2020.

It felt poignant to bring the stories from these issues to city hall, with many of the stories on the walls being directly implicated with the way in which policy, governance and work interact.

The aim of the exhibitions was to spark discussion and introspection as to the way in which vulnerability to crisis manifests in society. It was about exploring the nature of technology and how this is being used in ways which shapes the lives of people in precarious work. This is a discussion that continues and we hope to continue to be a part of it.

Ann Light, Co-I on Not-Equal, talked to FuseBox founder Phil Jones about Design, Technology and Social Justice for the ESRC Festival of Social Science in Brighton. Talking about the Not-Equal network she discussed how working with non-academic can be transformative for researchers.

Not-Equal’s call for collaboration process asks academics to partner with non-academic organisations, she explained how working closely with community partners can help researchers and designers really to understand the issues they are facing.

She explains: “It’s not enough to just hear what the problems are, it’s about going in together and really trying to understand why the issues are the way they are.”

Ann Light is a Professor of Design at The University of Sussex and Malmö University, she also discussed her upcoming book Designs to Reshape Humanity.

The seven projects were awarded over £290k as part of the second funding call launched by the £1.2m UKRI project Not-Equal, funded by EPSRC through the Digital Economy Theme (EP/R044929/1).

“Never has there been a more important time to look at the implications and opportunities that digital technology can bring to social justice. From looking at how we can tackle the impact of fake news, to dealing with issues relating to COVID-19 – these seven projects will develop innovative responses to real issues in people’s daily lives,” said Clara Crivellaro, lead investigator, Newcastle University.

“We’re so excited to fund these seven projects at what we believe to be a critical juncture in how we collectively use and understand technology, particularly around our three core critical challenges: digital security, algorithmic social justice and fairer futures for businesses and workforce.”

Not Equal is led by Newcastle University and includes Co-Investigators from Sussex, Royal Holloway and Swansea Universities.

The seven projects

The seven pilot projects, summarised below, will last between six and eight months, with funding between £30.2k and £39.8k (all amounts awarded at 80% FEC).

Co-Designing a Food Delivery Platform Co-operative

In the UK, the food delivery industry is big business, however, there still remains a lack of employment law protections for many of their ‘self-employed workers’. This project from University of Exeter and Autonomy Think Tank looks to understand the challenges facing food delivery platform co-operatives, which can offer a fairer model of doing business for the workers of the platform delivery economy.

Tackling Fake News via Fake People: Co-creating a toolkit to help young people recognise fake news

Fake news reaches more people and spreads more quickly than the truth and is believed around 75% of the time. Fake news is a real threat to health, society and democracy. This project by University of Glasgow, Northumbria University and eQuality Time will co-create a toolkit with young-people aged around 13 and social media influencers will run workshops to help them make better choices around their sources of information, and how they share information.

Equally Digital/Digitally Equal (ED/DE)

ED/DE is an international partnership between four co-operatives – Space2, Leeds, UK; Espacio Nixso, Argentina; C-Innova, Colombia and; Media Lab MX, Mexico – and the University of Leeds, looking to examine and technologically respond to the challenges of inequality and enablement in a moment of unprecedented change caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It will evaluate the current practices and methods of the four NGOs from the UK and South America to develop new sharable and collaborative practices fit for the current global condition.

Crowdsourcing Wage Pledge

Crowdworking platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic often pay workers around two dollars (USD) per hour and most requesters pay less than five dollars. This project between Open University and IG Metall will formally institute a ‘Crowdsourcing Wage Pledge’ for the purpose of improving wages for crowdworkers, thus ensuring fairer futures for digital workers in the platform economy.

Designing Security Infrastructures for Communities with Sensitive Data

This project will work with initiatives of migrant women across two countries; UK & Greece. These initiatives promote empowerment and active citizenship with a particular focus on gender-based violence. Newcastle University, Angelou Centre, Union of Women’s Associations of Herakleion (UWAH), and Sociality will work closely to create opportunities for mutual learning between such migrant women’s communities and produce a digital system that will enable them to complement as well as broaden their work online.

Covid-19 Debt Advice

According to Citizens Advice, the coronavirus outbreak has led to financial turmoil for millions of UK residents, undermining fairness, equality, and economic opportunities. This project by Swansea University, BPO Insolvency Ltd, and The Speakeasy Law Centre aims to support greater capacity for legal advice pro-bono clinics by developing, evaluating, and deploying an online COVID-19 debt advice tool.

MiniCoDe – Minimise algorithmic bias in Collaborative Decision Making with Design Fiction

Understanding human values and unconscious biases in the design and introduction of algorithmic services is a critical first step in addressing a fairer future within food justice and distribution. This project by University of Hertfordshire, Northumbria University, Newcastle West End Foodbank, Cambridge Spark, WeandAI will use a design fiction approach to develop a toolkit to enable multiple stakeholders to explore socio-technical biases in the collaborative process of designing socio-technical systems for fair food administration.

These projects were funded through Not-Equal’s Call for Collaborations process.

Since COVID-19 broke out, Not-Equal has engaged with 20 non-academic partners predominantly from the 3^rd sector, to find out what challenges they are facing as they have tried to continue to work with the communities they support.

This report, provides an overview of these conversations.

Following on from these conversations, Not-Equal is looking into the network to see how partners can assist each other. Three activities we have pinpointed are; 1) A digital wellbeing pack – a guide to being safe online and how to use key tools, 2) A series of workshops – to share best and worst practices and offer skills training & learning, 3) A set of focus groups – workshops to explore challenges that this sudden digitalization has brought about.

To cater to this, we will be holding two virtual Q&A sessions via Zoom – everybody’s new best friend! The sessions are open to any interested party and will be led by Network+ Manager Dr Rachel Sparks and the Not-Equal Investigators.

The first session will be held on Thursday 9^th April from 2-3pm and you can join up here.

The second session will be on Thursday 7^th May from 2-3pm and you can join via this link.

If you cannot attend please feel free to email your questions through beforehand to notequal@newcastle.ac.uk. Please bear in mind that your questions may already be answered in our FAQs which you can read here.

See you there!

Revised application form: also taking into account the current crisis, we have added a question to our application form asking about your project’s resilience plan: How will you carry out your project with social distancing measures in place? Will you be able to deliver workshops and other interventions via Zoom, for example?

If you have already completed your application on the old form, please go back and revise it using the new form that can be downloaded here.

We look forward to receiving your application!

A workshop with artists during the Opening Doors project

The project Opening Doors: Art and Inequality in the Platform Economy ended in December 2019. This was one of three micro projects funded by Not-Equal during its first call for proposals.

It centred on a series of six workshops hosted by and produced in collaboration with Newbridge Project at their space in Gateshead. These workshops, collectively entitled ‘Assembly: A Forum for Artists in Precarious Labour’ were conceived of as spaces in which artists could freely and frankly discuss their working lives without inhibitions. The events were designed to serve as opportunities for people to share lived experiences, as well as tactics and strategies for alleviating the impacts of precarity.

The six workshops were curated by artist and co-Investigator Lucas Ferguson-Sharp, and were moderated and facilitated by artist and researcher Toby Lloyd. Each workshop was led by an invited artist(s), whose practice resonated with the themes of the project.

Participants for the workshops were made up of a varied group of local artists, art workers and students. A core group of around 10 attended most/all workshops, while a further 40 attended one or more workshops. These were drawn from various local networks and attendees represented a wide diversity of ages and genders, although racial diversity was minimal.

Nicola Singh’s first workshop, ‘Input’, promoted self-reflection on the project, and centred on various mapping exercises through which to understand the institutional network that Assembly was imbricated within. Subsequent events focused on unionisation in the arts sector, the proliferation of unpaid and ‘in kind’ work in art, diversity and representation within the sector, and alternative funding strategies and sources.

Each topic served as both a provocation for thought and reflection on people’s conditions and experiences, and as a forum for action and the sharing of resources. Participants mapped their own individual economies; shared experiences of unionisation and its difficulties within a sector dominated by freelancing; produced drafts of collectively written demands for change within the sector; and reflected on their own privileges and how they might relate to their ability to maintain a poorly paid and precarious career.

The final workshop, ‘Output’, led by Sophie Hope, afforded the opportunity to consider outputs and future directions for the project, which will hopefully be able to count on the continued investment and shared ownership of the participants.

The final workshop crystallised the issues that emerged into a selection of key insights:

• Knowledge: A key concern, especially among younger or newer artists, was their lack of knowledge of key and practical information associated with working as a freelancer in the cultural sector. There was considerable inter-generational conversation and guidance between participants, and a broad agreement that this knowledge-sharing would be beneficial to the sector as a whole if scaled up.
• Transparency: The taboo nature of conversations regarding one’s own finances and working conditions was considered to be a major barrier to progression on issues of precarity within the sector. This lack of openness means that systemic issues are perceived as and become personal.
• Solidarity: Participants highlighted the many barriers to forms of solidarity amongst workers in a sector dominated by freelancing, low pay and undercutting as well as creativity and individualism. Conversations particularly revolved around unionisation as a necessary but difficult process.
• Psychological and physical impact: The non-economic impacts of precarity were discussed.
• Insulated Community: While the workshops were focused on art workers, the lack of knowledge of the rights and standards of other labour sectors was apparent. Solidarity could be created by sharing knowledge with other sectors.

As a result of these conversations, the project team discussed extensively how the project and its insights might lead to practicable, beneficial and tangible impacts for the sector. As it was agreed that pooling practical resources was essential, the team is in the process of establishing a resource hub – both physical and digital – for art workers.

Next steps …

Plans for hosting the physical resource hub are currently being negotiated with the Newbridge Project and the Star and Shadow Cinema. Both of these spaces are ingrained within the North-East’s arts infrastructure and are founded on an artist-led, activist ethos that echoes the intentions of the project.

The establishment of the digital resource hub will follow. It will gather materials available in the physical hub, and further research will be directed towards how to make the most of the different opportunities afforded by digital space.

Work on the production of the online/offline resource hub will be supported by further research into organisation and solidarity amongst gig workers, with particular focus paid to recent unionisation efforts amongst Deliveroo riders. This is seen as a key comparator for attempts to unionise workers in the art field, with lessons to be learned both from their successes and failures.

Our main networking events, which aim to help potential partners meet in person and begin to work together, will be held in Newcastle at the Catalyst Building on 27^th February and at the Digital Catapult in London on 6^th March. These are all-day ‘sandpit’ events designed to bring together partners from across the Not-Equal network, to facilitate collaborations, drive innovation and lay the foundations for potential research projects.

What is a sandpit?

Sandpits are interactive workshops involving 20-30 participants: the director, a team of expert mentors, and a number of independent stakeholders. Sandpits have a highly multidisciplinary mix of participants – some active researchers and other potential users of research outcomes – to drive lateral thinking and radical approaches in order to address research challenges. The director defines the topic and facilitates discussions at the event.

A Sandpit is an intensive discussion forum where free thinking is encouraged, allowing the stakeholders to delve into the problems on the agenda to uncover innovative solutions. Due to group dynamics and continual evaluation, it is not possible to ‘dip in and out’ of the process and participants should stay for the whole duration of the event.

Usually a sandpit is a five-day event. However for our purposes, the process is abridged to one day, although it will follow the same guiding principles:

• Defining the scope of the issue
• Agreeing a common language and terminology amongst diverse backgrounds and disciplines.
• Sharing understanding of the problem using participants’ expertise.
• Using creative and innovative thinking techniques in break-out sessions to focus on a problem.
• Turning Sandpit outputs into research projects

Possible outcomes

Outcomes are not pre-determined, but are defined during the sandpit.

Although it is hoped that some of the Sandpit outputs will become research proposals based on Not-Equal’s challenge areas and themes, it may be that they lead to events run through our Open Events programme, or to other collaborative projects.

Sign up here!

Newcastle Not-Equal Sandpit,
London Not-Equal Sandpit

Travel and accommodation can be provided on a first come first served basis for non-academics, early career researchers and post-docs. To make arrangements please email notequal@newcastle.ac.uk