AI & Civil Society Organizations: Agency, Labour Justice & Shared Futures
Event Summary
Join us as we discuss how civil society organizations could interact with AI if we focused on agency, labour justice, and shared futures
Event Details
Join us as we discuss how civil society organizations could interact with AI if we focused on agency, labour justice, and shared futures – for who, by who, and at what emotional and human cost?
Date: Thursday, January 15, 2026
Time: 11:15am – 1:00pm EST
Location: Online
About the Speakers
Dr. Matthew Smith is a Senior Program Specialist within the Education and Science Division at Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), based in Dakar, Senegal where he works on the Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI4D) program. Over the past 18 years at IDRC, Dr. Smith has partnered with prominent researchers and innovators from the Global South to leverage information and communication technologies in addressing sustainable development challenges. His work encompasses initiatives such as AI4D Africa, Information Networks in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and Connectivity and Equity in the Americas. Dr. Smith has an extensive publication record covering topics like artificial intelligence, openness, trust, educational technologies, and development research. Notably, in 2019, he authored a white paper titled Artificial Intelligence for Human Development, published by IDRC (see: idrc.ca/ai).
Noah Khan is a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. He is concurrently a Recognised Student at the Oxford Internet Institute in the DPhil in Social Data Science Program and a Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University’s Program in American Studies. His research focuses on the emotional dynamics of artificial intelligence development; he examines the ways in which emotions such as love, fear, grief, etc., affect how technology gets made in multiple countries such as Canada, the US, the UK, and India. Noah’s talk will be on “Platform Cooperativism, Migration, and the Emotional Labour of Artificial Intelligence in South Asia.”
About the K4C Tkaronto Hub
The K4C (Knowledge For Change) Tkaronto Hub was co-founded in the summer of 2019 by the Knowledge Equity Lab at University of Toronto Scarborough, OISE at the University of Toronto, Toronto Centre for Community Learning & Development (CL&D), and the Ontario Council for International Cooperation (OCIC). The K4C Tkaronto Hub is part of the global K4C Consortium, which includes 22 Hubs around the world in Canada, Colombia, Cuba, India, Ireland, Italy, Malaysian, Mexico, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and the United States of America.
Our collective goal is to enable transformative change by providing accessible opportunities for students, educators, academics, community development and international cooperation practitioners in the Greater Toronto Area region and beyond to learn about CBPAR, and to facilitate community-academic partnerships to carry out CBPAR projects. You can see examples of our previous CBPAR projects here.
