Part II: From Mistranslation to Dispossession: Culture, Land, and Algorithmic Power in India

Join the Indigenous Studies Discussion Group (ISDG) for a two-part online panel series Digitalising Indigeneity in India: Preservation, Power, and Dispossession deliberating the relationship between indigeneity and digitality in the context of India.

Part II: From Mistranslation to Dispossession: Culture, Land, and Algorithmic Power in India shifts the lens towards harm, structural violence, and digital justice. Bringing together a diverse group of speakers including an award-winning journalist, industry experts, and a legal and policy scholar, this session examines the varied modes through which digitalisation, especially the so-called AI revolution, produces (new) forms of misrepresentations and dispossessions. Topics will span the proliferation of large language models, land rights and the digitalisation of land and governance records, and the development of digital/AI infrastructures, among others.

Together, this panel series invites speakers and practitioners to sit with the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities that emerge at the intersection of indigeneities and digitalities, centering Indigenous cultural and political agencies as the analytical and ethical horizon of the conversation.

Teams Link: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/d686c52a-00ac-4895-baba-a879533ed277@49a50445-bdfa-4b79-ade3-547b4f3986e9

About the Speakers:

Sushmita

Sushmita is an international award-winning journalist, researcher, photographer, and a former engineer whose work focuses on climate change, infrastructure, environmental justice, forest governance, health, gender and more. Her work has appeared in outlets including Tech Policy Press, The Guardian, The Thirdpole (Dialogue Earth), Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, and Down to Earth.

She was a 2024 Pulitzer Center AI Accountability Fellow and recipient of the 2024 Covering Climate Now Award (Justice category) and the 2022 Red Ink Award for Excellence in Indian Journalism. She was part of a large collaborative effort by Earth Journalism Network in 2025 to investigate the impact of data centers in South and Southeast Asia. She has spoken at multiple national and international forums including University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, International Land Development Conference, and AI Accountability Consultation.

Neha Joshi

Neha Joshi is a development professional with over a decade of experience in the social impact space, rooted in grassroots engagement with rural and Indigenous communities across India. Her work has focused on local governance, gender inclusion, community participation, and equitable access to rights and opportunities with dignity. She is currently Principal – Community and Strategy at Karya, where she works at the intersection of AI, language technology, and community participation, collaborating with rural women and Indigenous communities to build low-resource language datasets and inclusive AI systems.

She is particularly interested in questions around ethical and inclusive AI, digital equity, participatory technology design, and how local knowledge systems, languages, and community voices can shape the future of technology in more just and inclusive ways. 

Dr Pamir Gogoi

Dr Pamir Gogoi is a linguist working on language technologies for endangered and low-resource languages in India, currently associated with Karya. Her work focuses on multilingual data creation and community-led documentation initiatives across Indigenous language communities. She is particularly interested in ethical and inclusive AI, building technologies for digitally underrepresented communities, and exploring how local knowledge systems and languages can meaningfully shape the future of AI.

Olivia Ruhil 

Olivia Ruhil is a Human Rights Advocate and Public Policy Scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi whose work explores the intersections of law, governance, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic decision-making. Her research engages with questions of Indigenous rights, digital justice, accountability, and explainability within technologically mediated systems of governance, with a particular focus on the implications of emerging technologies for vulnerable communities.

Moderator

Zǐ JIAO

Zǐ is an interdisciplinary researcher cross-trained in visual arts, cultural politics, and environmental law and governance. She obtained her MPhil from the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge and is an incoming master’s student at Edinburgh Law School. Her work applies a radical political ecology lens to questions of Indigenous rights and justice, particularly in the intersected contexts of digital and energy infrastructure, land, and environmental governance, through approaches rooted in cultural specificities and the centralisation of Indigenous political subjectivities. She has presented research on Indigenous rights and multi-level infrastructure governance at international conferences in the UK, Italy, and Hungary.