Digital Equity IN+ Practice: co-creating what comes next
September 18 @ 10:00 am – 5:00 pm University of Leeds, UK
This year’s INCLUDE+ event is all about exploring what comes next. In addition to exploring the curated, created, imagined and lived changes the INCLUDE+ projects have already enacted, we focus on the future: specifically looking at how we might carry work forward into everyday practice beyond current funding cycles. Through the event, we want to create space to reflect on the journey so far, including how ideas were developed, what might be learned from the process, and how those insights could shape future actions.
At its heart is a consideration of the possibilities for long-term change: we plan to look at how other people and organisations across policy, practice and community contexts might adopt the knowledge and partnerships built through INCLUDE+. As we enter the final year of our Network+, we’re keen to explore if/how this transition would remain grounded in real, lived experiences.
Our findings clearly show that the most meaningful digital equity legacies may not be formal outputs but rather the trust, relationships, and communities that could continue to evolve.
We will also touch upon the core INCLUDE+ Principles, opening up conversations around sustainability, collective care, and the conditions needed for ethical digital futures. This might involve looking at complex tensions, such as how good intentions can sometimes inadvertently create extra labor, and how we might avoid short term[ism] or extractive approaches to impact.
A central hope for the event is to think about how to keep key elements alive, such as:
- Knowledge generated through co-production and lived experience
- Methods and approaches developed across diverse projects
- Networks of peer support and collaboration
We will close the day with a creative workshop where participants will have the opportunity to consider how these elements might move forward as shared practices or infrastructure, rather than potentially fading when individual projects conclude.
The goal is to start exploring how lasting change actually happens and how individuals, organisations, or partnerships might best support it.
Location & Accessibility
The School of Media and Communication is located in Clothworkers’ Building North at the University of Leeds. You can find your way around campus on your mobile device with our interactive campus map, or if you prefer, download our printable map.
Accessibility directions: Use the accessible entrance on the east side of the building (near to Disability Services) and turn left. Take the lift to the first floor. SR (1.17) is directly in front of you.
A full access guide to the building is available on the AccessAble website.
The Find Us page of the University of Leeds website provides a full travel guide.
Programme
All activities take place in Rooms 1.17 and 1.18 unless noted otherwise
| TIME | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| 09:30 – 10:00 | Registration and informal discussion Refreshments available in Room 1.19 |
| 10:00 – 10:30 | Welcome address |
| 10:30 – 12:30 | FEASIBILITY STUDIES WORKSHOPS What does it take for a community’s knowledge to survive? Aldessa Georgiana Lincan & Doriane Ferrer This session offers a hands-on taste of co-creation workshops, a participatory design method used in the Romnja Feminist Library Feasibility Study. Participants are invited to add words or symbols to a shared drawing exploring what it takes for a community’s knowledge to survive and thrive, contributing individually or in pairs throughout the session as conversation grows around it. No design or drawing experience is needed — just an openness to think visually and work with others. —– Greece 3.0: Co-designing Ethical and Accessible Cultural Experiences Thomas Diafas, Marilena Koukouli & Christos Papamichael This workshop builds on the methodology developed through Greece 3.0, in which disabled and non-disabled participants explored digital equity from a holistic perspective. We begin with the challenging question ‘What happens when the needs and lived experiences of disabled communities meet institutional procedures and expert approaches to knowledge?’ Participants will consider how tokenism and established hierarchies between embodied experience and professional or academic expertise can affect collaboration. They will also explore methods for archiving and exchanging knowledge in ways that recognise community contributions and allow that knowledge to remain useful beyond a single project or event. Let your imagination run freely while grounding proposals in real-world conditions and the lived experiences of the people involved. Together, we will surface the good practices that emerged and capture the knowledge produced in a form that can help imagine more accessible futures. —- To Infinity and Beyond? Exploring Play to Build Communication at Home on Online Grooming Talk Professor Nuria Lorenzo-Dus & Dr Ruth Mullineux-Morgan Online grooming is, at its core, a communicative practice of manipulation: groomers use language strategically to exploit gaps in trust. DRAGON-Infinity explores how our evidence-based safeguarding resources about online grooming talk (DRAGON-Shield) can be adapted to support an ongoing, everyday practice of dialogue at home through play. This hands-on workshop invites participants to share their perspectives on three play-centred modes of adaptation (computer games, animation, and LEGO Serious Play co-production), alongside other creative approaches being explored within the project. The workshop will showcase how parents and carers – with particular focus on the needs of those supporting neurodivergent brains – will test the feasibility of translating core DRAGON-Shield resources into tools to build the shared vocabulary and trust needed at home to support child protection and bridge the gaps that groomers exploit. * Content note: This workshop includes discussion of online grooming. While no graphic content will be presented, some participants may find the topic emotionally challenging. |
| 12:30 – 13:30 | BUFFET LUNCH Served in Room 1.19, with seating in Rooms 1.17 and 1.18 |
| 13:30 – 14:45 | CONNECTIVE FELLOWSHIP WORKSHOPS Rethinking Sustainability: An IN+ Principles Workshop Darran Gillan Third sector projects often survive by moving from fund to fund, rebranding continuity as “sustainability” in a system that demands a performance of permanence while only ever funding the temporary. This workshop invites attendees to step back and explore sustainability differently, as a commitment to building long-term habits and practices that keep communities engaging with digital tools long after a project ends. Through co-design and shared reflection, participants will help ground the question at the heart of the IN+ Principles, how do we make sustainability work across sectors, what are we actually trying to sustain and is it worth sustaining? Digital Youth Workers as the youth sector’s ‘tech workers’?: An exploration of the past, present and future Cristina Bacalso This workshop explores in what ways youth workers use digital tools in their work with young people, by imagining the intimacies of everyday experiences, in the past, present, and future. Using an interactive storytelling exercise, participants will engage in scenario-building and radical imagination in a grounded, experiential workshop by crafting “field notes” that describe a day in the life of a digital youth worker. Field notes enable us to tell a story that makes connections between past and present, and then to imagine possible futures, for digital youth work as a practice, a sector, and a labour class. |
| 14:45 – 15:30 | Fellowships, Exploratory Projects and Escalator Studies Showcase – ENDO//CONNECT: Disability, Endo Violence, and Inclusive Digital Care – Trusted Online – mapping future [in]equity in digital relationships between young people and trusted adults – P is for Policy or is that Practice? – Digital Support at Leeds Refugee Forum – Collective Care in Digital Settings – Digital Change for Climate Justice – Building Ethical Partnerships with the Tech Sector |
| 15:30 – 15:40 | BREAK |
| 15:40 – 16:45 | IN+ Futures / The [Un]making room Helen Thornham & Alicja Pawluczuk To bring the event to a close, we invite you to take part in a speculative exercise to consider the future of the INCLUDE+ network. Participants will take on different roles in determining imagined future access to funding and collaborate to produce a handmade zine, written from the year 2031. The exercise is not a forecast. Instead, it is a way of making the reasoning behind funding decisions visible and open to disagreement in the room. |
| 16:45 – 17:00 | CLOSE |