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Relational Digital Inclusion: The Politics of Care and Connection
September 18, 2025 @ 9:30 am
Our third annual INCLUDE+ event spotlights the 2024–2025 cohort of funded projects that tackle the complex realities of digital inclusion. These projects speak to the contradictions of digital inclusion today: being connected but excluded, visible in systems but unheard in decisions. At a time of limited resources and growing need, they offer grounded, local responses that question assumptions and expand what digital inclusion can mean in practice.
Recent developments such as the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan and the publication of Digital Minimum Standards suggest there is still space and momentum for change. Combined with what we’ve learned from the INCLUDE+ project communities, and drawing on the IN+ Principles, these developments give us new tools and perspectives: They remind us that even in an unpredictable and uneven landscape, there is potential to build more grounded, inclusive, and sustainable futures if we do it together.
Our third INCLUDE+ event will spotlight the 2024–2025 cohort of projects supported by the network. These projects speak to the contradictions of digital inclusion today: being connected but excluded, visible in systems but unheard in decisions. At a time of limited resources and growing need, they offer grounded, local responses that question assumptions and expand what digital inclusion can mean in practice.
We bring together people working across youth work, health, education, migration, disability justice, and community organising in order to share methods, reflect on common challenges, and explore how digital inclusion is being defined and delivered from the ground up. Through interactive sessions and project-led activities, we’ll explore the strategies, questions, and relationships that underpin this work. We’ll end the day with collective reflection, asking what is needed now to ensure digital inclusion is not only a goal, but a shared, sustained and community-led practice.
We ask:
- How can we move beyond access to build digital systems rooted in care, fairness, and lived experience?
- What does it mean to be digitally included?
- Who gets to shape digital tools, and whose voices are left out of policy decisions?
Our event will include:
- Project presentations
- Panel discussion
- Workshops
- IN+ ART Iterations
- Exploration of our network’s core principles
Our mission
INCLUDE+ is a UKRI/EPSRC funded network exploring how social and digital environments can be built, shaped and sustained to enable all people to thrive. The five-year programme of activities (2022-2027) will build a knowledge community around in/equalities in digital society that will comprise industry, academia, the public and third sectors in response to the UKRI Equitable Digital Society theme. Read more
Programme
| Time | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| 09:30 – 10:00 | Registration and facilitated informal table discussions Little Woodhouse | |
| 10:00 – 10:30 | Welcome address / IN+ Principles across the IN+ Network activities Great Woodhouse | |
| Feasibility Studies Workshops | ||
| 10:30 – 11:00 | Youth Digital Cultures Lab Beechgrove Room | Online Objectification St George Room |
| 11:00 – 11:10 | Break | |
| 11:10 – 11:40 | Our Futures and AI Beechgrove Room | Advokit St George Room |
| 11:40 – 12:00 | Break | |
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Roundtable Discussion Great Woodhouse – Jason Tutin, 100% Digital Leeds – Andrina Dawson, Voluntary Action Leeds – Uma Amara, International Labour Organisation – Irene Mackintosh, Mhor Collective | |
| 13:00 – 14:00 | Lunch Little Woodhouse | |
| 14:00 – 15:00 | Exploratory Projects and Fellowships Showcase | |
| Beechgrove Room – See the Whole of Me – AI in Everyday Life – Youth Voice – Mapping the IN+ Principles Across the Network | St George Room – Truths – Fostering Digital Cultural Participation Leeds – Leeds Digital Volunteering – Gifting Smartphones to People Seeking Asylum | |
| 15:00 – 15:15 | Break | |
| 15:15 – 16:45 | IN+ ART Iterations Workshop Little Woodhouse | |
| 16:45 – 17:00 | Close Little Woodhouse | |
Feasibility Study Workshops
Choose one workshop for each session
Session 1, 10:30 – 11:00
Youth Digital Cultures Lab
How do we imagine digital futures that are inclusive, joyful and rooted in non- western paradigms with young individuals?
The Youth Digital Cultures Lab seeks to bring together diverse young people from India to meaningfully engage with their experiences of diversity, joy and meaningful inclusion in digital environments. Our earlier work with INCLUDE+ has shown that diversity remains a key element and factors such as language, location, culture, profession, education and social groups impact how young people interact, subvert, and imagine digital environments in their individual and collective lives. By co-developing speculative and participatory design methodologies with young people, the lab will deepen and foster non-western understandings and reimaginations of digital environments. This participatory workshop invites you to think, reflect and build with us. We will explore the core question: ‘What do digital futures look like?’.
Online Objectification
Exploring barriers to digital civic participation through an anti-objectification intervention
This project explores how girls and young women experience objectifying content on social media and will develop intervention resources to foster resilience against harmful content. Drawing on Ofcom’s Online Nation 2023 report, which highlights the prevalence of such online harm, the project takes an intersectional approach to understand how vulnerabilities accumulate across gender, race, sexuality, and disability.
This workshop will explore what objectification is and how it unfolds for young women in the online space. Participants will be asked to contribute words / short descriptions of objectifying content that will be used to co-develop themes for analysis of participant interviews. If times allows, we will then use the themes to group anonymised extracts from participant interviews.
Session 2, 11:10 – 11:40
Our Futures and AI
Come and find out about our youth-led research project to explore the impact that generative AI is having, particularly on young people’s lives. The young people have chosen to explore body image, politics, university admissions and who pays for AI. The workshop will include an opportunity to participate in the project outputs which will include some guidance for the youth work sector in Scotland.
Advokit
Disabled Welfare Experiences and Envisioned Futures under AI Governance
This workshop will explore the accessibility challenges faced by people living with communication disabilities such as aphasia in applying for disability benefits. It will present current barriers encountered within public service systems, including those exacerbated by recent AI-driven changes to disability benefit administration. Participants will be invited to join us in co-developing accessible toolkits designed to empower people with aphasia in navigating these complex systems.
Location & Accessibility
University House is centrally located on the University of Leeds campus and room used for our event can be found on Level 2 of the building. Click on the map below to see its location or visit the AccessAble website for a full access guide to University House.
The Find Us page of the University of Leeds website provides a full travel guide.