Bhaskar Mitra

Last week I presented a keynote at #SIGIR2026 titled "Emancipatory Information Retrieval: Towards Critical IR Theories and Practices". Slides: https://bhaskar-mitra.github.io/files/emancipatory-ir-sigir2026-keynote.pptx I went in nervously excited but several people appreciated talking openly about this topic. A thread. 🧵 1/

E.g., big shout out to @djoerd@idf.social and the team for realizing @IRRJ@sigmoid.social as an alternative to the for-profit academic publishing ecosystem in IR. We need more such actions and experimentations on building counter-structures in the field. Website: https://irrj.org/ 57/

Instead let's recognize that knowledge is socially constructed; IR systems are embedded in complex social processes influencing beliefs, info needs, and collections; and a good IR system doesn't just retrieve relevant info but grows our understanding of the world and realizes societal good. 53/

Meanwhile beautiful acts of community resistance against AI is sprouting globally. E.g., The People’s Consultation on AI in Canada. I co-organized an event as part of the consultation w/ @techworkersco@union.place & @techfordemocracy@thecanadian.social. 22/

Together these constitute an anti-working class politic. Any "responsible use" of AI must address these, not just worry about errors in LLM outputs. If we talk about human -in-the-loop, make sure it's not just holding workers responsible for the machine's mistakes without any actual agency. 21/

Last but not the least, the unsubstantiated and hyped promises of AI are providing political cover for defunding our public services. Instead of funding our nurses and teachers, we are redirecting those funds to AI industry whose response to the public's material needs: "Let them eat chatbots!" 20/

In a moment of extreme global precarity from climate change, AI data centers are hindering our transition away from nonrenewable energy sources, creating water shortages and raising energy bills for local communities, and continuing colonial exploitations of indigenous lands. 19/

AI is also different from traditional industrial automation. To use a horse carriage metaphor, AI doesn't replace the carriage with an automobile but instead inserts a machine between driver and horse displacing the driver from his craft but leaving him responsible for all machine errors. 18/

Promises of lowering labor cost has led to high valuation of AI. Historically surplus produced by automation have typically gone to bosses. The devaluation of labor is not just a function of actual productivity gains but what people believe it is, which makes the AI hype particularly nefarious. 17/

AI is built using uncompensated appropriation of works by writer, artists, and coders and underpaid crowd work. Who gets to labor for AI and who gets to benefit from it (note: I didn't say "use") mirrors racial capitalism and coloniality. Relevant read: "Ghost Work" by @maryLgray@dair-community.social 16/

But that conversation cannot be just about the technological project of AI, it must recognize and center the much broader political projects of AI. This includes AI's anti-working class politics... 15/

And while AI has become dominant in IR, we're also witnessing rising public anger against AI. We could ignore this or assume that this can be fixed by "educating" people about AI's benefits, or... We could pause to recognize that there's a real issue here that people are mobilizing against. 14/

Big Tech mirrors Big Oil / Big Tobacco / Big Pharma in how it exerts undue influence over public opinion through academic / regulatory / media capture. There is growing body of work from @Mer__edith@mastodon.world @abebab@scholar.social and others documenting diff mechanisms and strategies employed by Big Tech. 13/

Ongoing human rights violations, immigration violence, transphobic violence, displacement, apartheid, war, and genocide do not just affect people out there but also members of the IR community, their friends and families. Solidarity building and collective care is core to critical IR praxis. 58/

#6 To affect societal good, critical IR must combine liberatory research + liberatory action. This includes drawing red lines in research, building counter-structures, organizing within the IR community and raising its sociopolitical consciousness, public education, and a recommitment to DEI. 56/

#5 However, we must be wary of being trapped by the technologists-as-liberator frame. Instead, recently we started developing a notion of Freirean Design (https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09600) to engage users in the active co-option and co-construction of platforms by underdesigning systems at design time. 55/

I argue that given information and knowledge are socially constructed, it is important to also recognize the need for making space for social deliberation and negotiation within IR systems. This is idea that IR systems should also be social systems is largely missing from the field today. 54/

#4 IR needs to renounce positivist views of information and the traditional role ascribed to IR within capitalist logics of consumption where information artifacts are viewed as commodities and the IR system's role is to match supply (artifacts in the collection) with demand (search queries). 52/

Critical theory makes similar normative commitments towards "a classless, nondominative, co-operative, participatory democracy". Similarly, Christian Fuchs clarifies critical information studies' commitment to be in solidarity with the dominated for the abolishment of domination. 51/

This motivated me last year to start developing a research agenda for emancipatory IR. It is my hope that universal humanization and emancipation from oppression can be a kernel that we can build a broader coalition within the IR community and mobilize towards. Paper: https://irrj.org/article/view/24531 50/

#3 IR needs to make a normative commitment to nondomination in solidarity with the oppressed. This is a challenging task for a community whose members reflect vastly different values, cultures, politics, identities, privileges, lived experiences, and understandings of history. 49/

When we talk about Big Tech, let us remember as @willoremus@mastodon.social eloquently puts it "society does not prepend the label “Big,” with a capital “B,” to an industry out of respect or admiration. It does it out of loathing and fear—and in preparation for battle.' 12/

IR should reconnect with its roots in library and information sciences that engages w/ liberatory concerns. Libraries have been at the forefront of antifascist and decolonial resistance throughout history across the globe. (Shout out to Darren Flynn for inviting me to #CALC26!) 48/