Emancipatory Information Retrieval
Bhaskar Mitra (he/him)
Tiohtià:ke / Montréal, Canada
Radically Reorienting Information Retrieval Research to
Resist Corporate and Authoritarian Capture of our Information Ecosystems
Content Warning: The following presentation includes references and discussions of reproductive rights, coloniality, classism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, casteism, ableism, political violence, war, and genocide
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@bmitra.bsky.social
bhaskar.mitra@acm.org
bhaskar-mitra.github.io
Part I�Politics of Information Access
Our world in crises�Intersecting concerns of �social justice and emancipation
Climate Change
Pandemic
Global Inequity
Political Oppression
Global Conflicts
Our world in crises�Intersecting concerns of �social justice and emancipation
Climate Change
Our world in crises�Intersecting concerns of �social justice and emancipation
Pandemic
Our world in crises�Intersecting concerns of �social justice and emancipation
Global Inequity
Our world in crises�Intersecting concerns of �social justice and emancipation
Political Oppression
Our world in crises�Intersecting concerns of �social justice and emancipation
Global Conflicts
Provocation
What is the role of computer-mediated information access in our collective struggles for social justice, universal humanization, and emancipation?
The politics of information access
Access to information is critical to collective sense-making of our place and relationships in this world; therefore, throughout history authoritarian forces have tried to control what information is disseminated and how; and information access media have been a site of conflict between liberation and oppression
Emancipatory information access
Part II�Big Tech, AI, �and the Information Ecosystem
How should we situate Big Tech?
Shades of AI Ethics
ACM FAccT Community. Cross-disciplinary community studying sociotechnical aspects of computing; consists of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities collaborating with other experts including regulators, movement organizers, etc.
Corporate Responsible AI. Community of industry researchers and practitioners studying allocative and representational harms, privacy, etc. and developing mitigation strategies; only allowed to critique aspects that do not challenge corporate power and profit; complicit in ethics washing and providing cover for corporate harms
AI Safety. Emergent community with backing from powerful elites and huge capital; rooted in ideologies like effective altruism and longtermism; study of existential risks is foundational to the field
An infamous public statement “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” (1994) that defends harmful and now discredited race science
The values encoded in the AI community
The Authoritarian tendencies of�Big Tech &�Silicon Valley
A personal update…
After working at Microsoft for 19 years (first at Bing and then at Microsoft Research), this summer, I made the difficult decision to leave the industry in objection to Big Tech and Silicon Valley's harmful practices and in particular their complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza
Mitra. Why I am leaving big tech… Blog post, 2025.
AI and information access
Information ecosystem disruption
Generative AI enables low-cost generation of derivative low-quality content at an unprecedented scale that can be employed to shape public opinion (“generative propaganda”)
Chatbots are jeopardizing the “grand bargain at the heart of the web” by not sending adequate traffic to Websites like Wikipedia and StackExchange
AI persuasion
Chatbots can alter the beliefs of their users (e.g., political or commercial preferences) by using persuasive language
The massive trove of detailed data on user behavior and preferences combined with the capabilities of generative AI to produce persuasive language and visualizations is an effective tool for mass manipulation and pose serious risks to functioning of global democracies
Mitra, Cramer, & Gurevich. Sociotechnical implications of generative artificial intelligence for information access. Book chapter, 2024.
Daepp et al. Generative Propaganda. ArXiv preprint, 2025
AI Persuasion
Imagine every time you searched online or accessed information via your digital assistant, the information was presented to you exactly in the form mostly likely alter your political opinions or consumer preferences
The existence of such capabilities incentivizes authoritarian capture of online information access platforms
Massive amounts of user behavior data from surveillance capitalism
Generative AI’s capability to produce persuasive language and visualizations
Effective tools for mass manipulation of public consumer preferences and political opinion
Our ability to align generative AI models towards specific values
Yom-Tov, Dumais, & Guo. Promoting Civil Discourse Through Search Engine Diversity. In SSCR, 2014.
Calls for public platforms and digital sovereignty
Part III�What IR Owes to society
Published in 1976 (nearly half a century ago)
However, the field has been largely reluctant to acknowledge the saliently political nature of this work leaving the underlying colonial, cisheteropatriarchal, and capitalist values that has (and continue to) critically shape the field of IR unchallenged
Cisheteropatriarchy (Noun)
A system of power that centers cisgender, heterosexual men and masculinity at the top of a gender/sexual hierarchy, using tools like gender roles to reinforce binary notions of gender and sexuality. This system creates a way of being in the world that accepts only certain kinds of behavior and relationships, punishing women and LGBTQ+ people who do not follow these roles/norms.
Mitra. What is IR-for-Good? Blog post, 2025.
Even IR conference tracks dedicated to research that tries to affect social good have historically side-stepped the deeply sociopolitical question of defining what constitutes social good
Recent calls to critically examine the norms and values of the IR community
(SWIRL’18)
(SWIRL’25)
What society needs
What Big Tech & Silicon Valley needs
What should IR research focus on?
Mitra. Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical Futures. In IRRJ, 2025.
We need dedicated research agenda situating societal needs at the core of IR research
Part IV�Emancipatory IR
Emancipatory IR is the study and development of information access methods that challenge all forms of human oppression and situates its activities within broader collective emancipatory praxis
Signifies the moral concerns of universal humanization of all peoples and the elimination of oppression to create the conditions under which we can collectively flourish
e.g., colonialism, racism, patriarchy, casteism, transphobia, ableism, …
Discourages non-performative academic gaze, urges this research to be situated in movement building, and calls for the recognizing the role of movement building in this research
Mitra. Emancipatory Information Retrieval. In IRRJ, 2025.
A framework of practices, projects, and provocations for emancipatory IR
Provocations for emancipatory IR
Safeguard against dehumanization and inequitable outcomes
Mitigate ecological and human costs
Safeguard against manipulation
Safeguard against surveillance
Safeguard against capture
Promote emancipatory pedagogy
Community building and organizing
Mitra. Emancipatory Information Retrieval. In IRRJ, 2025.
Practices of emancipatory IR
Diagnose and critique
Identify ways in which existing IR methods and systems, the cost of IR R&D, and the arrangements within the IR community may contribute systemic harms and impede emancipatory struggles
Imagine viable alternative futures
Rid ourselves of the “tyranny of dominant imaginaries” and reimagine desirable, viable, and achievable alternatives for future information experiences
Elaborate theories of change
Realize alternative futures in the face of current realities by developing new research agendas and exploring new arrangements within the IR community and new relationships with other institutions (e.g., industry and government)
Mitra. Emancipatory Information Retrieval. In IRRJ, 2025.
Practices of emancipatory IR
Diagnose and critique
Identify ways in which existing IR methods and systems, the cost of IR R&D, and the arrangements within the IR community may contribute systemic harms and impede emancipatory struggles
Imagine viable alternative futures
Rid ourselves of the “tyranny of dominant imaginaries” and reimagine desirable, viable, and achievable alternatives for future information experiences
Elaborate theories of change
Realize alternative futures in the face of current realities by developing new research agendas and exploring new arrangements within the IR community and new relationships with other institutions (e.g., industry and government)
Mitra. Emancipatory Information Retrieval. In IRRJ, 2025.
Mitra, Cramer, & Gurevich. Sociotechnical implications of generative artificial intelligence for information access. Book chapter, 2024.
Diagnose and critique
Sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access
Mitra, Cramer, & Gurevich. Sociotechnical implications of generative artificial intelligence for information access. Book chapter, 2024.
A.K.A “hallucinations”,
we avoid that term as it is anthropomorphizing
Diagnose and critique
Practices of emancipatory IR
Diagnose and critique
Identify ways in which existing IR methods and systems, the cost of IR R&D, and the arrangements within the IR community may contribute systemic harms and impede emancipatory struggles
Imagine viable alternative futures
Rid ourselves of the “tyranny of dominant imaginaries” and reimagine desirable, viable, and achievable alternatives for future information experiences
Elaborate theories of change
Realize alternative futures in the face of current realities by developing new research agendas and exploring new arrangements within the IR community and new relationships with other institutions (e.g., industry and government)
Mitra. Emancipatory Information Retrieval. In IRRJ, 2025.
Sociotechnical imaginaries
“Visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology”
~Jasanoff and Kim (2015)
Whose sociotechnical imaginaries are granted normative status and what myriad of radically alternative futures are we overlooking?
How does increasing dominance of established for-profit platforms over academic research influences and/or homogenizes the kinds of IR systems we build?
What would information access systems look like if designed for futures informed by feminist, queer, decolonial, anti-racist, anti-casteist, anti-ableist, and abolitionist thoughts?
Mitra. Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical Futures. In IRRJ, 2025.
Diagnose and critique
Imagine viable alternative futures
“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Diagnose and critique
Imagine viable alternative futures
Practices of emancipatory IR
Diagnose and critique
Identify ways in which existing IR methods and systems, the cost of IR R&D, and the arrangements within the IR community may contribute systemic harms and impede emancipatory struggles
Imagine viable alternative futures
Rid ourselves of the “tyranny of dominant imaginaries” and reimagine desirable, viable, and achievable alternatives for future information experiences
Elaborate theories of change
Realize alternative futures in the face of current realities by developing new research agendas and exploring new arrangements within the IR community and new relationships with other institutions (e.g., industry and government)
Mitra. Emancipatory Information Retrieval. In IRRJ, 2025.
Potential projects for emancipatory IR
Safeguard against platform capture
Safeguard against surveillance
Visibilize and mitigate ecological and human costs
Community building and organizing
Safeguard against manipulation
Safeguard against dehumanization and inequitable outcomes
Promote emancipatory pedagogy
Mitra. Emancipatory Information Retrieval. In IRRJ, 2025.
Search result pages as sites of emancipatory pedagogy
Instead of trying to algorithmically fix under-representation of women and people of color in image search results for occupational roles, can we reclaim that digital space as a site of resistance and emancipatory pedagogy by allowing feminist, queer, and anti-racist scholars, activists, and artists to create experiences that teach the history of these movements and struggles?
Mitra. Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical Futures. In IRRJ, 2025.
Research agenda for decentralized IR
Organizing and raising sociopolitical consciousness of our IR community��(Cross-disciplinary workshops, book clubs, popular education, arts and zines, …)
Organizing and raising sociopolitical consciousness of our IR community��(Cross-disciplinary workshops, book clubs, popular education, arts and zines, …)
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
– Arundhati Roy
THANK YOU
Abolish Big Tech. Free Palestine.
Download slides
@bmitra.bsky.social
bhaskar.mitra@acm.org
bhaskar-mitra.github.io