The Emancipator is an award-winning nonprofit platform that provides news, expert analysis, and investigative reporting about the structure of racism and antiracist efforts to abolish it. The Emancipator works in the revolutionary spirit of antislavery journalists who covered the scourge of slavery and efforts to abolish it. We are emancipating through evidence, experience, expertise, and empathy.
Emancipatory Information Retrieval
Our world today is facing a confluence of several mutually reinforcing crises each of which intersects with concerns of social justice and emancipation. This paper is a provocation for the role of computer-mediated information access in our emancipatory struggles. We define emancipatory information retrieval as the study and development of information access methods that challenge various forms of human oppression, and situates its activities within broader collective emancipatory praxis. The term "emancipatory" here 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. To develop an emancipatory research agenda for information retrieval (IR), in this paper we speculate about the practices that the community can adopt, enumerate some of the projects that the field should undertake, and discuss provocations to spark new ideas and directions for research. We challenge the field of IR research to embrace humanistic values and commit to universal emancipation and social justice. We also invite scholars from fields such as human-computer interaction, information sciences, media studies, design, science and technology studies, social and political sciences, philosophy, law, environmental sciences, public health, educational sciences, as well as legal and policy experts, civil rights advocates, social justice activists and movement organizers, and artists to join us in realizing this transformation. In this process, we must both imagine post-oppressive worlds, and reimagine the role of IR in that world and in the journey that leads us there.
Emancipatory Information Retrieval (Invited Talk at UCC)
Information Access of the Oppressed: Freirean Design for Emancipatory Information Access
Online information access (IA) platforms are targets of authoritarian capture. We explore the question of how to safeguard our platforms and ensure emancipatory outcomes through the lens of Paulo Freire's theories of emancipatory pedagogy. Freire's theories provide a radically different lens for exploring IA's sociotechnical concerns relative to the current dominating frames of fairness, accountability, and transparency. We make explicit, with the intention to challenge, the technologist-user dichotomy in IA platform development that mirrors the teacher-student relation in Freire's analysis. By extending Freire's analysis to IA, we critique the technologists-as-liberator frame where it is the burden of (altruistic) technologists to mitigate the risks of emerging technologies for marginalized communities. Instead, we advocate for Freirean Design whose goal is to structurally expose the platform for co-option and co-construction by community members in aid of their emancipatory struggles.
The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State by Emmaia Gelman - Hardcover
Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.
Q&A: Robin Berjon on freeing journalists' feeds.
The AT protocol and “long-term, lifelong, sustainable protection against enshittification.”
Restorative Justice
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~1 minute read | Published: Apr 13, 2025 | Updated: Oct 4, 2026
Robin Berjon (@robin.berjon.com)
Politics of Elon Musk: if you hadn't seen already, this is Anna Zeiter being literally wowed by gross propaganda from Martin Sellner's "Institute For Remigration" — a group that advocates ethnic cleansing, "the preservation of ethnocultural continuity," and spreads Great Replacement conspiracies.
Orion Reed
My research investigates the intersection of computing, human-system interfaces, and emancipatory politics. I am interested in the potential of computing as a medium for thought, as a tool for collective action, and as a means of emancipation.
The New York Times helped fuel an anti-trans panic in 2022. Will 2023 be any better?
Perhaps no mainstream publication did more in 2022 than the New York Times to shift the mainstream conversation around transgender equality away from obstacles to access in housing, employment, and health care and toward the idea that the most pressing issue facing the trans community is actually too much medical care. The paper’s venerable pages featured profile after profile that platformed anti-trans extremists, fearmongered about the price of transgender acceptance, and framed rising trans identification as a social contagion. A recent article that centers the concerns of parents calling for the forced outing of transgender students shows why in 2023, the Times must improve its coverage.
Information Access of the Oppressed: A Problem-Posing Framework for Envisioning Emancipatory Information Access Platforms
Online information access (IA) platforms are targets of authoritarian capture. These concerns are particularly serious and urgent today in light of the rising levels of democratic erosion worldwide, the emerging capabilities of generative AI technologies such as AI persuasion, and the increasing concentration of economic and political power in the hands of Big Tech. This raises the question of what alternative IA infrastructure we must reimagine and build to mitigate the risks of authoritarian capture of our information ecosystems. We explore this question through the lens of Paulo Freire's theories of emancipatory pedagogy. Freire's theories provide a radically different lens for exploring IA's sociotechnical concerns relative to the current dominating frames of fairness, accountability, confidentiality, transparency, and safety. We make explicit, with the intention to challenge, the dichotomy of how we relate to technology as either technologists (who envision and build technology) and its users. We posit that this mirrors the teacher-student relationship in Freire's analysis. By extending Freire's analysis to IA, we challenge the notion that it is the burden of the (altruistic) technologists to come up with interventions to mitigate the risks that emerging technologies pose to marginalized communities. Instead, we advocate that the first task for the technologists is to pose these as problems to the marginalized communities, to encourage them to make and unmake the technology as part of their material struggle against oppression. Their second task is to redesign our online technology stacks to structurally expose spaces for community members to co-opt and co-construct the technology in aid of their emancipatory struggles. We operationalize Freire's theories to develop a problem-posing framework for envisioning emancipatory IA platforms of the future.
David Ellerman: Neo-Abolitionism: Towards Abolishing the Institution of Renting Persons/Wage Slavery
De Facto Journalism Co-op
Non-profit investigative journalism that shines a light on systems of power and abuses of rights and authority
What Trump Sells Is Impunity
Trump stands out in the GOP not for his racism, but his vision of emancipatory irresponsibility.
Human Rights Concerns at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory
This blog is an academic exercise in which student contributors select a topic of their choosing to research and write. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are the author’s only and do not reflect an official position of UAB or the Institute for Human Rights. As an institution of higher education that values and promotes free speech and civil discourse, we welcome a variety of perspectives and opinions from our student contributors. Learn more about UAB’s commitment to institutional neutrality and free speech. UAB students who would like to submit a post on human rights related topics, please email ihr@uab.edu and use “Blog Post” in the subject line.
Amia Srinivasan · Stop the Robot Apocalypse: The New Utilitarians
Philosophers may talk about justice or rights, but they don’t often try to reshape the world according to their ideals...
