Keynote Speakers

Civic participation is increasingly recognised as essential to data and AI governance, shaping a vision of what Patel describes in her forthcoming book as ‘glass box’ AI, moving away from the dominant paradigms of surveillance capitalism, black box and deficit models towards empowerment-based models rooted in narratives of stewardship and care. Power dynamics are already asymmetrically structured between parents, teachers and children, and the acceleration of AI presents a new challenge and risk of exacerbating them, excluding children and young people from important conversations about their futures.
The presentation introduces Patel’s social model of digital technology, shaped by her practical policy facing research work with governments and policymakers – drawing upon disability rights movements and theory, to explain how digital exclusion for young people in the age of AI is socially produced, not inherent. She argues for a philosophical approach called conceptual engineering to address limiting mental models embedded in technology development so that young people and children are truly empowered. Through case studies and practitioner examples, the talk illustrates how civic participation rooted in conceptual engineering can enable tangible power shifts — redistributing agency, authority, and decision-making capacity.
This talk also presents examples of how children are already being involved in shaping AI governance, drawing on models such as school assemblies, play based models using Lego, arts and creative models, as well as deliberative AI Children’s Summit convened by the Alan Turing Institute. It also showcases a practical framework for participation and inclusion in AI that moves beyond consultation toward meaningful power-sharing, adapted for youth practitioners. Integrating insights from youth participatory praxis, Patel’s prior research on participatory data stewardship at the Ada Lovelace Institute, and her approaches to public involvement in shaping responsible AI at the ESRC Digital Good Network, the framework reconceptualises both civic participation and inclusion as a pedagogical, infrastructural, social, and technical challenge for children and young people.
Attendees will learn from a structured approach to designing participatory processes that are inclusive, reflexive, and capable of influencing real-world data and AI systems, presented in Patel’s self assessment workbook for including public voices in AI.

Reema Patel is a social researcher and participatory practitioner based in Cambridge, UK working at the intersection of civic participation, data stewardship, and responsible AI. She co-founded the Ada Lovelace Institute where she established its flagship work programmes on public participation and participatory data stewardship and authored reports on Rethinking Data, the Data Divide, Beyond Face Value and many more. Reema is now the director of Elgon Social Research, where she collaborates with communities, policymakers, and practitioners to design participatory processes that enable meaningful power-sharing in technology and social policy, rooted in methodologies of praxis experimentation and action learning.
She has contributed to national research on public involvement in AI through the ESRC Digital Good Network, developing new frameworks for including public voices in shaping AI futures, shaping practitioner materials; and is an advisor to the UK’s research and innovation expert resource centre Sciencewise, supporting policymakers to involve the public in emerging science and technology issues. Reema’s research focuses on rethinking inclusion in the datafied and AI driven-age, addressing digital exclusion, and developing practical methods that centre young people and marginalised communities in shaping data-driven and AI-enabled futures.
She is also a research fellow of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, based in Cambridge University. Prior to her work in AI, she was best known for her work on the UK government Sciencewise public engagement programme, and her leadership of the Royal Society of Arts’ Citizens’ Economic Council initiative, where she worked with schools and children using Lego based methodologies to engage them in thinking about economic futures. Reema worked closely with the UK central bank, the Bank of England, to embed their regional citizen economic panels as a result of this research.

Young children are growing up in a digital age characterised by technologies that mediate how practices are enacted amongst people in the formation of societies. As this level of digital complexity has evolved over time, so too have the demands on early years education developed to ensure young children have opportunities for agentic digital learning in practice. In this session, philosophy of technology is explored as a viable knowledge base for the early years, advancing thinking from the limitations of technical determinism through to the democratic possibilities of critical constructivism in practice.

Susan Edwards is Professor of Early Childhood Education at Australian Catholic University. She has researched young children and their adults using digital technologies, digital media and popular culture in their play and learning for many years. Susan has been awarded over $1.5 million in research funding to develop insights into young children’s cultural meaning-making with digital technologies through play. She is interested in advancing knowledge and pedagogical practices that help keep young children safe online. This includes amongst the first work nationally and internationally with colleagues to determine what young children know and understand about the internet. Professor Edwards is a co-author of the Early Childhood Australia Statement on Young Children and Digital Technologies. Her publications include over 80 books, journal publications and reports.