Meet the Fellows who are shaping inclusive digital futures ✨

We are excited to announce 12 fellowship projects that will explore what inclusive and just digital futures can look like. For the next six months, fellows from all across Europe will share insights into their work and communities and help us better understand what is needed for just digital futures.

The fellows’ combined strength resides in the diversity of their backgrounds and the distinctness of their perspectives. They hail from nine countries across Europe and belong to a multitude of different communities. Their projects range from reimagining cities to bringing rural communities together. They work alongside survivors of abuse, and create awareness on race and health, and gender diversity. All of them share a strong sense of community, inclusive participation and co-creation.

The 12 projects were chosen from 289 submissions that reached the New New program in 2020. In light of the enormous number of applications, we doubled the number of fellowships from six to 12. Below is a brief overview on the projects. You can find the detailed descriptions on the website.

Feminist Curricula is an open online directory of educational design initiatives that use feminist perspectives to explore alternative ways of learning and teaching.

The Dark Matters Database is a collaborative online portal documenting under-publicised illness presentations in Black and Indigenous people, and people of colour.

Networks of Trust is an offline network which hosts stories about tech, population movements and the climate crisis, and proposes fiction as a method for building community.

Beyond the Green combines investigative journalism, academic knowledge and artistic languages to explore feminist narratives about megaprojects that affect people’s lives, bodies and territories.

Algorithms of Late Capitalism is a community co-designed critical card game that induces players to reflect on the absurdities of the technological present and imagine futures that are more fair.

Chayn Italia is an intersectional feminist tech project for survivors of domestic abuse and frontline workers in Italy. It develops resources and runs training on the dual nature of tech — which can enable abuse but also be a tool for defence, resilience and positive connection.

La Banlieue du Turfu (French slang for future) creates speculative futures for the French banlieues which counter the prevailing narratives of pessimism and deprivation.

HammamRadio is a feminist participatory online radio, launched from Berlin. It is a space where womxn, trans and queer folks organise, educate and carve out space to disrupt mainstream narratives.

OUSA is an intersectional digital platform for marginalised and migrant perspectives which raises awareness of inequity and discrimination by creating new forms of collaboration and sparking creative exchange.

[multi’vocal] works towards an alternative future for digital voice-assistants by creating performative synthetic voices that can present with more than one age, gender and geographic origin.

Syb: Queering voice AI is a voice interface designed by and for trans people which connects users to media created by the trans community. Participatory design is at its core.

Just wondering… creates animated essays that take radical and critical approaches to the current status quo in order to inspire people to imagine and reflect on complex subjects.

Over the next six months, these fellows will receive a fellowship grant and coaching tailored to their respective needs. A series of public workshops will accompany the program. In them, we aim to discuss different topics that arise at the intersection of the digital, the social and the political with a larger audience. We will publish in-depth insights into the themes of the fellowship and interviews with experts in a magazine in fall 2021.

The New Fellowship is an initiative of SUPERRR Lab and the Ethics of Algorithms project at Bertelsmann Stiftung, in cooperation with the Allianz Kulturstiftung and the Goethe Institut.

We will post updates on this blog which will give insights into the different projects as they progress, and the discussions they raise.