Overview
This interactive workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, and community members to explore how LGBTQIA2S+ communities experience and respond to algorithmic harms, and how these responses can inform more inclusive AI governance. Moving beyond top-down approaches, the workshop centers community-driven strategies that enable agency and collective influence over AI systems. Through scenario-based, small-group discussions, participants will identify harms, examine existing coping and resistance practices, and surface unmet needs across domains such as recommendation, moderation, and service access. The workshop aims to foster shared understanding and outline broad, community-centered directions for effective algorithmic collective action, closing the gap between research and LGBTQIA2S+ community needs.
Goals
The session aims to support a collective reflection on algorithmic harms, community-led resistance strategies, and the support needs of LGBTQIA2S+ communities. Participants will share their perspectives and examine emerging evidence on how algorithmic systems affect these communities. They will also identify recurring gaps in existing support and empowerment approaches. The goal is to outline broad priorities for a research agenda grounded in community needs, with a focus on empowerment and practical support. More specifically, after the workshop, participants will:
- Gain a better understanding of existing community-driven resistance strategies and remaining unmet needs.
- Identify key gaps that limit the usability and adoption of these strategies.
- Contribute to a shared, evolving repository that documents response strategies and identified gaps (e.g., barriers to implementation and adoption). This repository will be accessible to the community and continuously updated, with two interfaces: a public-facing blog and an open-source repository where community members can contribute new insights and emerging practices.
- Contribute to a position paper co-developed with workshop organizers, facilitators, and participants.
The session will also create opportunities for future collaboration between researchers, community organizations, advocates, and LGBTQIA2S+ participants. This may lead to shared initiatives such as toolkits and other community-informed resources. After the workshop, a survey will be circulated to collect participants’ interest in contributing to these different initiatives.
Organizers
The workshop is developed in collaboration with the Canada Research Chair in Partnership Research and the Empowerment of Vulnerable Youth (CRC-ReParE) and members of the Queer in AI community.1
Session organizers listed in alphabetical order.