Research Dialogues - Digital Vulnerabilities & AI
17 June - 02 December 2025
Principal Investigator/Organiser: Archana Raghavan, University of Bath
Supporting Partner: N/A
Event attendees: 2 in the first session, and 1 in the first and second sessions.
Event Summary
The event was focused on early-career researchers from low and middle-income countries with limited networks to discuss and learn about digital vulnerabilities and artificial intelligence. The workshops were held for 90 minutes between October and November 2025. Unlike a formal academic conference or a professional development workshop, this research dialogue encouraged critical reflection and generative idea exchange.
Highlights
The group developed an initial proposal for a critical review in a relevant journal, we managed to come together, ideate and put together a project that we hope to continue working on despite the conclusion of the workshop series.
Feedback from a workshop participant:
“I wanted to share my appreciation for the AI Development and Vulnerabilities workshops. The sessions were thoughtfully structured and created a clear learning progression from identifying research gaps, to refining research problems, to presenting early proposals. This made the workshops feel both coherent and deeply engaging.
Professionally, the workshops helped me understand digital vulnerabilities through a genuinely interdisciplinary lens. The integration of management studies, psychology, labour research, HCI, and political economy expanded my understanding of how complex and layered AI-related questions truly are. I particularly valued the discussions on data context, digital capital, and the global power dynamics that shape AI development”
Unlike a formal academic conference or a professional development workshop, this research dialogue encouraged critical reflection and generative idea exchange. In the first workshop, critical vulnerabilities posed by AI-related technologies were discussed, along with biases in AI research. Following this, the second workshop involved refining a research question and conducting a preliminary literature review.
The third workshop helped participants consolidate a research proposal based on the issues they identified in the initial workshops. The informal setting allowed participants to freely ask questions and learn about AI, its impact, and the fundamentals of AI research. By critically evaluating AI research, potential gaps in digital vulnerabilities were identified.
The space and resources truly pushed for a community to develop organically and sustain itself primarily through shared research interests and concerns of AI development within the society.
Lessons Learnt
Putting together a series of workshops from scratch was a rare, challenging yet deeply exciting opportunity for me. I learnt valuable lessons about time-management and program management because designing for the workshops was merely 5% of the actual task, what mattered more was finding speakers, planning the flow of the workshops and most importantly advertising. I believe I could have done better if I had started advertising the workshops at least a month and half in advance rather than 3 weeks. This would have certainly boosted the attendance.
However, another lesson I did learn following on the previous point that quality mattered. Although only 1 participant showed up consistently during the three sessions, the speaker Dr. Brit Davidson, and I were able to fully immerse ourselves into discussions about AI development, research and problems. Belonging to such a tightly knit group is a reminder of how communal learning can lead to the development of a tangible project, i.e., a critical review proposal for a journal. We also came to rely on each other as a group to discuss ideas and plans irrespective of the workshop. Putting this series together showed me how to action the objective of creating a collaborative space leading to future collaborations and research outputs.
Outcomes/outputs
An organic and informal research support group to discuss research on AI and digital vulnerabilities
A proposal for a critical review on AI and digital vulnerabilities that we hope to eventually turn into a journal publication.