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Call for Researchers and Practitioners

By PCC

Solidarity AI 2026

November 12–15, 2026
Chulalongkorn University | Bangkok, Thailand

AI With, By, and For Communities

Building Solidarity Stacks: AI With, By, and For Communities

What would it mean to design artificial intelligence in service of climate justice, communal care, and local values? What would it mean to build AI as part of a federated democratic infrastructure rather than a vertically integrated extraction stack?

Solidarity AI, co-convened by PCC Global and PCC Thailand in partnership with Chulalongkorn University, convenes researchers, practitioners, cooperative leaders, technologists, policymakers, union organizers, and digital rights advocates in Bangkok to strengthen democratic approaches to AI infrastructure.

Following the 2025 Cooperative AI conference in Istanbul, which centered on collective ownership and democratic governance amid rapid AI consolidation, the 2026 gathering shifts the conversation toward voices from the Majority World, particularly across Asia. As global AI discourse remains dominated by North American and Western European universities and think tanks, this conference foregrounds governance experiments and institutional innovations from regions most affected yet least represented.

Today’s dominant AI systems operate as vertically integrated extraction architectures, where cloud, data, models, applications, and finance reinforce one another to concentrate power and surplus upward. Infrastructure consolidates; value flows up; risk flows down.

This conference focuses on building a different pattern: linking cooperative cloud and data infrastructures, data trusts and commons, democratically governed AI systems, platform cooperatives, federated finance, and public–cooperative digital partnerships into coordinated, durable systems. The question is not simply how to regulate AI, but how to embed democratic ownership and participation across its layers.

Conference website

Why Bangkok? Why Now?

Bangkok is not a backdrop; it is a site of living intellectual and political traditions that reframe technology through responsibility, sufficiency, and collective autonomy.

Solidarity AI 2026 draws on traditions that have long resisted extractive techno-solutionism. Buddhist ethics foreground interdependence and care. Thailand’s sufficiency economy challenges growth at all costs. Gandhian decentralism and Ambedkarite critique insist on justice and structural transformation.

This conference welcomes scholarship and practice grounded in lived experience and embedded knowledge, with a strong focus on research and real-world experimentation in platform cooperatives and adjacent solidarity enterprises.

We are especially interested in contributions that:

  • Emerge from and remain accountable to communities affected by AI systems
  • Examine AI’s material supply chains, from minerals and energy to data labeling and content moderation
  • Connect cooperative principles to implementable digital infrastructure
  • Move beyond critique toward deployable, federated models

The INDL 2026 conference in Geneva calls for rigorous interdisciplinary work on “AI Supply Chains,” highlighting invisible labor and ethical sourcing embedded in AI systems. Solidarity AI 2026 extends that conversation by asking:

How can AI supply chains themselves become democratically governed, federated, and solidarity-based?

Conference Themes

We encourage submissions that bridge research and practice and that operate across layers of the Solidarity Stack.

1. AI Supply Chains and Labor

  • Mapping AI supply chains from raw materials to model deployment
  • Data annotators, moderators, and invisible labor
  • Cooperative procurement and ethical sourcing
  • Social dialogue and collective bargaining in AI systems
  • Union–cooperative alliances in digital work

2. Cooperative Cloud, Data, and Model Governance

  • Cooperative or municipal data centers
  • Federated AI training infrastructures
  • Data cooperatives and trusts in agriculture, health, and finance
  • Democratic governance primitives (asset locks, elected stewards, surplus routing rules)
  • Interoperability and federation across regions

3. AI and Ecological Limits

  • AI’s energy, water, and land footprint
  • Community responses to hyperscale data centers
  • Renewable and cooperative data centers
  • Sufficiency-oriented AI design
  • Refusal strategies in high-risk or extractive contexts

4. Linguistic Justice and Majority World AI

  • Regionally grounded large language models
  • Protection of linguistic diversity
  • Public-interest AI for Southeast Asia
  • Cooperative AI infrastructures serving minority languages
  • Dataset governance

5. Digital Public Infrastructure and Cooperative Alternatives

  • Digital Public Infrastructure as enabling layer or surveillance risk
  • Cooperative identity systems and payment rails
  • Public–cooperative hybrid governance
  • Case studies from Asia and beyond
  • Binding participation platforms and executable democracy

6. Scaling Through Federation

  • Sixth Cooperative Principle (“cooperation among cooperatives”)
  • Cross-border cooperative AI alliances
  • Surplus rerouting across layers
  • Practical federation toolkits

This conference moves beyond abstract policy exercises and speculative techno-optimism, without rejecting technology itself, working instead in the space between uncritical embrace and reflexive refusal—rigorous about power, attentive to risk, and committed to shaping technological systems toward democratic, ecological, and communal ends.We move beyond critique toward construction—seeking deployable models, governance experiments, federation strategies, and real-world coordination that can be implemented and scaled. Here, research is judged by its public service, civic contribution, durable partnerships, and reduction of inequality, and by whether it materially strengthens the common good.

Formats

We welcome academic papers, case studies and field reports, art exhibits and screenings, performance lectures, workshops and strategy sessions, project demonstrations, participatory and creative presentations, policy blueprints, and movement-building frameworks. Presentations will be limited to 10 -15 minutes, with materials shared in advance to support substantive discussion.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should:

  • Clearly relate to one or more conference themes
  • Include a 200–400 word abstract
  • Indicate whether you are submitting as a researcher, practitioner, or hybrid
  • Include relevant references, data, or implementation examples (where applicable)
  • Specify format (paper, workshop, demo, artistic intervention, etc.)
  • State whether or not you’d like to be considered for the Du Bois prize.

Submission deadline: March 31, 2026
Notification of acceptance: April 21, 2026
Full materials due: October 15, 2026

Submit HERE


W.E.B. Du Bois Prize for Emerging Scholars

A $500 prize will be awarded to an early scholar (under 35) whose submission demonstrates methodological rigor, innovation, and commitment to marginalized communities in the design of AI systems.

For inquiries:
pcc@newschool.edu

Conference website and registration/updates

Bangkok, November 12–15, 2026.