"Imagine global digital equity — real equity, beyond mere access to technology. We envision a world where information is used to sustain and nourish communities, families, and individuals; a world where discourses around data, and ethics and privacy have shifted away from an exclusive focus on commercial considerations towards technologies for humanist self-actualisation; and, importantly, a world where marginalised and displaced peoples can establish and maintain rights in their information, as a crucial, but currently unmet, foundation for exercising their human rights."

Rolan, G., McKemmish, S., Oliver, G., Evans, J., & Faulkhead, S. (2020). Digital equity through data sovereignty: A vision for sustaining humanity. iConference 2020 Proceedings. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/106548

Digital equity is a global issue, a societal grand challenge in both developed and developing contexts. By definition such a wicked problem needs transdisciplinary and international engagement -  across the data and information sciences, IT, cybersecurity, information cultures, information literacy, and a host of domain-specific disciplines such as First Nations studies, ethics, law, the arts, etc.

First Nations peoples around the world are claiming Data Sovereignty and defining data extensively in ways that are inclusive of records and archives.  They point to how data has been weaponized against them in colonial-settler societies, and plays a critical role in the ongoing colonial project, amplified by the digital environment.

The keynote will explore the role of data sovereignty in the digital world, and in enabling the actualisation of human rights. It will discuss participatory Australian research projects, undertaken in partnership with First Nations and communities, and those with lived experience of Out of Home Care, which aim to contribute to a future where data, broadly defined, is neither weaponised nor exploited, but considered as sovereign to individuals, families and communities.