IAS Programming Manager Carolina Maranon-Cobos reflects on the 2025-2026 (In)Justice Series on Data & Power.
After everything our communities have lived through this year, many of us find ourselves sitting with a familiar mix of emotions: gratitude, urgency, and a weight that lingers and asks us not to look away.
The 2025–2026 (In)Justice Series on Data and Power asked questions that met that heaviness with deep curiosity. We turned toward something that shapes so much of our lives, often invisibly: data. How it’s collected, who controls it, what it reveals, and what it erases. And maybe most importantly: who it serves.
What unfolded over these months wasn’t just a series of conversations about technology or systems. These events became something much more human and heavily influenced by our experiences as Minnesotans. Panel after panel, each speaker led with their own personal story. Despite the language of algorithms, datasets, and surveillance, every conversation brought us back to the same truth: Data is never neutral. It carries the fingerprints of power.
We began in November by asking a question that feels simple on the surface: Who Owns Your Medical Information?
What emerged was a deep reckoning with how care and control have become entangled. We talked about genetic testing kits, predictive algorithms, and public health systems, but what we were really talking about was trust and how easily it is broken.
We sat with the reality that, for many communities, especially those already marginalized, data collection is not care. It looks and feels like extraction, surveillance, and profit.
Even still, a thread of optimism and possibility ran through our conversation. What would it mean to build systems rooted in transparency, consent, and community rather than efficiency alone? What would ethical stewardship of our most personal information actually look like?
In December, we shifted to a topic deeply personal to me, but also more expansive: Who Gets to Define “Latino”?
For many of us, this conversation felt both liberating and deeply affirming. It challenged the flattening of Latinidad into a single story, a checkbox, or a simplified narrative of struggle.
Our speakers reminded us that identity itself operates as a kind of data. Institutions, governments, schools, and media constantly attempt to classify people into categories that can be measured, tracked, and analyzed. But identities are lived, layered, and constantly evolving. They carry language, migration, memory, race, family history, joy, contradiction, and survival. What gets counted shapes who is seen, whose experiences matter, and who is erased altogether.
We made space for contradiction, complexity, and joy. We talked about existing across languages, across borders, and across histories that do not fit neatly into categories. We asked who gets excluded when identities are reduced to data points, and what becomes possible when people are allowed to define themselves on their own terms and when we honor the fullness of who we are.
There was poetry. There was laughter and tears. And there was a truth that continued to show up throughout the series: some forms of data resist simplification because they live within the stories, the community, and self-definition.
By March, the series deepened even further through a conversation about ancestry, lineage, and the fragile threads that connect us to those who came before us.
This discussion invited us to think about heritage and memory as forms of data too, though not the kind that can easily be archived in spreadsheets or databases. This is embodied data carried through oral histories, rituals, photographs, recipes, names, movement, and memory itself.
We also named the forces that disrupt and sever those connections: migration, displacement, incarceration, colonization, and systemic erasure. Entire histories disappear when institutions fail to document certain communities, or when survival itself requires that rupture.
And yet, we witnessed how people continue reweaving those threads through storytelling, art, community archives, and collective remembrance. There was something so profound in recognizing that even when systems fail to record us, people have always found ways to preserve memory and find one another again.
In April, we closed with one of the most urgent and unresolved questions of our time: how artificial intelligence is reshaping visibility, creativity, and power itself.
Together, we examined the growing role AI plays in determining what gets surfaced, what gets buried, and what society comes to understand as valuable. Algorithms and systems that learn from us but don’t always see us and that increasingly shape culture, opportunity, labor, and access, often under the illusion of objectivity.
Our conversation centered especially on artists and cultural workers navigating these rapidly shifting systems. What does it mean to create within technologies that can erase you, misrepresent you, or make you hyper-visible without consent? What happens when machines trained on human creativity begin mediating whose work is discovered, valued, or economically sustainable?
What emerged was not a simple conclusion about whether AI is “good” or “bad,” but a recognition of its deeply complicated nature. AI is simultaneously a tool, a gatekeeper, a mirror of existing inequities, and a site of resistance. And within that tension, artists continue imagining new ways to assert agency, humanity, and creative freedom.
Looking back on this year, even in a series centered on systems and structures that can often feel abstract or distant, what we created together felt deeply human. Our speakers brought their full selves into the room. They led with vulnerability, honesty, and lived experience. Because of that, these conversations became spaces of connection, not just ideas.
We did not just talk about data. We talked about bodies, memory, identity, ancestry, visibility, and power. We talked about who gets to exist fully, who gets remembered, and who gets to be seen as human.
We are still living through a time of deep uncertainty. A time of rapid technological change and widening gaps between those who hold power and those most impacted by these systems. But this year also reminded us that we are not powerless.
The (In)Justice Series on Data & Power will continue in 2026-27. We can't wait to see you there.
Authored by Carolina Maranon-Cobos, IAS Programming Manager