The rapid development of artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT has generated debate and discussion about knowledge practices in social, political, and institutional spaces. Although the development of new data systems raise important ethical and professional practice issues, these developments also take place in a digital context informed by older colonial knowledges and biases. This special issue focuses on AI (artificial intelligence) and Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the impact of new data systems on data decision-making in knowledge, engagement, and learning contexts. The special issue examines how knowledge, engagement, and learning practices must recognise the importance of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property and sovereignty rights and the potential for new technologies to reinforce and/or disrupt existing information inequalities. Landmark work on Indigenous Data Sovereignty has been completed by Lewis et al.’s Making Kin with the Machines (2018) and the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group (2020) as well as the edited collections Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an agenda (2016) and Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy (2021). We seek to build on this important research. New technologies such as AI prompt renewed considerations and examinations of the sustainability and importance of Indigenous Data Sovereignty.

The purpose of this special issue is to focus the recent debate and scholarship on artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT on questions of Indigenous Data Sovereignty. The information, decision-making, and language and data predictive practices of AI are not neutral and take place within value-laden systems and structures. Some important data justice considerations in relation to AI relate to which countries, institutions, and companies are leading the development of AI and are therefore setting the terms of data engagement. Data scraping reflects academic publishing’s already colonial and male citation bias, subject to what are referred to as confabulations. As such, how do these kinds of technologies and forms of data-gathering relate to Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the protection and support of Indigenous Knowledges?.

We welcome contributions that include but are not limited to the following

. Coloniality of AI and data systems

. Decolonisation of AI and data systems in relation to sovereignty

. Indigenous knowledges, ethics, and ethical relations in AI and data systems for sovereignty

. Ways of engaging with AI and data systems for justice and sovereignty

. Power relations of learning, cognitive imperialism, and how new AI and data systems shape learning and cultural protocols of knowing

. Ownership, data-veillance, and geopolitical considerations of AI and data systems

. Interrogations of the construction of ‘intelligence’ and relationality in new data systems

Please send abstracts and all queries to the three editors, Holly Randell-Moon (hrandell-moon@csu.edu.au), Jessica Russ-Smith (Jessica.Russ-Smith@acu.edu.au), and Karaitiana Taiuru (karaitiana@taiuru.maori.nz).