sinnwerkstatt

With Moro Yapha (Migration and Human Rights Advocate, GM/DE), Stella Nyanzi (Activist, Poet and Digital Rights Defender, UG/DE), Nyima Jadama (Activist & Moderator, GM/DE). Moderated by Mo R. (Project Lead, Tactical Tech, EG/US/DE).

This panel explores the pivotal role of media and technology in raising awareness and fostering community bonds among migrants and refugees. It discusses the challenges faced by migrants in Germany, Europe and beyond, and how the process of gaining agency can shift the focus from 'being a migrant' to 'becoming a citizen'. Through their individual stories, speakers will also illustrate the power of media and self-advocacy in combating systemic alienation and oppression.

Reflecting on his personal migration journey from The Gambia to Europe, Moro Yapha recounts how the lack of communication tools initially limited connectivity. This experience inspired the creation of a Facebook group in 2014 to document the perilous journey to Europe and highlight human rights abuses faced by migrants, especially those from sub-Saharan Africa. The group aimed to share untold stories, search for missing persons, and raise awareness of the struggles and exploitation faced by migrants in Europe. Motivated by the need for self-representation, Moro Yapha became a migration and human rights advocate, leveraging online platforms to challenge prevailing narratives and promote migrant voices. In 2016, this advocacy led to the co-founding of Wearebornfree! Empowerment Radio, the first self-organised African radio station in Berlin and Potsdam, now known as Kangkiling Radio. The station serves as a platform for raising awareness, empowering black music and cultures and building community among African migrants in Europe. Additionally, Moro has worked for seven years as an intercultural mediator at Fixpunkt e.V, supporting undocumented sub-Saharan Africans with health, legal, and social services.

Stella Nyanzi is a dissident poet and activist from Uganda working at the intersection of women's and LGBTQI+ rights, labour rights, freedom of expression and research, digital democracy and civil rights. She is currently a fellow of the PEN Centre Germany's Writers in Exile Programme and the Center for Ethics and Writing. Nyanzi has been arrested and charged several times for her political poetry in Uganda. Digital platforms have always played a key role in her activism. is a nascent campaign based on her recent cases in the Bavarian criminal court and administrative court. She photographed 3 security guards uttering hate speech which comprised racist, sexist and homophobic national stereotypes against a Ugandan asylum seeker in an asylum shelter in Bavaria. When they threatened to call the police, she uploaded their photograph on her Facebook timeline. Police officers confiscated her phone, opened up a section 201 case against her, forbade her to enter the premises, and escorted her off the grounds. A few weeks later, she received a house ban from all asylum and refugee shelters in Bavaria. Based on the two criminal and administrative cases, she started organising Ugandan asylum seekers to speak out against the dehumanisation they face in asylum shelters. She will briefly discuss the challenges and strategies of organising for asylum dignity based on the responses to photographing and posting online the faces of security guards violating the human rights and dignity of asylum seekers. For whom does digital democracy work in Bavaria?

Through her work on media literacy and the empowerment of refugees, migrants and women, Nyima Jadama developed her career in Germany as a TV presenter, moderator and media trainer. She left The Gambia in 2015 and dedicated herself connecting marginalised communities worldwide. After an initially difficult journey, bureaucratic hurdles and various work experiences, she founded the 'Bantaba Academy' for migrants and refugees and hosts 'Nyima's Bantaba' and 'Unfiltered Podcast' at the media organisation ALEX Berlin, giving migrants and refugees a voice to discuss their problems and tell their stories. Initially she joined ALEX Berlin as a trainee, but since 2020, she runs her own programme. Nyima describes that the word ‘Bantaba’ comes from her home language Mandinka, which is spoken in some parts of West African countries. Bantaba is a large tree under which the community in The Gambia gathers to discuss the concerns of society. With her programme, in which culture, migration and empowerment are discussed, Nyima talks about migration with migrants – and not without them, as is often the case in the media. Topics range from the direct participation of refugees to countering hate speech against migrants. The podcast 'Unfiltered Bantaba' was added in September 2023. Guests talk about stories that matter to them. Today, she is developing a media literacy project in The Gambia with the r0g agency. Through the creation of a Media Field Guide, she is empowering young women to be active in the media sector and to move from a state of oppression caused by cultural barriers to an awareness of their role in society.

https://www.disruptionlab.org/hacking-alienation

With allapopp (Digital Media and Performance Artist), Milagros Miceli (Sociologist and Computer Scientist, DAIR Institute, AR/DE), Marwa Fatafta (Researcher, Policy Analyst and Digital Rights Expert, PS/DE). Moderated by Walid El-Houri (Researcher and Editor, LBN/DE).

This panel brings together three different situated experiences of the development of AI technologies (including machine learning, digital surveillance, data generation and labelling), challenging the language used to describe them, their inner functioning and their application in both civilian and wartime contexts. Technologies are never neutral and reflect the biases, systemic structures and cultural paradigms of the geographical, social and political contexts in which they are developed. Furthermore, their usage is brining concrete consequences affecting the lives of marginalised communities and contributing in generating transational repression.

While engaging with recent developments in decolonial thought in the field of artificial intelligence, such as the Decolonial AI Manyfesto and embracing both personal hopes and discomfort caused by the expanding post-Soviet decolonial dialogue, with its new hot spot in Berlin, allapopp envisioned an ambitious experiment: to facilitate a conversation about technology in general, and the future with AI in particular, led by “us*- born on the (post)colonial margins of post-Soviet translocal experiences, cultural, geopolitical, and ethnic half-bloods.” By doing so, allapopp aims for these imaginations to enter a tangible realm of technological envisioning – envisioning futurities as a means of political participation and self-determination. And while doing so, allapopp continuously wonders: who is us*?

Through a specific investigation of data work, the often overlooked labour essential to creating datasets, Milagros Miceli discusses how it plays a critical role in shaping AI technologies. In this talk, she will present findings from the Data Workers’ Inquiry, a community-based research project conducted with 15 data workers. She will describe how issues of migration, exploration, and power shape data work, significantly impacting datasets and AI systems, and argue for the importance of addressing historical inequities, labour conditions, and epistemological standpoints when discussing AI Ethics. This talk will also highlight the need for new research questions and methodologies to better understand the complexities of AI data work.

Looking beyond the harms or 'side effects' of AI and its dangerous impact on marginalised and racialised communities, Marwa Fatafta's presentation draws on the current reality of occupied Palestine, where these technologies have been designed to automate systematic discrimination, human rights abuses, and large-scale killing. She will discuss Israel’s recent use of AI systems in warfare to surveil, target, and bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure on an industrial scale in Gaza and its implication on a global scale. Far from being an isolated issue in a faraway land, she will showcase how these battle-tested technologies and systems – and the industries behind them – are often repurposed to fuel the oppression and crackdown on migrants and minorities here in Europe. Finally, she’ll delve into the complicity of big tech in providing the technologies or services underpinning these abusive systems without transparency and how we can hold them accountable.

With Anna Titovets Intektra (Artist, Researcher and Curator, RU/PT). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE).

Floating, fighting, surviving: digital tactics, strategies, and challenges of defeating the alienation of migrants.

According to statistics, at the end of 2023, an estimated 117.3 million* people worldwide have left their home countries due to wars, conflicts, human rights violations, or because of the potential dangers connected with their ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or political opinions. When moving to a new country, migrants not only lose their roots and part of their identity but also acquire a new label from the point of view of the law. This label – be it “refugee,” “migrant,” “immigrant,” “displaced person,” or “asylum seeker” – becomes a rather crucial determinant of a person's life and rights in the new country. It's not only a matter of legal status but depending on the type of this label people become more or less unseen, oppressed, or alienated in society.

Modern immigration involves not only a physical change of geography but also relocation to a new digital environment. Despite the prevailing idea of digital globalisation, each country and even each city has its local characteristics in the digital fabric of society, digital bureaucracy, and policies towards data protection, privacy, and surveillance.

The keynote will focus on practical survivalist strategies, community-building approaches, and challenges in the process of fighting for social equality, searching for a sense of [digital] belonging, reshaping identity, and protecting social rights with digital means and technologies. Among the tactics and tools to be mentioned are not only the creation of self-organised communities, but empathetic chatbots, social media groups with crowdsourced hacks and tricks, AI bots helping to solve different migration-related issues, and guerrilla chatbots for misbehavioral activist tactics helping migrants fight existing rules in the gig economy sector. The keynote will present some examples of artistic projects addressing alienation and migrant issues. Besides, it will examine the phenomena of digital ghettoisation and the challenges of the specific pre-conditioned experience of the city and culture shaped by Google services and ranking-based apps.

The talk is partly based on Anna Titovets’ personal experience of immigration as well as research and observations gained from recent participation as a mentor/curator in the Pause / Play: Culture Under Pressure project, which deals with the artists and cultural practitioners who had to relocate due to wars and conflicts.

Artistic and tech initiatives are important for highlighting the problematic areas of digital and other forms of discrimination and, ideally, should become a foundation for change. However, these initiatives should first and foremost be seen as practices of empowerment, utilising digital tools to foster a sense of support in resisting injustice.

*According to the data published by The United Nations refugee agency.

https://www.disruptionlab.org/hacking-alienation

Gaza, Ukraine & Azerbaijan: Challenging Network Authoritarianism
With Manolo Luppichini (Filmmaker and Author, IT), Arzu Geybulla (Journalist and Editor, AzNet Watch, Global Voices, AZ/TR), Tetyana Lokot (Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society, Dublin City University, UA/IE). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE)..

This panel brings together three different stories from Gaza, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, documenting the monopoly of communication channels during wartime and how strategies of digital authoritarianism can be used to maintain power, target people and distort reality. We will also discuss how it is possible to circumvent restricted access to digital infrastructure in war, and how it is possible to empower people to use distributed tools to fight digital oppression.

Besides killing tens of thousands, the Israeli offensive has been destroying Gaza's telecommunications infrastructure. To bypass the blackouts and restore connections in hard-hit areas, NGO ACS-Italia is testing a network of Web-Trees: mobile hotspots radiating free, universally-accessible WI-FI signal. Web-Trees are grown by local Web-Gardners, committed to keep their community connected to the rest of the world and to their social ties. Manolo Luppichini will bring his recent direct experience in Rafah, when together with NGO ACS-Italia, he worked on developing the Gaza’s Web-Trees project to provide digital access within Gaza.

Journalist and editor Arzu Geybulla will speak about Azerbaijan's passionate affair with digital authoritarianism. Since 2003, the government has deployed an array of measures and tactics to spy on civil society representatives and the public at large and resort to digital censorship, persecution, and repression. As a result, Azerbaijan has ranked poorly year-on-year, on many international indexes measuring political and social freedoms including its backsliding on internet freedoms.

Tetyana Lokot presents how to resist networked authoritarianism in Ukraine’s occupied territories during Russia's full-scale invasion. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has seen the authoritarian state mixing its usual external cyber warfare tactics with internet control and information manipulation approaches inspired by its internal networked authoritarian regime. Russia’s interventions in the information spaces and telecommunications infrastructure in temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories demand greater scrutiny, yet we should also be studying Ukrainians' grassroots citizen responses to these threats.

BEYOND CONTROL
Resisting Digital Oppression & Authoritarianism

Unveiling the Depths of Online Racism: Jihad Van Puymbroeck's Story to Justice

With Jihad Van Puymbroeck (Activist and Communication Strategist, BE). Moderated by Nyima Jadama (Activist & Moderator, GM/DE).

In January 2018 Jihad Van Puymbroeck started to work at VRT NWS, the Flemish Public Broadcast. It was a moment she should have celebrated, where she could be proud of herself. But it was taken away from her, and even more than that. Who is Jihad Van Puymbroeck? A woman, a Muslim woman, with Moroccan and Belgian origins, committed and ambitious. Apparently the ideal target for the Flemish far right youth movement Schild & Vrienden. The head of the organization Dries Van Langenhove orchestrated an online racist hate campaign against her. Her overall presence in influential environments was disturbing their vision of the Belgian landscape. Their strategy to clear Jihad from the way was by making her loose her job at the strategic employer, attempting to gagging and damaging her professional and mentally.

In September 2018 journalists of VRT NWS found a way to infiltrate the online Discord groups of Schild & Vrienden and their secret activities. To the outside eye, the members succeed to build a misleading image through their well-dressed looks and eloquence. Take a deeper look and you discover a closed network where racism and sexism are rife. They uncovered the racist, sexist and antisemitic face of the right-wing group. A criminal investigation was launched after the VRT documentary.

Jihad Van Puymbroeck is one of the civil parties, she discovered a file of 200 pages of ‘secret conversations’ with the aim of smearing her. After more than 6 years the judge sentenced Dries Van Langenhove with 1-year prison sentence. Jihad Van Puymbroeck won her case after a long agony. The judge specifically mentioned Jihad in his judgement: “He encourages antagonism, discord and conflict and as such fosters physical and psychological violence."

Jihad Van Puymbroeck will tell her story about the reasons which drove her becoming a civil party, what strategy she used to sustain this legal battle, how she almost gave up but eventually saw how justice prevails.

BEYOND CONTROL: Resisting Digital Oppression & Authoritarianism
https://disruptionlab.org/beyond-control

With: Anas Aremeyaw Anas (Investigative Journalist, GH). Moderated by Stephanie Busari (Journalist and Editor for CNN, UK/NG). Like many human activities, crimes have evolved over the years and become complex – making their resolution difficult. Most crimes are committed under the thick cover of darkness, and can only be uncovered through sophisticated operations. The necessity of permeating criminal rings is of utmost importance due to the impact of such crimes on society as a collective. In this keynote, impelled by his mantra to name, shame, and jail, undercover investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas will present the mechanics of undercover and sting operations through heart-rending stories born out of his work over the years, highlighting the challenges thereof. Pioneered in Ghana and Africa, “Anasism”, popularly called the Anas principle in Ghana, involves the use of undercover tools and has proven to be a very effective strategy for penetrating criminal rings operating under the shadows of darkness. At the local level, the Anas principle has been employed to shed light on the callous treatment of individuals with mental health issues while under the custody of the agency responsible for their well-being. Subsequently, legislations were passed in the parliament of Ghana to deal with the maltreatment of individuals with mental health issues. In the story “Ghana in the eyes of God (Justice for Sale)”, several judges and judicial officers were caught taking bribes of varying degrees to bend the course of justice, free criminals, and jail the innocent. Over 40 judicial staff including judges, were sacked, and judicial reforms initialised, consequently. Internationally, Anasism was used to, for the first time, premiere the story “Number 12” which involved the uncovering of the grand and perennial corruption in football in Africa. Referees and other football officials were filmed taking bribes to change the outcome of the game which led to FIFA handing sanctions to those caught and leading to a total overhaul of football in Ghana: this work have not come without costs, with the recent assassination of Ahmed Suale, an agent of Anas playing a central role in uncovering football corruption in Africa. Through the Anas method, the story “The Spell of the Albino” was birthed, about a criminal ring harvesting human parts of albinos in Tanzania. Those involved in the horrendous act were busted and prosecuted. A similar criminal ring was penetrated in Malawi in the story “Malawi’s Human Harvest”. The list of stories involving the pe*******on and busting of criminal rings using the Anas principle is endless. Consequent reforms arising from such stories remain an indelible feature of Anasism.
www.disruptionlab.org/organised-crime

With Vincenzo Musacchio (Criminologist, IT), Dritan Zagani (Whistleblower, Former anti-Drug Police Officer, AL), Pleurad Xhafa (Artist and Activist, AL), Andrea Dip (Investigative Journalist and Researcher, BR/DE), Anton Radniankou (Chair of the Board, Center for New Ideas, BY/PL). Moderated by Verena Zoppei (Advisor Anti-corruption and Integrity, IT/DE). This panel connects different organised crime and corruption strategies from the local to the global at the political and financial levels. Globalised crime will be analysed through various local contexts: money laundering, drug-, human- and organ trafficking by Italian and global mafias; the current state of Albania regarding organised crime, corruption, and its entanglement with government and politicians; the connections between Brazil's religious far-right, political power and organised crime; as well as corruption, sanctions and the role of media in authoritarian Belarus. Vincenzo Musacchio will describe how the globalised financial system and the consequent deregulation has facilitated money laundering, allowing the world’s mafias to hide their illicit profits. He will show how the mafias benefit above all from financial deregulation, as it provides the path for them to launder money through placement, stratification, and full integration into the legal financial system. The global mafias have been able to make the most of the negative effects of globalization processes by expanding their networks of influence and power in every part of the world. They currently have access to cutting-edge technologies (airplanes, submarines, drones) for trafficking drugs, human beings, and organs. They also use complex financial and IT operations (most recently crypto currencies like Bitcoin) to launder dirty money through lawful activities. Trafficking of drugs, including co***ne, generates income to fund other crimes. It is no coincidence that the main global mafias (Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and South American) constitute the economic power in many developing countries and are capable of overturning the rules of the market, of conditioning the legal economy and democracy. Transnational crime demands transnational strategies. Twenty years after the UN Palermo Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC), it will be necessary to take further and decisive steps in the direction of an integrated system that is capable not only of guaranteeing the effective implementation of the existing legislative framework, but also of coordinating supervision of anti–money laundering efforts. In the context of organised crime and corruption in Albania, Disruption Network Lab invited Dritan Zagani, a whistleblower and former anti-drugs police officer, who currently resides in political asylum in Switzerland. In 2014-2015 after unveiling the collusion between politicians and organised crime in Albania, he was forced to leave his country. From his asylum in Switzerland he has recorded a statement for the conference in cooperation with Pleurad Xhafa, an artist and the co-founder of Debatik Center of Contemporary Art, a multidisciplinary platform that contributes on exploring critical themes such as power, corruption, colonialism, and resistance to the status quo in Albania and internationally. Both Zagani and Xhafa will contribute to the discourse sharing their personal experiences and offering insights into the current situation of political corruption and organised crime in Albania. Xhafa will take part in the panel discussion, intending to piece together a puzzle about the symbiotic relationship between organised crime and government in Albania and the effects produced by it. Andrea Dip has been covering stories on youth, inequality and poverty, violence against women, hate crimes, and attacks against the LGBTQ community for a long time, and for the past few years, she has investigated the transnational coalitions of far-right religious movements. Brazil has one of the highest rates of trans people killed, as well as femicides in the world. In the National Congress, 20% of federal deputies and 16% of senators are ultra-conservative religious, who mainly attack the rights of LGBT+ people and reproductive rights. This year, congressmen intend to vote on laws that could ban homoaffective marriage as well as abortions – even in cases of r**e or anencephaly of the fetus, or life-threatening conditions for pregnant women. The ultra-conservative discourse created to generate moral panic in the population is inflamed by far-right groups, politicians and "bolsonaristas". Bolsonarismo remains strong, despite the new progressive government. Evidence of this was the attempted coup that invaded and vandalised public buildings in Brasilia earlier this year. These far-right politicians, ultraconservative religious and fascist groups have established international connections, especially with North American and European organisations with questionable sources of funding. Meanwhile, the relationship between ultraconservative Christian churches, the far right and the militia is also growing strong in the country. Anton Radniankou will explore the intricate relationship between sanctions, corruption, and media influence in authoritarian Belarus. This presentation delves into the unintended consequences of sanctions, shedding light on how they can inadvertently fuel corruption within a regime. We will discover how Belarus has sought to export corruption to its allies while violating sanctions and learn about the role of the media in uncovering these intricate networks. The presentation will offer insights into the need for international cooperation, and the role of informed citizens in the fight against corruption.
www.disruptionlab.org/organised-crime

With Stevan Dojčinović (Investigative Reporter and Editor, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, SRB), Floriana Bulfon (Investigative Journalist, IT), Shehryar Fazli (Author and Senior Policy Advisor, Asia-Pacific, OSF, PK/UK). Moderated by Denisse Rodriguez Olivari (Researcher, BR/DE). Drug trafficking is a highly lucrative market worldwide, with an estimated value of 30 billion Euro per year in the European Union, and is estimated to account nearly 1.5% of total global trade. In the context of transnational organised crime, it is an especially complex form of criminal activity, frequently involving several states and often overlapping with other offences, including financial crime and cybercrime. This panel details how drugs are trafficked and how this impacts technical and organisational complexity, with crime groups involved becoming more specialised and more fully interconnected. Organized crime has grown in size and strength over the past three years. While citizens in various countries were still isolated due to the coronavirus, organised crime was moving drugs and money across the globe, and effectively organising murders of opponents. Investigative reporter Stevan Dojčinović will dwell deep into new ways criminals are organising themselves, and how super cartels are making organised crime organisations larger. Today, seizures of one to ten tons of drugs are a regular occurrence and are no longer as damaging to criminals as they once were. Dojčinović will describe how global narcotic smuggling works from the Balkans and Europe to North America, and from South America to the Pacific. His focus will be on the various ways in which criminals overcome barriers to grow their businesses, protect themselves, and hide their money. Trends include adopting software to encrypt communication, using offshore companies to launder billions of euros, moving leaders of organised crime groups to Dubai where they are protected from international warrants, but most importantly, investing a lot in corruption and making connections with governments on the highest level. Award-winning author and journalist Floriana Bulfon, who has spent years investigating transnational organized crime, will examine the boom in drug trafficking in Europe, which in a decade went from importing quintals of co***ne to tons per shipment, enabled by a web of collusion. Relations between criminals and men of institutions have different characteristics – in countries like the Netherlands, where mafia organisations are a recent phenomenon (such as Ridouan Taghi’s Mocro Mafia), 'simple' bribery of port authority officials has been used to facilitate the passage of containers full of narcotics. On the other hand, in places with deep-rooted presence of clans, as in Southern Italy, organised crime has been able to exploit its capillary control of the territory, like the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro, historically dominated by the 'Ndrangheta. At the same time, the global narcotics market has seen the rise of new players – the brokers: hybrid figures between entrepreneurs and bosses, able to weave licit and illicit relationships more easily with institutions, to build logistical networks, shell companies, and diplomatic protection. A dowry that has allowed them to move hundreds of tons of co***ne while living undisturbed in the Arab Emirates for years. Shehryar Fazli, specialist on political and security affairs in South Asia, will describe how Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, along with Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, became Asia’s most notorious drug smuggling hub. Since 2002, Iran and Pakistan have consistently accounted for more than 90 percent of global o***m seizures, originating in Afghanistan. Central Asia, too, contributes significantly to drug trafficking from Afghanistan to Russia and Europe, with Tajikistan being the most critical country in this northern route. These states have all adopted highly punitive counter-narcotics regimes, relying on coercive and arbitrary force, but with largely limited political will to tackle criminal organisations. Combined with high levels of corruption, this approach targets those at the lowest rungs of the criminal ladder while effectively protecting the most resourceful traffickers. Other than serving organised criminal groups, the drug trade is deeply intertwined with local economies in the region. Poppy remains vital to Afghanistan’s rural economy; for millions of Afghans, food security, children’s education, and meeting everyday costs would be impossible without its cultivation. The interim Taliban’s April 2022 edict banning poppy cultivation could, therefore, have enormous ramifications for farming communities amid a drought-prone and collapsing Afghan economy. Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan share long porous borders and deep cultural ties with Afghanistan. Cross-border informal trade and smuggling is a way of life and financial lifeline for border communities. Yet, the infrastructure that sustains these cross-border economies also lend themselves to drug and other trafficking, through transnational networks of transporters on land and sea, corrupt officials at entry and exit points, and recruiters and middlemen connecting suppliers with clients. International counter-narcotics assistance that has largely supported coercive state organs has not only failed to tackle the official corruption and collusion that enables a flourishing narcotics trade; it has also often fed that very problem. www.disruptionlab.org/organised-crime