Miriyam Aouragh secures €288,500 AI Collaborative grant as part of a coalition for project on technology, securitisation, and justice

Screenshot from collaborative.ai

Over the next two years, Prof. Miriyam Aouragh will work with partners from the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) and the Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice as part of the newly formed Tech Infrastructure Coalition—an initiative dedicated to community-driven research and collective strategy building in technology policy.

The Coalition has been awarded a €288,500 grant for a new research project, “Collective Counter-Strategies: Breaking the New Normal of Securitisation and Digital Competitiveness.” The project, funded by The AI Collaborative, responds to urgent debates about how artificial intelligence is governed and whose interests it serves. The AI Collaborative was established to ensure that decisions shaping AI’s future are rooted in democratic values and public accountability.

Through this grant, the Tech Infrastructure Coalition will critically examine how the European Union’s digitalisation and industrial strategies, framed around “securitisation” and “digital competitiveness,” are reshaping both states and economies. The team will develop collective strategies and alternative policy approaches that foreground racial, social, environmental, and economic justice.

“This project challenges dominant narratives about AI and digitalisation. By bringing together communities, activists, and researchers, we aim to rethink what public interest means in an era of expanding computational power and securitised governance,” writes the group.

Over two years, the Coalition will conduct policy-oriented research, community-led working sessions, and critical interventions with policymakers and civil society. Their aim is to highlight how digital infrastructures can also entrench inequalities, and to propose more equitable alternatives.

The project builds on Aouragh’s long-standing work with TITiPI, a transdisciplinary initiative she co-founded with Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard, and Femke Snelting. TITiPI convenes activists, artists, engineers, and theorists to reimagine what technologies designed in the public interest might look like when that public is diverse, contested, and evolving.