In this interview, Just Tech Program Assistant An Doan and Just Tech Editor Rodrigo Ugarte spoke with 2024 Just Tech Fellow Petra Kuppers about her Just Tech-supported project Planting Disabled Futures, her first installation, the impetus behind her project, and what participants will experience when they enter her virtual reality world.

Meet Petra Kuppers, one of our 2024–2026 Just Tech Fellows. A queer, disabled cis woman of size, she is a performance artist and disability activist who uses expanded media and video-dance to celebrate copresence with fellow disabled people, in particular people who live with pain or exhaustion. Her work is driven by principles of access through artful improvisation, awareness of histories of exclusion, and centers disabled people as knowledge carriers and storytellers.

In this interview, Just Tech Editor Rodrigo Ugarte and Program Assistant An Doan speak with Lilian OIivia Orero, a Kenyan attorney and activist whose work focuses on the intersection of gender, technology, and law, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, about her advocacy work ensuring women’s online safety, gender bias in AI policy, and SafeOnline Women Kenya (SOW-Kenya), the organization she founded.

Join Just Tech and the Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) on April 10 at 3:30 p.m. ET for a panel discussion on “Listening for Bias: The Politics and Potential of Speech AI.” Just Tech Fellows Johann Diedrick, Dorothy Santos, Jay Cunningham, and NYU professor Edward Kang will address the politics and potentials of speech AI, asking who gets to design AI speech technologies and how these are developed to respond to communities’ needs. The panel will be moderated by NYU professor Mara Mills.