Session 5: Elisha Ward & Dr Vincent Bryce, University of Oxford: AI and EDI

AI and EDI   

AI increasingly influences how research is designed, conducted, and interpreted. This shifts labour, judgement, and authority in ways that can strengthen research — or quietly introduce hidden gaps. One area where this becomes particularly visible is equality: whose data is present or absent, which voices are amplified or smoothed over, and how research findings travel into wider use. 

In this interactive workshop, we invite participants to apply an “equality stress-test” to their research practice. Rather than offering technical debiasing methods, we focus on three questions that cut across disciplines: 

1. Who is missing from the data underpinning the AI tools we use — and does that absence shape or skew our claims? 

2. What forms of human judgement or nuance might be reduced or reshaped in exchange for efficiency? 

3. If AI-driven findings are applied at scale, travelling into policy or practice, who benefits — and are there specific groups who might be inadvertently disadvantaged? 

The session combines a short framing presentation with structured discussion, drawing on participants’ own research contexts. Attendees will leave better equipped to identify structural gaps in their adoption of AI, and to integrate more reflexive, context-sensitive thinking into their research practice.