Emancipatory Information Retrieval
Bhaskar Mitra

TL;DR
This paper advocates for an emancipatory approach to information retrieval, emphasizing social justice and humanization, and calls for interdisciplinary collaboration to develop IR methods that challenge oppression and promote collective flourishing.
Contribution
It introduces the concept of emancipatory IR, proposing a new research agenda focused on social justice, human rights, and collective emancipation within the field of information retrieval.
Findings
Defines emancipatory IR as a moral pursuit of humanization and justice.
Proposes a research agenda involving diverse disciplines and social movements.
Challenges IR community to adopt humanistic values and reimagine its role.
Abstract
Our world today is facing a confluence of several mutually reinforcing crises each of which intersects with concerns of social justice and emancipation. This paper is a provocation for the role of computer-mediated information access in our emancipatory struggles. We define emancipatory information retrieval as the study and development of information access methods that challenge various forms of human oppression, and situates its activities within broader collective emancipatory praxis. The term "emancipatory" here signifies the moral concerns of universal humanization of all peoples and the elimination of oppression to create the conditions under which we can collectively flourish. To develop an emancipatory research agenda for information retrieval (IR), in this paper we speculate about the practices that the community can adopt, enumerate some of the projects that the field should…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInnovative Human-Technology Interaction · Information Retrieval and Search Behavior · ICT in Developing Communities
