Pull Up a Chair Series
AI & Our Communities
Fall 2026- Spring 2027
THEME: Who gets a say in the AI systems reshaping our everyday lives?
AI is already at work in our jobs, our health, our neighbourhoods and our public spaces. Most of the conversations about it happen in rooms most of us will never enter. Pull Up a Chair series moves the conversation to a room you can enter: a series of free, 90-minute community sessions, each taking one subject that touches everyone, employment, data centres, mental health, women's health data, and AI-powered surveillance.
Some sessions run as facilitated workshops where small groups do the talking; others as moderated panels where experts and people with lived experience take questions from the room. No expertise is required and no jargon comes from the front. Every session ends with plain-language resources to take home. The name is the invitation: pull up a chair, the conversation is better with you in it.
PAST: AIGSS Inaugural Summit
ST. LUCIA 2024
THEME: Can new technology open a real path for the Global South?
Every technological wave has promised a way out. Too often that promise is blunted by the structures of the global economy, which have long kept the Global South producing raw value rather than capturing it. The inaugural summit asked the harder version of the question: this time, with AI and emerging tools, can it be different?
Saint Lucia, with its Creole heritage, was the right backdrop. The creative sector, the orange economy, is one of the South's genuine growth frontiers: a way to turn untapped cultural wealth into employment and economic independence. October is Creole Heritage Month on the island, so the timing was deliberate.
