2026 Lab Newsletter
This year’s newsletter is also available as a PDF! Keep scrolling to continue reading the newsletter through this blog post.
In this edition…
A Note from Our Founder
Reproductive Justice Futures Talk
Recl[AI]ming Ethical Digital Futures: Intro and Syllabus Statement
AI Manifestation
soft digital places to land
Lab Member Updates
Glossary of Terms
A Note from Our Founder
Dearest gentle reader,
Welcome to our second newsletter in as many years! I’m your guide to the inside of our lab, the Digital Apothecary.
Thank you for your patience. Around here, we move at the speed of trust. We don’t rush the process because the process is the product. We take our time and take time off if we can’t make something work in the time frame we thought.
In this edition we are giving you a bit of our collective processes and dreams for the future. Please join us in celebrating our wins over the years including some graduates, new members, and a whole lot of archival work on the things we did and are doing.
We hope you will join us next quarter when we start a read aloud and along of Empire of AI by Karen Hao on April 10 @ 11am CST.
In whirs and beeps of love and justice,
Moya
Reproductive Justice Futures Talk
Follow along Moya’s presentation from this year’s RJ Futures: “Transforming Misogynoir & Obstetric Racism through Recl[AI]ming our Futures”! If the video isn’t displaying below, go to bit.ly/RJ-Futures2026 to access it.
Recl[AI]ming Ethical Digital Futures: A Manifestation from the Digital Apothecary
With the use of AI encouraged in many spaces today, we offer a manifestation and syllabus statement of our perspective.
Syllabus Statement
We will attempt to tread a little lighter on the planet, at least in the context of this classroom. Assignments and grades will be submitted both by hand and electronically depending on the requirements. Students are encouraged to use the same notebook and journal for in class assignments. I take seriously the hidden environmental and human costs of AI so we will continue to minimize its use in this class and the resulting harm it causes. My lab, the Digital Apothecary, has written a statement about AI in which we question its growing role in our world. There is no question that in this class, AI should not be used for course work as we are embarking on the very human process of creating our own stories. “Any use of content generated by artificial intelligence, constitutes a violation of Northwestern’s academic integrity policy.”
The Manifestation
We, The Digital Apothecary Lab, as a collective of educators and alchemists reject AI as presented to us.
We challenge the notion that what AI promises is inherently helpful.
We denounce the White supremacist logics of urgency and ableism that underpin the inevitability of AI.
We do not valorize a digital future nor romanticize an analog past but remain steadfast for the possibility to create a world that holds both together.
We recognize the ways the development and use of these technologies harm lands, waters, and peoples, and we contend that any theoretical benefit or utility of these technologies does not justify these harms.
We condemn the unequal power relations that reward AI corporations for the theft of original ideas while using these very systems to reinvest in surveillance and punishment of the most marginalized end users.
We take steps towards a future that does not rely on these technologies in coercive ways.
We insist that pushing for productivity is not a real solution to societal problems within a capitalist system.
We call forth a new relation with the digital through the integration of technologies derived before its birth and those we have yet to imagine.
We collaborate with our communities to ensure that alternative tools, knowledges, and engagements are centered.
Through imagining more just worlds with our communities, we recl[AI]m the possibilities of ethical digital futures by championing slow work where we value process over product.
soft digital places to land ☁️
the state of the internet in 2026 feels like a whiplash of urgency, performance, endless updates, ai slop, surveillance, attention harvesting, hyper-consumerism, and digital colonialism. it is exhausting. as part of my time as a community fellow with the Labs for Liberation project, i’ve been researching alternative corners of the web that offer respite, resistance, and reimaginings of what the internet can be. here, i’m in conversation with the work of the Disco Network, and their search for “digital… homes in inhospitable places.”
what follows is a collectively sourced list, gathered from Digital Apothecary lab members and my social media community, of soft digital places to land: places that remind us the internet can still hold intimacy, curiosity, and small-scale wonder.
freerice: learning, care, and tiny acts of redistribution
are.na: nonlinear research and visual wandering
breonna’s garden: digital sacred pause honoring Breonnna Taylor
internet archive: memory, history, and old web wandering
club penguin: playful nostalgia and soft social internet energy
neopets: browser-based whimsy and long-haul affection
lo-fi girl: ambient focus and digital companionship
letterboxd: film logging as mood, memory, and ritual
cosmos: idea mapping and spacious digital thinking
letter loop: slow exchange, thoughtful connection, and the feeling of correspondence
sublime: thoughtful discovery, slower browsing, and internet wandering with intention
what are the soft digital places you’d add to this growing map?
Lab Member Updates
Welcome to DA!
Dana and Namara have joined us as Early Research Experience Awards (EREA) Scholars.
Congrats Grads!
Annika, Bailey, Natalie, and Yena have completed their PhDs!
Annika is an Assistant Professor at Hamline University
Bailey is a PostDoc at Cornell
Yena is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society in UPenn
Glossary of Terms
For further reading, check out the sources in the footnotes, and/or look over the Key Equity Terms and Concepts: A Glossary for Shared Understanding1.
AI: Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to a conglomerate of technologies including Generative AI, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Cognitive Computing, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision models, as well as other processes that are understood as intelligence demonstrated by machines. The popularity of models like Chat GPT, Copilot, Gemini etc., has caused AI to become almost synonymous with Generative Artificial Intelligence.
Broligarch / Broligarchy: This term is a combination of bro and oligarch/ oligarchy. Taken from 2000s surfer speak2, it has come to refer to a small group of people, usually men, who own technology or are involved within technology industries. These men are extremely rich and powerful and have or want political influence and power to govern in place of, or in concert with (s)elected officials3.
Disability Justice: This is a framework and movement that seeks to dismantle systemic oppression facing disabled people. It goes beyond traditional civil rights based approaches4 and argues that we have to take into consideration the interconnection of disability with race, class and gender to really address and dismantle ableism in society. It was developed in 2005 by the Sins Invalid Collective.5
Fascism: A populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation, and often race, above the individual. It is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.
Genocide: The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. It is defined by the United Nations6 as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Misogynoir: Misogynoir, a term coined by Dr. Bailey, “describes the uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization.” It describes the “anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience.”7
Slow Work / Scholarship: This term was created by and within broader disability communities, and refers to the focus on slowing down neoliberal capitalistic work standards8. It emphasizes focus on the process over output and moving at the speed of trust9. This philosophy argues that a better end product and relations to each other and the work result when we are able to slow down and complete tasks in a manner that aligns with one’s capacity and abilities.
Technofascism: This takes the definition of fascism as defined above and posits that this ideology would be better served with technology at the helm instead of a populist agenda.10 Within this philosophy, science and technology are viewed as the objective arbiter of economic, social and other regimentation and due to its perceived objectivity can be used to suppress dissent to technological progress. Further, it argues that regulation is the enemy of corporate innovation and government oversight, in particular, infringes on the ability to use or exploit human and natural resources as needed to propel technological progress.11
Footnotes
CSSP (2019). “Key Equity Terms and Concepts: A Glossary for Shared Understanding.” Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Social Policy.
Ogilvie, S. (2025), The Rise of The Broligarchy. Prospect.
Norden, L. & Weiner, D. L. (2025), The Rise of America’s Broligarchy and What to Do About It. Time.
Hudson, H. (2021, September 8). Moving From Disability Rights to Disability Justice. World Institute on Disability.
Sins Invalid (nd). 10 Principles of Disability Justice.
The United Nations. (nd). Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes. Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.
Bailey, M. (2021). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (Vol. 18). NYU Press.
Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure and Accountability in Academic Life. Duke University Press.
Bailey, M. (2021). The Ethics of Pace. South Atlantic Quarterly 120(2), 285- 299. DOI:10.1215/00382876-8916032
Chayka, K. (2025, February 26). Techno-Fascism Comes To America. The New Yorker.
Dillet, B. (2025, March 10). Technofascism and the AI Stage of Late Capitalism. Blog of the APA.