Connected Life 2025: C³ – Connect. Create. Compute.

About

Check out the Connected Life website!

In 2025, digital infrastructure is already a part of our everyday existence. From generative AI shaping communication to geopolitical cyberconflicts and climate-tech entanglements, our connected systems of the Internet carry unprecedented power and risks. The digital sphere is fragmented by platform politics, algorithmic opacity and widening access gaps, reinforcing existing inequalities in new forms. Within this complexity also lies opportunity – an opportunity to not just critique the systems we inherit, but also to actively rewire them.

At Connected Life 2025, we shift the conversation from critique to creation. Under the theme C³ – Connect. Create. Compute., we engage with three core dimensions of this transformation: how we connect across fragmented digital spaces; how we create tools, norms and cultures through design and policy; and how we compute the data and architecture that underpin our digital world. From global governance and grassroots innovation to virtual identities, we foreground interdisciplinary dialogue and practice-based research aimed at reimagining the digital sphere from the ground up.

Through keynote talks and panel presentations, Connected Life offers a multi-dimensional engagement in this one day conference — connecting people, creating ideas, and computing change. Join us in shaping how we live, design, and act in a deeply connected digital world.

Agenda

26th June 2025 – Jesus College
Timing
10:00 – 10:20	Arrival Coffee and Welcome
10:20 – 10:30	Welcome Remarks	Professor Victoria Nash (Remote) (Atrium)
10:30 – 11:30	Opening Keynote	Dr Fabian Braesemann (Atrium)
11:30 – 12:30	Morning Panels	Evolving Digital Market (Atrium)	Governance and Infrastructure (Level 1)
11:30 – 11:50	Presentation 1	The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI: Introducing the Fairwork Action Research Project   Professor Mark Graham	Layered Digital Colonialism in LLMs: A Critical Global South Framework for Analysis and Counter-measures   Zixuan Ji
11:50 – 12:10	Presentation 2	World Building in Emerging Markets: From The Passion Economy to Outer Space   Utkarsh Amitabh	The case study of EquiLabs   EquiLabs is a global youth- and queer-led digital rights initiative working to reimagine participation in the governance of data and AI systems   Luisa Franco Machado
12:10 – 12:30	Presentation 3	Algorithmic Mirror: Visualising Data Across Platforms Supporting Adolescents’ Sense of Data Autonomy on Social MediaYui Kondo	Neither Queer nor Just a Transaction”: Double Moral Anxiety and the Boundary Work of Intimacy in Otome Cosplay Commissions Ziyu Deng
12:30 – 13:30	Lunch (Networking)
13:30 – 14:30	Interim Keynote	HYBRIDIZED REALITIES: The Rise of Screen Corporeality   Professor Richard Koeck (Atrium)
14:30 – 15:30	Afternoon Panels	Digital Society and Empowerment (Level 1)	Creativity and Humanities (Atrium)
14:30 – 14:50	Presentation 1	Gen-AI and the implications for intellectual autonomy: a provocation   Professor Cristina Costa (Remote)	TECHNO-UTOPIA   Dr Robert Laidlow
14:50 – 15:10	Presentation 2	Measuring Verbal Violence: Studying Online Dehumanisation in the Russia-Ukraine War   Elizaveta Chernenko	Digitally unlocking Hidden and Complex Histories   Professor Kathryn Eccles
15:10 – 15:30	Presentation 3	I Used to Pray for Vines Like This: Digital Nostalgia, Archival Practices, and the Preservation of UGC   Joelle Saunders	Morphogenesis: Creating Art with Digital Biology   Andy Lomas
15:30 – 16:00	Afternoon Break (Networking)
16:00 – 16:50	Closing Keynote	Revisiting AI Justice in China: Rationale and Risks behind the Progressive Movement   Professor Weiwei Shen (Atrium)
16:50 – 17:00	Closing Remarks	CL Committee Team (Atrium)

Registration

We are excited to announce that tickets for Connected Life 2025 are now live! 

Join us on Thursday, 26th June 2025, in Oxford, UK for a one-day interdisciplinary conference exploring how we connect, create, and compute in an increasingly digital world. 

Tickets are free! Register below!