No Borders, No Nations, Stop Deportations: Designers, Technologists, and the Fight Against Technofascism
We are honoured to welcome Sasha Costanza-Chock as the closing keynote speaker of the LDE GMD Annual Conference 2026. Sasha Costanza-Chock (she/they/ella/elle) is a researcher, designer, and author whose work supports community-led processes that build shared power, dismantle the matrix of domination, and advance ecological survival. They are Head of Research and Sensemaking at OneProject.org, a Faculty Associate with the Berkman-Klein Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Design Justice Network.
Keynote: No Borders, No Nations, Stop Deportations: Designers, Technologists, and the Fight Against Technofascism
The current map of borders is young. It was mostly drawn over the last few centuries as settler colonialism, slavery, and imperial conquest carved up Indigenous lands and attempted to fix who may move and who is contained. Today, border regimes are being rebuilt as automated infrastructure. As the broligarchs of Silicon Valley openly align with the far right, imperial wars waged with AI kill chains and an escalating climate crisis push more people toward the imperial core and the lands of their former colonizers. The far right channels working-class anger over enshittified jobs, rising costs, the housing crisis, and crumbling infrastructure into nativist fear of the migrant other, amplified by hyperconcentrated media control. Tech firms compete for contracts to militarize and automate migration control: Palantir tools that guide ICE agents to target migrants within a geographic zone, facial recognition on agents’ phones, Flock camera networks feeding AI systems that process surveillance data at new scale. Yet immigrant rights networks are building power. They forge multiracial, cross-class solidarities, support fugitive strategies and mutual aid, and mobilize co-conspirators who organize rapid response over encrypted channels to block, film, and disrupt enforcement. Drawing on the design justice network principles, this talk explores how designers and technologists can work alongside migrant communities and the growing wave of social movements to build alternatives to the fascist technopolitical project, and towards freedom of movement for all.
Design Justice & Book Signing
Sasha is the author of Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020). The book outlines the Design Justice Network's principles and offers a framework for designers and technologists working alongside communities most impacted by the systems they aim to transform.
Sasha will join a book signing session following the keynote. Limited Copies of Design Justice will be available at the conference. You are welcome to bring your own copies of the book.
Roundtable Session: In Conversation with Sasha Costanza-Chock
Alongside the closing keynote, we are hosting a smaller, more intimate session with Sasha focused on queer perspectives, intersectionality, and design justice. The session offers space for exchange with Sasha on how design justice principles speak to queer, trans, and intersectional organising — and how those perspectives shape the practice and politics of design.
Time: 11:30 - 12:30 | Room: TBC