Unlearning Systems
As modern society grapples with environmental crises, systemic inequality, and structures of exclusion, this debate questions whether both ancestral wisdom and the lived knowledge of those pushing back—across identities, movements, and generations—can offer vital insights for reimagining our relationship with the world.
Explore the transformative potential of unlearning dominant ways of knowing and organizing, through the lens of Indigenous knowledge, youth-led resistance, and struggles against fixed norms and inherited hierarchies.
Originally recorded November 9th, 2025
Speakers Featured
Keoni Mahelona
Keoni (kanaka ʻōiwi / native Hawaiian) is the CTO at Te Hiku Media and a leading practitioner of indigenous data sovereignty. Originally from Anahola on the island of Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi, Keoni has been living and working in Te Hiku o Te Ika for over 10 years having first arrived in Aotearoa as a Fulbright Scholar. As a driving force behind the development of digital innovation projects that seek to secure the future of te reo Māori and other indigenous languages, Keoni makes decisions every day to protect the sovereignty of Māori data and technologies.
Luísa Franco Machado
Luísa Franco Machado is a an award-winning digital rights advocate and the founder of EquiLabs, a youth-led digital rights laboratory reshaping AI and data governance through equity and justice. A UN Young Leader for the SDGs, Future Minds 25 Under 25 awardee in STEM & innovation, and a Rising Star on Apolitical’s Government AI 100, Luísa has built a career driving trustworthy AI and data policies at OECD.AI, GIZ, UNDESA, and governments globally.
Reaching over 10 million people with her advocacy for rights-based digital policies, she has spoken at the UN General Assembly, Nobel Prize Summit, and dozens other high-level global fora. Her research at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Sciences Po Paris advanced high-level decisions on AI ethics and data policy, and she mobilizes a community of 70,000+ online, making digital rights central to movements worldwide.
