CANTech Justice: Grassroots Responses to Digital Bias and Technological Power in the Canadian Context

ABSTRACT Our co‐authored article investigates how grassroots arts and culture organizations engage technology as a site of justice‐oriented practice. Drawing on primary‐source interviews with Canadian grassroots arts and culture organizations, we outline an EDI‐infused technological praxis we call CANTech Justice (CTJ). CTJ provides a framework for understanding how cultural and artistic organizations resist exclusionary technologies and imagine justice‐centered alternatives. Rather than rejecting digital tools outright, these organizations engage in re‐purposing and re‐scripting—transforming existing technologies through creative, relational, and politically‐grounded practices that challenge dominant design norms and assert community control. CTJ also responds to the dominance of U.S.‐based technological infrastructures and frameworks in digital justice discourse. It does so by foregrounding locally‐rooted, intersectional approaches to technological agency. However, CTJ operates within the Canadian settler state—a nation built on land theft, resource dispossession, and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples. These conditions set clear limits to what CTJ strategies can achieve, particularly in relation to decolonial interventions.