Rahul Bhargava, Director of the Data Culture Group and Assistant Professor in Journalism and Art + Design at Northeastern University
Join the event on YouTube Live, Wednesday, February 4, 2026, 5:30 PM EST:
Data is now commonly used in community organizing, civic governance, newsrooms, and museums, but our tools have changed little. We’re stuck with surveys, spreadsheets, and charts designed for corporate boardrooms, approaches that weren’t designed for participation and empowerment. This talk will introduce various provocations that Rahul Bhargava has created over the last 15 years to push back on this disconnect. These include participatory data murals, playful museum exhibits, educational experiences for learners, data tools aids for journalists, interrogations of bias in AI, and collaboratively created machine learning models for human rights defenders. These all serve as examples of a creative approach to civic data design, creating digital and off-screen approaches that help communities to tell their own data stories.
RAHUL BHARGAVA is an educator, designer, and artist working on creative data storytelling and computational journalism in support of social justice and community empowerment. He creates data murals and theatre with communities, award-winning museum exhibits, AI-powered civic technologies with CSOs, and delivers hands-on workshops and keynote talks across the globe. Rahul’s first book, Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information, is now available from Oxford University Press. He leads the Data Culture Group at Northeastern University as an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Art + Design.
About the Diverse Perspectives in Digital Media & Design 2026 Speaker Series
To paraphrase James Baldwin, nothing can be changed until it is faced. This is certainly true of the inequities that have historically shaped digital media content, fields, and careers. Join UConn’s Digital Media & Design department in welcoming industry professionals, artists, and media scholars from the film, design, cultural, game, and other sectors to discuss how issues of equity manifest in their work, creative processes, and professions, allowing us to reflect on how our own practice can support greater equity, diversity, and inclusion.
For more information, contact: Digital Media & Design Department at meredith.friedman@uconn.edu