ComAI Lecture: Rafael Grohmann on “Worker-led AI Governance in Cultural Industries”
On 16 June 2026, Rafael Grohmann (University of Toronto) joined the ComAI Lecture series at the Bremer Presse-Club. Grohmann is Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies), co-lead of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster, and leader of the DigiLabour initiative. His talk, “Worker-led AI Governance in Cultural Industries,” asked how cultural workers organise collectively to have a say in how AI is used across their industries.
Grohmann opened by presenting data from the CLCF tracker Worker Mobilizations around AI in Arts, Culture, and Media – an openly accessible database documenting strikes, campaigns, and mobilisations by cultural workers around AI worldwide, which he warmly invited the audience to use. More on the project at creativelabourcriticalfutures.ca. The project has also produced a recent publication in Information, Communication & Society.
At the heart of the talk was Grohmann’s argument that workers hold two kinds of power: institutional power – through strong guilds that can halt production, like the Hollywood Writers Guild – and discursive power, because cultural workers are visible, well-known, and skilled storytellers.
He then turned to his – almost activist – work with voice actors, drawing a line from the tracker as a mapping exercise to concrete interventions. He closed by sketching his next research direction: AI literacy – but, rather than the usual top-down perspective, conceived as “pedagogies around worker powers and contexts of use.”
17. June 2026
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp
ZeMKI, Center for Media, Communication and Information Research
University of Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67620
Assistent Mrs. Schober: +49 421 218-67603
E-mail: andreas.hepp@uni-bremen.de
