Building 21

🪷At Building 21, projects often start from a question that sticks.

For B21 scholar Islamiyat Jamiu, it was this:
“how can something be described as just, yet not always feel that way in lived experience?”

In her project “Between Devotion and Justice”, Islamiyat looks at how women from Muslim backgrounds move between faith, feminist thinking, and the realities of everyday life.

She spoke with women in different places in their relationship to Islam — some practicing, some questioning, some who’ve stepped away. What comes through isn’t a simple “for or against,” but something more layered. A lot of the tension isn’t about belief itself, but about interpretation — who defines it, and whose voices are heard.

Feminism, in these conversations, wasn’t always an identity people claim. It showed up more as a way of asking questions — about autonomy, expectations, dignity.

The project doesn’t try to land on a clean answer. It stays with the gap between what is said to be just and what people actually experience — and how individuals keep navigating that space over time.

🎥 Watch the video to hear Islamiyat talk about her work and her experience in her own words.

👀 Read about her project here: https://www.building21.ca/scholars/islamiyat-jamiu

🗣️ Spread the word: change.org/building21

Featuring: Islamiyat Jamiu
Created and Produced by: Alex Nicholas Chen
Additional Footage by: Mohamed Amine CHAAI

(PART 2) 💃🌌 Mathilde tells us about how she reconnected her dance brain—unused in her degree program—with her physics brain during her time as an interdisciplinary fellow here at Building 21.

Now, Mathilde is LA Dodger’s first AI research scientist. She also went on to develop a new subfield of ML called ‘Topological Deep Learning’, a research program dedicated to studying human motion and intuition using deep learning at the Geometric Intelligence Lab at UC Santa Barbara.

Support our last days at McGill University here: change.org/building21 🙏🙏🙏

Featuring: Mathilde Papillon
Created & Produced by: Alex Nicholas Chen & Neil Roy Choudhury
Emerged in Montréal, QC 2026

🧮“Modelling a way to be in the world that will really help us” — That is how Philippe Beaudoin (LawZero, Waverly, Element AI, Google) generously describes what happens at B21.

Philippe shared one of his own ‘out-there’ ideas with the 2026 Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute - B21 Fellows earlier this year.

A ‘Phenomenal Alignment’ model of consciousness that rests on an inter-relational ontology, one that seems to dissolve the traditional hard problem and open up new possibilities of understanding 2nd order effects of AI.

EXACTLY the kind of idea that Building 21 believes should be nurtured, explored, stress tested, witnessed.

Safe to say, Philippe has found an intellectual home here 😄

(Part 1/3) Please support these videos by liking, commenting, reposting!! They’re so fun to make but also take quite a bit of time 🌎

⚾️💃 LA Los Angeles Dodgers first AI research scientist, Mathilde Papillon, shares with us about how her combination of physics and dance all started at B21!

🤞Spread the word: change.org/building21 !!!