Prof. Payal Arora
Pessimism to Promise: Building Inclusive Tech with the Global South
Abstract
When it comes to new tech, the mainstream headlines are bleak: Algorithms control and oppress. AI will destroy democracy and our social fabric, and possibly drive us to extinction. Payal Arora in her 2024 MIT Press book, From Pessimism to Promise, longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards, argues that the West is suffering from a “pessimism paralysis” – a despair, and even impotence towards all things digital. While legitimate concerns drive these fears, we need to equally account for the fact that technology offers young people something incredibly valuable—a rare space for self-actualization. There is a contagion of optimism in the Global South, where 90 percent of the world’s youth reside. As AI disrupts sectors across industries, education, and beyond, these young creators have become lead navigators of all manners of forced disruptions, leapfrogging obstructive systems, norms, and practices to rapidly reinvent themselves. Drawing on ground level realities in diverse global contexts such as engaging with refugees in Brazil, to creatives and gig workers in India and Bangladesh, Arora reveals what drives these groups to be hopeful despite the formidable risks and harms. She argues that pessimism is the privilege for those who can afford to be in despair; the rest of the world have little choice but to be hopeful if they want to have agency over their futures. We need to take heart in the power of numbers, as the creators from the majority world infuse algorithms with everyday aspirations, pushing for a new digital order.
Bio
Payal Arora is a Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and co-founder of two inclusive tech initiatives- Inclusive AI Lab, and FemLab. She is a leading digital anthropologist with two decades of user experiences in the Global South. Payal is the author of 100+ articles and award-winning books including “The Next Billion Users” with Harvard Press. Forbes named her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech.’ She has been listed in the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2025 and won the 2025 Women in AI Benelux Award. Her new book with MIT Press “From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech” has been longlisted for the 2024 Porchlight Business Book Awards. 200+ international media outlets have covered her work including the Financial Times, Wired, and The Economist, and Tech Crunch. She has consulted for several organizations including Spotify, KPMG, Adobe, IDEO, and Google. She has given 350+ keynotes in 85 countries for events such as re:publica, COP26, and the World Economic Forum, and TEDx talks. She is a Harvard and Columbia University, and Rockefeller Bellagio Resident Fellow alumni, and lives in Amsterdam.
Prof. Nick Couldry
The Space of The World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t?
Abstract
In this lecture, drawing on his recent book for Polity, Nick Couldry will reflect on the global space of social communications and interaction that has been constructed over the past three decades through a commercialized internet and the emergence of digital platforms whose business model depends on the extraction of data from their users and the shaping of user behaviour in order to optimize user behaviour that will generate advertising value. What if those conditions – valid perhaps in their own commercial terms – have guaranteed a space of human interaction that is larger, more polarized, more intense, and more toxic than is compatible with human solidarity, and as we have seen recently, increasingly complicit with toxic forms of political power? This would be a major problem for humanity that social theory might play some role in deconstructing and potentially even solving, by formulating alternatives. So how might we build a different space of the world, less likely to be toxic and more likely to generate the solidarity and effective cooperation that humanity needs if it is to have any chance of addressing its huge, shared challenges?
Bio
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and since 2017 a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of seventeen books including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest books include The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? (Polity 2024), Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (Penguin/W. H. Allen 2024, with Ulises Mejias), Media: Why It Matters (Polity: 2019) and Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction (Routledge 2021). Nick is also the co-founder of the Tierra Común network of scholars and activists (https://www.tierracomun.net/ ).
Prof. Lina Dencik
State-tech power laid bare: what does it mean to talk about data justice in the current moment?
Abstract
Historically, a key task of media and communication studies, within a broader framework of critical social science, has been to expose and explain power structures and relationship to alleviate both latent and manifest unnecessary and unwanted human suffering. Often this concerns itself with uncovering how media power is bound up with other forms of social power, whose interests are being served and how. Yet as our information systems have complexified and become further embedded in everyday activities, it appears that we are now in a moment when such power dynamics no longer need uncovering; they are being played out in the open. From Elon Musk in the White House to the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan inviting further partnerships with Big Tech, it is now clear for everyone to see that state-tech relations have a defining role for the future of society. Yet what is the nature of these relations? What avenues are available to advance social justice in such a context? And what role can media and communication studies play? This talk will reflect on data justice debates in the current moment, focusing on both the nature of computational infrastructure as well as the broader (geo)politics that contextualises it, and will make the case for the advent of a marked shift in state-tech relations that require us to (re)consider what responses might be appropriate in order to advance conditions that will enable human flourishing.
Bio
Lina Dencik is Professor and University Research Leader in AI Justice at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Co-Founder/Director of the Data Justice Lab and has published widely on digital media and the politics of data, with a particular focus on governance and resistance. Her recent publications include Data Justice (2022, Sage), The Media Manifesto (2020, Polity) and Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society (2018, Polity). She is currently Lead Principal Investigator for the international project Big Tech, AI and Democracy [AIDEMOCRACY] funded by the Transatlantic Platform Scheme (ESRC).
Prof. Guobin Yang
Will You Hear the People Sing? Narrative Imagination and the Future of Digital Communication
Abstract
As we ponder the histories, presents, and futures of media and communication amidst all the buzz of “artificial unintelligence” (Broussard 2018), it is imperative to center the voices of the marginalized, disempowered, and exploited peoples around the world. The voices of these people, and the silences that never get to be voiced, have an emotional and moral power that cannot be matched or replaced by algorithm-driven machines. To center their voices is to document, preserve, and celebrate stories of ongoing struggles for justice, as well as to excavate untold stories of past and present forms of slow violence and harm. It is to understand the sources and power of the narrative imagination in their everyday struggle. In this talk, I examine forms of narrative imagination on Chinese social media to reveal the possibilities of grassroots storytelling under conditions of commercial and state-sponsored platformization. Distinguishing between storytelling and storyselling (Han 2024), I show how social media users reframe social issues and experiences in creative and iterative processes of networked participation. Lessons from these digital storytelling practices are distilled for understanding the challenges and possibilities of future digital communication.
Bio
Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009), The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), and The Wuhan Lockdown (2022). He has edited or co-edited several books, including, most recently, Pandemic Crossings: Digital Technology, Everyday Experience, and Governance in the COVID-19 Crisis (with Bingchun Meng and Elaine Yuan, 2024). His current research focuses on digital activism, civic storytelling, and the digital politics of emotions.