Payal Arora
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands

Payal Arora is a Full Professor and Chair in Technology, Values, and Global Media Cultures at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the Founder and Executive Director of a digital activism organization, Catalyst Lab. She is a digital anthropologist and author of several books including Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas (Ashgate, 2010), The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 (Routledge, 2015; Winner of the EUR Fellowship Award), and, The Next Billion Users: Digital Life beyond the West (Harvard University Press, 2019). She is the co-editor of Crossroads in New Media, Identity & Law: The Shape of Diversity to Come (Palgrave, 2015). Much of her research focuses on digital cultures, global inequality and data governance in the Global South. She has published over 50 papers in her field and has given 165 presentations in 102 cities in 52 countries, including a TEDx talk on the future of the internet.

Join Payal Arora for her talk on “Inclusive Design and the Pathway to Action”

Doris Allhutter
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria

Photo by: Nini Tschavoll

Doris Allhutter is a Senior Academy Scientist at the Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA), Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a Lecturer at the TU Vienna and the Johannes Kepler University Linz. She was the recipient of the Käthe Leichter Award 2020 and several publication awards. In 2021/22, she is an Associate Fellow at the Digital Curation Institute, University of Toronto, and she was a visiting researcher at Vassar College, New York (2019), UC Berkeley (2013) and Lancaster University, UK (2011). Her research focuses on how social inequality and ideologies of human difference co-emerge with information infrastructures and sociotechnical systems. She studies the implicit normativity of computing practices in machine learning and AI under the lens of how these practices are entrenched in power relations. Recent publications include a Special Issue in Feminist Theory on Materiality-Critique-Transformation: Challenging the Political in Feminist New Materialisms, the paper Algorithmic Profiling of Job Seekers in Austria: How Austerity Politics Are Made Effective in Frontiers in Big Data, as well as Of ‘Working Ontologists’ and ‘High-quality Human Components’. The Politics of Semantic Infrastructures in DigitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies (Winner of the Olga Amsterdamska Award 2020). Allhutter has an MA in Social and Economic Sciences, a Post-Graduate Diploma in ‘Governance in the European Union’, and a PhD in Political Science.

Join Doris Allhutter for her talk on “Digital Future(s) of Welfare and the Power of Infrastructure”

Jeanette Hofmann
Berlin Social Science Center,
Germany

Photo by: David Ausserhofer

Prof Hofmann’s current research addresses the interplay of democracy and digitalisation with a focus on algorithmic systems, the social shaping of digital technologies and the regulation of digital platforms. Her network of research groups studies the evolution of the digital society, the politics of digitalization, the digital transformation of democracy and the logics of automated decision-making systems.

In addition to her academic duties, Prof Hofmann has served in various advisory capacities. She chaired an academic expert commissions on digitalisation and democracy (Leopoldina, National Academy of the Sciences), an academic commission on 'Young Engagement in the Digital Age' (German Government), and she was a member of the expert group to the EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy.

Join Jeanette Hofmann for her talk on “Imagining democracy through the lens of learning machines”