Keynote speaker

We are delighted to announce that ‘Automation and data-driven journalism beyond the Western world’ -online conference will have Payal Arora as a keynote speaker!

In her keynote ‘Next billion users, next billion journalists?’ professor Arora will talk about how cheap mobile phones and data plans have brought the “next billion” users online, the vast low-income communities in the global south who are engaging with and shaping the global infosphere and the future of data-driven journalism. Does this translate to Spivak’s subaltern finally gaining voice not just as speakers but as authors, as reporters? The talk pushes against simplistic tropes of empowerment and collective intelligence by looking closely at the politics of Archiving for future facts, the Aesthetics of everyday news-making, and the Affect of digital communalism that impacts newsworthiness.

“Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist and an author, speaker and professor. She holds the Chair in Technology, Values, and Global Media Cultures at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her expertise lies in ethical AI, inclusive design & UX among low-income communities worldwide and comes with more than a decade of fieldwork experience in such contexts.

She is the author of a number of award-winning books including the ‘Leisure Commons’ and more recently the “The Next Billion Users” with Harvard Press. Engadget (Top 5 in the ‘Technorati top 100’ and Times endorsed ‘best blogs on tech’) stated that her Harvard book is “the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find.” Forbes named her the “next billion champion” and “the right kind of person to reform tech.” Several international media outlets have covered her work including The BBC, The Economist, Quartz, Tech Crunch, The Boston Globe, F.A.Z, The Nation and CBC. She has consulted on tech innovation for diverse organizations such as UNESCO, KPMG, GE, and HP. She has given more than 200 talks in 109 cities in 54 countries alongside figures like Jimmy Wales and Steve Wozniak and a TEDx talk on the future of the internet. She is the founder of Catalyst Lab, a digital storytelling organization and co-founder of FemLab.Co, a future of work initiative. She sits on several boards such as Columbia University’s Earth Institute and World Women Global Council in New York. She has held Fellow positions at GE, ZEMKI, ITSRio, and NYU and is a section editor for Global Perspectives, a new University of California Press journal. She has a Masters in International Policy from Harvard University and a PhD in Language, Literacy and Technology from Columbia University. She is Indian and American and currently lives in Amsterdam.”

For more information, please visit: https://www.eur.nl/en/people/payal-arora [Accessed 10.1.2021]