Seyram Avle, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst has been named a Global Horizons Senior Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) in Uppsala, Sweden.
At SCAS, she will be working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Future Worlds: Chinese Techno Power and African Imaginaries. This book examines the socio-technical practices underlying the design and uses of digital hardware, AI, and data flows between Africa and China.
Professor Avle studies digital technology cultures and innovation across Africa, China, and the United States. This work primarily takes a critical approach towards understanding how digital technologies are made and used, as well as their implications for issues of labor, identity, and futures. Avle’s research centers the lived experiences of people who are consistently “written out of the archive” and interrogates taken-for-granted notions of where technologies come from, what they are imagined to do, and for whom. This research is interdisciplinary and is published across Media Studies journals such as Media, Culture and Society; Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) venues such as CHI and CSCW; as well as Science & Technology Studies (STS) journals like Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. Other works are available in Global Studies journals such as Global Perspectives.
Additionally, she is a founding member of the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab (GloTech) at UMASS.