Designing Inclusive Tech: Building Hopeful AI Futures with the Global Majority
2025 Communication Annual Lecture
Content
When it comes to tech, the mainstream headlines are bleak: Algorithms control and oppress. AI will destroy democracy and our social fabric, and possibly even drive us to extinction. While legitimate concerns drive these fears, we need to equally account for the fact that tech affords young people something incredibly valuable—a rare space for self-actualization. In From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech, award-winning author Payal Arora explains that outside the West, where most of the world's youth reside, there is a significantly different outlook on tech: in fact, there is a contagion of optimism toward all things digital. These users, especially those in marginalized contexts, are full of hope for new tech. As AI disrupts sectors across industries, education, and beyond, the Global South becomes the navigator of all manner of forced disruptions, leapfrogging obstructive systems, norms, and practices to rapidly reinvent itself. Drawing on field insights in diverse global contexts such as Brazil, India, and Bangladesh, Arora describes what drives Gen Z to embrace new technologies. Arora also takes heart in the power of numbers, as the users from the majority world infuse algorithms with everyday aspirations, pushing for a new digital order. She makes the case that it is not naive to be optimistic about our digital future. On the contrary, it is our moral imperative to design with hope.
About the Speaker
Payal Arora, PhD, is the Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University, co-founder of FebLab and the Inclusive AI Lab, and author of the 2024 book From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech. She is recognized as a leading digital media anthropologist whose work advances theories, designs, and policies for digital inclusion in the Global South.
About the Lecture
Every spring, the Communication Annual Lecture invites nationally and internationally recognized scholars to UMass Amherst to dialogue with the campus and the Western Mass community about their outstanding scholarship and contributions to the field of communication in the analysis of contemporary social problems. Speakers are nominated and selected by members of faculty and the graduate student body at large.