Maya Indira Ganesh

Maya Indira Ganesh is a tech and digital cultures theorist, researcher, and writer. Her work weds questions of power, justice, and inequalities to those of language, knowledge, and the body as mediated by digital technologies. She is a Senior Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and course co-lead on the MSt (Master of Studies) program on AI, Ethics, and Society at the University of Cambridge, UK.

In June 2021 Maya submitted her Drphil dissertation in Cultural Sciences to Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. Her doctoral research is titled, The Ethical Apparatus: The material-discursive shaping of ethics, autonomy, and the driverless car. It examines the social, discursive, and cultural implications of how what we understand as the ‘ethical’ is being re-shaped in an attempt to regulate evolving forms of AI, algorithmic systems, and autonomous vehicles.

Maya’s academic work is deeply influenced by over a decade’s work at the intersection of gender justice, digital rights and freedom of expression, and international development in India and on projects in parts of SE Asia and Africa. She has worked with Tactical Tech, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, and APC Women’s Rights Program.

Maya continues to be associated with NGO communities through her position on the Board of Directors of ARROW, a sexual and reproductive health and rights policy advocacy research organisation working across the Asia-Pacific region.

In the past five years, Maya’s research outside of but adjacent to the academy has focused on feminism, intimacy with technology, and the digital; metaphors, imaginaries, and knowledge-making of AI; and the material economies of clouds, platforms, and voice recognition systems. Her practice includes digital-cultural, research, and writing projects, most often collaborations with creative programmers, fellow researchers, and artists. Maya has worked with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Transmediale Festival, Berlin (2019), was on the 2019-2020 Jury for Digital art at Akademie Schloss Solitude, and is a frequent speaker at arts and cultural events in Germany.

Maya has been awarded fellowships with the Berggruen Institute (2020-21), and Hivos (2020), and was a Resident Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center for a thematic residency on AI (2019). She has worked with the AI and Media Philosophy (Künstliche Intelligenz und Medienphilosophie -KIM) research group at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung (University of Arts and Design), Karlsruhe (2019); and has been a fellow of the Media Cultures for Computer Simulation (MECS) Institute for Advanced Study at Leuphana University (2018).