Course Designer
Bishakha Datta leads the pioneering gender, sexuality and technology portfolio at Point of View. Bishakha, who started her working life as a journalist, writer and filmmaker, explores marginal, invisible, and silenced points of view across her work.
Her documentary work includes In The Flesh, a film on the lives of three sex workers, and Taza Khabar, which delves into a unique women-run rural newspaper. Books she edited include Nine Degrees of Justice, a collection of essays on the struggle against violence on women in India, and And Who Will Make the Chapatis?, an anthology on rural women's political participation. She is the co-founder of the online imprint, Deep Dives, which publishes long-form essays on ‘the way we live now’. She is also a wikipedian, on the board of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), and on the advisory board of the Software Freedom Law Centre.
Course Designer
Nishant Shah (he/him) is a Professor of Global Media and the Director of the Digital Narratives Studio at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a knowledge partner with Point of View (Mumbai).
After co-founding the Centre for Internet & Society (India) in 2008, he has since then, worked in various academic roles as the Director of Digital School at Leuphana University in Germany, and the Vice-President of Research at ArtEZ University of the Arts in The Netherlands. He is also a knowledge partner with Digital Asia Hub (Singapore/Hong Kong), and Radboud Institute of Culture and History (Nijmegen). Nishant actively positions his work at the intersections of academic research, humanist traditions of story-telling and meaning making, and capacity development for hopeful change practice. His last two books Really Fake( University of Minnesota Press) and Overload, Excess, Creep: An Internet From India (Institute of Network Cultures / Leftword Books), are available for open digital access. His current preoccupations are about expanding and exploring the affordances of digital authorship, authenticity, and authority towards collective action.
Course Designer
Dr Padmini Ray Murray is a feminist researcher, maker and the founder-director of Design Beku - a collective of researchers, artists, technologists and designers who work towards making design and digital practice more locally rooted, contextually relevant and ethical.
Padmini Ray Murray's research-led practice focuses on challenging acts of infrastructural and algorithmic violence, and creating alternative digital spaces and imaginations that are characterised by feminist values, specifically an ethics of care. To explore the possibilities of manifesting these spaces, Padmini founded Design Beku, a design and digital collective, that aims to dismantle expectations created by market-driven notions of design by following design justice principles, that advocate designing with communities, and not for. Her creative work includes Visualising Cybersecurity (with Paulanthony George & CIS, 2019) about how cybersecurity is represented in the media; On Affecting the Archive (as artist in residence at Serendipity Arts Festival, 2020); an animated short entitled Appa and his Invisible Mundu on data and digital rights (with Varun Kurtkoti and Paulanthony George, 2021. She was the curator for Smarter Digital Realities, working with 21 residents from India and Bangladesh about technology and the city, and performing Abhi.Neta Aayenge (as part of Last Seen), a digital theatrical work developed under the aegis of Refunction, a grant for experimental work online awarded by the Goethe Institut in 2020. Her work Gathering Multitudes has been recently featured as a highlight of the Wired Women programme for the NEoN Digital Arts Festival and recently exhibited her work as part of a residency, Unstacked: articulations of the algorithmic condition at Khoj Studios.
Knowledge Partner
Dr Noopur Raval (she/they/any) is a queer feminist, anti-caste technologist and an interdisciplinary researcher trained in media studies, science studies and critical information studies. Noopur also dabbles in craft practice to inform her pedagogical work as an educator of work and labor. Noopur is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Media department at University of California Santa Cruz and an incoming assistant professor in Information Studies at University of California Los Angeles in 2023. Noopur’s work thus far has engaged ethnographic methods to understand the social, political, economic and moral transformations inaugurated by algorithmic gig economy platforms. In ongoing work, she is studying issues of cultural and political change within technology corporations in Silicon Valley and their impact on immigrant tech workers.
Knowledge Partner
Nayantara is a researcher and lawyer working on the politics and cultures of technologies. She studies, teaches and writes about the political economy of data, and its relationship with the law. She pursues an interdisciplinary practice including through artistic methods and journalistic investigations, and has a keen interest in legal and media theories. She co-founded Persuasion Lab (ad.watch), a project on political advertising on social media. At the lab, she creates installations about the ‘informational turn’ in propaganda and influence, and intervenes within legal and policy discourse. Previously at the Internet Democracy Project, she worked on programs exploring a feminist politics of data, where she developed work related to freedom of expression, surveillance, net neutrality and the gendered use of the internet. As visiting faculty at the National Law School of India University she created a curriculum on ‘Data Politics and the Law.’
Knowledge Partner
Dr. Anja Kovacs is a researcher and consultant focusing on feminist perspectives on the digital society. Previously the founding-director of the Internet Democracy Project, she is now a founding partner of Feminist Futures, exploring and addressing power imbalances in the areas of norms, governance and infrastructure in digital india and beyond. Her current research and consultancy work is centred in particular on gender, bodies, surveillance, and dataveillance, and on gender, sexuality, freedom of expression and online abuse. She has also conducted extensive research on the architecture of Internet governance. Anja has lectured in the UK, India and Brazil, has been a Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, and is currently a CyberBRICS Non-Resident Fellow at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), Rio de Janeiro. She obtained her PhD in Development Studies from the University of East Anglia in the UK, and has conducted extensive fieldwork across South Asia.
Knowledge Partner
Vishal Kumaraswamy is Bangalore, India based artist & curator working across text, film, sound, performance & computational arts. His works draw from his own Dailt heritage to investigate a range of critical concerns around Caste, Race & Technology. He often employs emergent & experimental technologies to create media-based works across physical & hybrid formats. Vishal has an MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins, London & his works have been shown at The Venice Biennale’s Research Pavilion, Athens Digital Arts Festival, CCS Bard College, Vector Festival, The Royal College of Art, Furtherfield and SITE Gallery Sheffield. Some of his works are distributed by VIVO Media Arts, Vancouver & Vishal has previously been an artist in residence with the US Consulate General Mumbai, Contemporary Calgary in Alberta, SAVAC Toronto, Vital Capacities videoclub UK & Onassis AiR. He is a recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts Transmitter Delhi X Darwin Grant, the Warehouse421 Artistic Research Grant and is a 2022-2024 Research Associate at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry. Vishal is the curator in residence at Arts House, City of Melbourne for 2023.
Knowledge Partner
Dr. (des) Maya Indira Ganesh is Course Co-leader (MSt) of the Master of AI Ethics and Society programme at CFI. She is a media and digital cultures theorist, researcher, and writer who has worked with arts and cultural organisations, academia, and NGOs. She earned a Drphil in Cultural Sciences from Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany in 2022. Her doctoral work examined the re-shaping of what we mean by the ‘ethical’ and the shifting role of the human in the emergence of the driverless car. Maya’s dissertation investigates what initiatives for governance of such a complex technology implies for human social relations, spaces, and bodies. Prior to academic work Maya spent 15 years working at the intersection of gender justice, digital security and data privacy, and digital freedom of expression in a variety of global regions. Hence her work has consistently brought questions of power, justice, and global inequality to those of the body, the digital, and knowledge. She continues to be associated with feminist movements in Asia, and works with arts and cultural organisations in Germany.
Knowledge Partner
Dr. Louise Hickman is a research associate at the Minderoo Centre of Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge. Previously, she was at the London School of Economics and the Ada Lovelace Institute’s JUST-AI Network on Data and AI Ethics. Her research draws on critical disability studies, feminist labor studies, and science and technology studies to examine the historical conditions of access work. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Crip AI: The Automation of Access.”
Knowledge Partner
A PhD Candidate at the Department of Information Science at Cornell University until recently, Dr Palashi Vaghela is an engineer turned feminist scholar, researcher, writer, poet, and activist who has been working at the intersection of society and technology for the last decade.
Knowledge Partner
Dilan, LLM, Dr.iur.,
Artist and Academic
Pronouns: she, it
Knowledge Partner
Jac sm Kee is a feminist activist, writer and researcher from Malaysia who has conducted pioneering research that linked issues of internet governance, censorship, privacy, women's rights and sexuality.
She went on to lead the Association for Progressive Communications Women's Rights Programme, which works to address online violence against women, advocates for feminist digital security, supports research on the intersection of digital technology and gender justice, and facilitates network and movement building on feminism and technology. She has also led the team that facilitated the development of the collectively drafted Feminist Principles of the Internet– a set of principles that outline the critical approach and issues that need to be considered in engaging and development of technology towards an ending of discrimination. Jac is one of the founders of the global and collaborative Take Back the Tech! campaign, which aims to combat digital gender violence by supporting and empowering women to take back control of technology. Currently, she is the Co-founder and Chief Cartographer at Numun Fund, a grant building initiative for feminist tech workers.
Learning Partner
Anushka Nair is a performance artist, researcher, writer. She is a graduate of MA Performance Practices from ArtEZ University of Arts, NL. Her artistic practice -research dives into the affective, sensuous and entangled nature of more than human bodies through performance art.
Her work is situated in the intersections of new materialism, phenomenology, ecology and feminism. Her immersive performances probe into physical, political, socio-cultural and symbolic webs of matter, exploring transformation in dynamic environments of exchanges. From beetroots to everyday objects, she performs the self and bodies of the world in the quest to find a more-than-one state of identity through care, inclusivity and deep intimacy. Her paper Roo(u)ting: Cultivating relations with matter through performance art was presented at the Sentient Performativities Forum by Art.earth (UK) and Schumacher College (ENG) and her performance works were published in Friend of The Artist (US). Other publications include Notes in Space, an essay (Thespo Ink (IND), and Where is We? , a video essay with ArtEZ Press (NL). She is also a trained actor, physical theatre practitioner and expressive arts therapist and is currently exploring her curatorial flair.
Learning Partner
Dr. Madhavi Shivaprasad has completed her doctoral degree in gender studies. She's currently senior content writer for StellarFi while dabbling as an independent researcher with Design Beku. Her research largely focuses on digital media studies, gender and sexuality, and disability studies. For her doctoral dissertation, she focussed on women stand-up comedians in India, exploring the potential for stand-up to be a liminal space between feminist activism and entertainment. She also enjoys writing feature stories on Indian popular culture as she binge-watches content on most OTT platforms. Right now, she's trying to figure out if she's professor material as her nine-month old daughter is teaching her new ways of understanding, nay, pushing all kinds of corporeal boundaries and loving every minute of it.
Learning Partner
My research focuses on the relationships between made objects, the maker and the behaviour of making, in the context of spreadable digital media (and behaviours stemming from it). I study internet memes inside and outside of India and phenomena such as dissent, satire, free expression and ambivalent behaviour fostered by them. The research is at the intersection of digital ethnography, culture studies, human-computer interaction, humour studies and critical theory. I spend my time watching people. I draw them, the way they are, the way some people want to be and sometimes I have interesting conversations with them.
Communications Anchor
As the Communications Associate at Point of View, Afrah (she/they) works across multiple programmes to conceptualize and execute tailored, multimedia campaigns that amplify voices at the intersections of gender, sexuality, technology and disabilities. Afrah graduated from FLAME University with a BBA Comms. in 2019 and joined rePurpose Global in 2020 as a Creative Campaign Manager for a portfolio of global climate conscious brands, such as GTEch. Her academic and professional background in campaigning and marketing drives her curiosity to explore digital platforms as catalysts of social impact.
Project Manager
Prarthana is a queer-feminist practitioner mainstreaming gender and justice in the digital rights landscape, centering care and creativity in their 6+ years practice in communications, media, and civil society in South Asia. They are currently building out knowledge and communications at Point of View, anchoring a project on Gendered Disinformation (with APC) and an arts+feminism project (with the Goethe Institut), besides The Digital Everyday. They are also a DRAPAC 2024 Fellow and a speaker at the Asia-Pacific regional Internet Governance Forum 2024 and UN World Data Forum 2024. In the past, they have led communications, strategy, research and outreach for UNICEF India, The Union, John Snow International, Clinton Health Access Initiative, Participatory Research in Asia, and Doc Society’s Good Pitch and Climate Story Lab programmes. They also write on gender, identity, policy and culture, with bylines in Gaysi, Border Movement, WILD CITY, and Gulmohur Quarterly.
Visualiser
Senjuti Sangia (she/her) is a researcher and designer (sometimes both, sometimes neither) at Design Beku. Her current work and hopes are around compounding intersectional feminist theories with research and participatory tools to co-make alongside communities while subverting the prevailing notion of design for social justice. She take a keen interest in elements of theatre and interpreting commonplace linguistics. As part of The Digital Everyday, she worked with the core team to visualise the course.
Design Specialist
A lover of tea, solitude, and all things artsy, Vaishali Soni (she/her) made her way into illustrations and design after doing a brief stint in journalism. Her work as a graphic designer and illustrator at POV intersects across all programmes and social media. In her free time, she is busy working on her art studio - Khaas by Vaishali Soni - and making pinterest boards for her wardrobe.
Project Anchor
Yashita (she/her) is a Knowledge Associate at Point of View. She helps anchor The Digital Everyday and is working on other projects around Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence and on Data, Personhood, and Privacy. She graduated from Davidson College, NC, in 2022, where she majored in Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her senior honors thesis compared how people in privileged and subaltern groups in India used the internet to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Yashita also has a keen interest in archives and oral history, having worked and done research with the Counsel Club LGBTQ Archives in Kolkata and been a Digital Archivist and Citizen Historian at the 1947 Partition Archive.
Zoya Chadha is an educator, researcher, and librarian. Her work moves around the intersections of literature, community media, and libraries, and her research interests include (trans)literacy practices and discourses of reading, technologies, and data. She was the Digital Equity and Media Coordinator at The Community Library Project, where she set up a digital library as a space of community-made media, youth experiences, advocacy, literature, and dialogue. She was a member of the Research and Action group at the Free Libraries Network to co-write the People’s National Library Policy 2024. She regularly works with government and nonprofit organizations to develop curricular materials focusing on critical pedagogy, digital technologies, and justice in educational spaces.
Marketing and Comms
Megha Garg (any pronouns) is a marketing consultant and research enthusiast at Point of View. Her current work and interests are around mainstreaming conversations on sex, tech and gender and building ethical AI tools. She is also a RAIL fellow at Digital Futures Lab and writes on understanding digital policies and harms through dating application lens.
