Whose digital future?

Professor Payal Arora, chairperson of the Inclusive AI Cultures Lab at Utrecht University, visited the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Digital Media Sociology (DMS) Lab in October for a series of engagements exploring inclusive artificial intelligence (AI), digital futures and perspectives from the Majority World.

Professor Arora’s visit included a roundtable discussion with DMS Lab postgraduate students, a staff seminar at UCT’s Centre for Film & Media Studies, and a workshop with UCT’s Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT). The discussions offered opportunities to engage with her work on digital cultures, technological inclusion and the ways people across diverse social contexts shape emerging technologies. The visit also reflects the growing profile of the DMS Lab, established in 2025 by Professor Tanja Bosch, as a hub for research on platforms, AI, digital cultures and everyday technologies.

An internationally recognised digital anthropologist and author, Arora challenges prevailing pessimistic narratives about emerging technologies. While acknowledging the risks and harms associated with digital innovation, her work asks how debates about technology might move from pessimism towards possibility by paying closer attention to the practices, aspirations and innovations emerging from the Global South.

Moving beyond technological hype

Her research highlights how people across the Majority World are already adapting, repurposing and innovating with technologies – practices that are often overlooked by investors, policy makers and technology developers. By centring these experiences, Arora challenges assumptions about who shapes digital futures and whose needs and forms of knowledge are prioritised in the design of new technologies.

Her book, The Next Billion Users, received the Association of American Publishers’ 2019 PROSE Award and challenges Western assumptions about internet use by examining digital practices and aspirations across the Global South. Her more recent book, From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech, develops this argument by further examining what technology design can learn from communities and innovators beyond dominant Western contexts.

“Questions about AI are not only technical – they are also questions about culture, power, inequality, meaning and whose knowledge counts.”

Her visit forms part of the DMS Lab’s broader programme of international engagement and collaboration, strengthening connections between UCT and leading scholars working on AI, digital culture and technological futures across the Global South and beyond. “The DMS Lab is interested in moving beyond both technological hype and pessimism to ask how people actually live with, adapt and reshape emerging technologies,” said Professor Bosch. “The humanities are crucial to these conversations because questions about AI are not only technical – they are also questions about culture, power, inequality, meaning and whose knowledge counts.”