Payal Arora

Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist, author, and Professor and holds the Chair in Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University. She is the co-founder of FemLab, a feminist future of work initiative. Her work focuses on internet usage in the Global South, specifically on global digital cultures, inequality and data governance. She is Indian, American, and Irish and currently lives in Amsterdam.

Career
Payal Arora is a Professor and Chair in Inclusive AI Cultures at the department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Prior to that, she was at Erasmus University Rotterdam for 15 years where she served as a Professor of Technology, Values and Global Media Cultures and expert leader in UX Research and Global Tech Design at the Erasmus Center for Data Analytics. In 2020, she co-founded FemLab, a feminist future of work initiative that translates digital ethnographic insights around user-experiences of women workers at the margins using digital tools into actionable policies and platform interventions.

She has extensively written on digital cultures and inequality in the Global South. She has authored and co-edited numerous papers and books and delivered hundreds of talks around the world, including two TEDx talks on the future of the internet and on why we need less innovation. Forbes called her “next billion champion” in reference to her award-winning book “The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West” which examines the online behavior of citizens in India, China, South Africa, Brazil, and the Middle East. The book has been featured by publications such as The Economist, TechCrunch and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Engadget stated that her Harvard book is one of “the most interesting, thought-provoking books on science and technology we can find.”

In 2021, the UNHCR Innovation Services commissioned Arora to execute a field study and report on the digital leisure divide and the forcibly replaced in Brazil. In 2016, she was commissioned by UNESCO to write up a report on prize-based incentives for innovations in ICTs in education which was presented at the Mobile Learning Week at UNESCO Paris.

Arora is a member of several boards and advisory committees, including Facebook's Social Science One and ICRIER Prosus Centre for Internet and Digital Economy. She is a Rockefeller Bellagio Resident Fellow.

In 2017 her teaching was awarded with the Erasmus University Rotterdam's Education Prize. She holds a Master's degree in International Development Policy from Harvard University and a doctoral degree in Language, Literacy & Technology from Columbia University.

In the media
Arora writes extensively about the impact of new digital technologies in the Global South, with a special focus on India, Brazil, Namibia, and Bangladesh where she conducted substantive fieldwork. She gets invited by public and private organizations to comment on how to build technologies that include the world. Her work has been featured in international media outlets including the Het Financieele Dagblad (Netherlands), The Economist (UK), Quartz (USA), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, De Standaard (Belgium), and Times of India.

She was invited on the popular "We the People" NDTV Indian Television Talk Show in 2019 to discuss "Is social media deciding self-worth?" In 2020, she was invited on the award-winning podcast 99% Invisible on the theme ‘next billion users.’ On this podcast, she discussed with host Roman Mars on how these new online users are changing the ways in which we think and use technology. In 2020 she wrote an op-ed for NRC Handelsblad critiquing the viral essay by Rutger Bregman on "The real lord of the flies" by arguing that it was a typical white savior focused story, and not representative of the historical colonial context. She was an early contributor to the Ideas section for the award-winning global media outlet Rest of World, with the opinion piece "AI isn’t going to save us."