Maya Indira Ganesh

Maya Indira Ganesh is a technology researcher and writer whose work investigates the social, cultural, and political implications of the 'becoming-human' of machines, and vice versa. Maya spent 15 years working at the intersection of gender justice, technology, and human rights with Indian and international NGOs. She is completing a DPhil that will be awarded by the Doctoral College on Knowledge Cultures and Digital Media at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. Her work examines AI and autonomous technologies as ontologically multiple, and fragmented, and the implications of this for the shaping of 'ethics' in data-centric worlds.

Research overview

This research and collaboration award will support the expansion of an existing digital resource, A is For Another: A Dictionary of AI, that facilitates learning to re-think the politics, power, limits, and especially contemporary harms, of AI. Through entries on 'AI art', 'cyborg' and 'human-machine collaboration' among others, 'A Is For Another' presents how intelligence, humans, machines, data and mind exist differently across a variety of cosmologies, sciences, and art practices. At its core, this resource brings together inter-disciplinary knowledge in an accessible, engaging, and novel way, sparking reflection on how we think about what AI is, and what else it might be. While the site is already oriented around issues of justice and diversity in knowledge production, this award will allow for the addition of new material on Indigenous epistemologies, and theoretical and artistic work from the Caribbean and parts of Asia through participatory online workshops with students, researchers, activists, and artists.