Seyram Avle

Seyram Avle studies digital technology cultures and innovation across Africa, China, and the United States. This work primarily takes a critical approach towards understanding how digital technologies are made and used, as well as their implications for issues of labor, identity, and futures. Avle’s research centers the lived experiences of people who are consistently “written out of the archive” and interrogates taken-for-granted notions of where technologies come from, what they are imagined to do, and for whom. This research is interdisciplinary and is published across Media Studies journals such as Media, Culture and Society; Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) venues such as CHI and CSCW; as well as Science & Technology Studies (STS) journals like Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. Other works are a vailable in Global Studies journals such as Global Perspectives.

Avle’s PhD is from the University of Michigan where she also completed a postdoc. She is a founding member of the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab (GloTech) and is a board member at the Afro-Sino Center for International Relations. She is also a Fellow at the International Institute for the Advanced Study at the University of Ghana, and in 2021–22 was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for African Studies at Harvard University.