Maya Indira Ganesh is a scholar, educator, and practitioner who works at the intersection of AI and digital technologies, culture, and society. As of July 1, 2024, she is the Associate Director (Research Partnerships) and Senior Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge, UK. 

For three years prior to this role, Maya was an assistant teaching professor at the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) at the university, co-directing the MSt in AI Ethics and Society run jointly between ICE and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.  Maya has a Drphil in Cultural Studies from Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. Her doctoral work took the case of the ‘ethics of autonomous driving’ to study the implications of ethical decision-making and governance by algorithmic/AI technologies for human social relations, and argued for a conception of AI technologies as situated in distinct infrastructural and social environments. You can pre-order a forthcoming book based on this work and read the introductory chapter here.

Maya’s research at LCFI builds on this by focusing on AI in public and with different kinds of publics in the design and development of technology.  She draws on varied theoretical and methodological genres, including feminist scholarship, media studies, and Science and Technology Studies. Prior to academia, Maya spent over a decade as a researcher and activist working at the intersection of gender justice, security, and digital freedom of expression, chiefly at Tactical Tech.

She is also an invited speaker, curatorial advisor, and writer with arts and cultural organisations in Europe, and on the internet including Transmediale (2019), AI Anarchies (2022) and Ether’s Bloom (2023). Maya’s  writing has been translated into Korean, Turkish, French, and German. 

Maya has won fellowships and awards from the Media Cultures of Simulation (MECS) Institute for Advanced Study at Leuphana University, Lüneburg (2018), Digital Earth/Hivos (2020), the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar on Histories of AI (2021), and was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Resident Fellow on AI (2019). Here’s how you can contact Maya.