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 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. In her research role at LCFI, Maya’s work is organised around empirical inquiry into how people, places, and social organisations meet the design and development of technology. How do ideologies, institutional processes, business imaginaries, experts and lay publics convene around AI as a social and cultural entity? How does this inform how we navigate ‘ethical and responsible AI’? She draws on varied theoretical and methodological genres, including feminist scholarship, social and cultural studies of technology, and Science and Technology Studies.

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 governance of and by algorithmic/AI technologies for human social relations, spaces, and bodies.

Before transitioning to a PhD and academia, Maya worked with feminist and digital rights NGOs on securing freedom of speech and expression online and offline for human rights defenders, journalists, and activists, chiefly at Tactical Tech.

Maya collaborates with artists, critics, curators, and designers, to develop cultural symposia and exhibitions including Transmediale (2019), AI Anarchies (2022) and Ether’s Bloom (2023). Maya’s  writing has been translated into Korean, Turkish, French, and German. In 2023, she co-founded an experimental studio called Writing Club with Georgina Voss and Maria Yablonina. 

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.