Keynotes

Dr. Kishonna Gray
University of Kentucky

The Intersectional Gaming Project: Reimagining Futures Through Gaming

While public discussions around gaming culture focus on the toxic elements, there are thriving groups utilizing online environments and their related tools to sustain their communities. While trolls and other toxic actors (and resistance practices) may dominate the conversation, we must begin to center the communities that marginalized bodies create and sustain despite the toxicity. Using Discord, gaming platforms, Twitter, Twine, streaming, YouTube, and others, minoritized users have created hybrid networks of users demonstrating the innovativeness of digital practices within gaming contexts. As such, the purpose of this presentation is to explore these hybrid communities as intersectional counterpublics focused on creating and connecting communities to foster identity development in both physical and digital contexts.

Dr. Payal Arora
Erasmus University Rotterdam

FemWork: Critical Pivot towards Design for Inclusive Labor Futures

In recent years, femtech – ‘female technologies’ has received increased attention and venture capital funding, with some celebrating this as a feminist approach to design. While commendable in opening spaces for other genders, these efforts are tethered to the healthcare industry, narrowing the scope and potential of inclusive design.

This talk broadens these conceptions by drawing from user-research of women ‘gig’ workers in the Global South as they organize themselves to navigate tech platforms and engage with the various design innovations that mediate their work and life worlds. These research efforts are driven by FemLab, a decolonial and co-design initiative that situate at the center the voices of the marginalized workers at the bottom of the global value chain in the design and building of digital storytelling campaigns for inclusive labor futures.

The fact is that we need to disrupt binaries in our approach on laboring through and with platforms. Flexibility and formality, individual and collective, and standardization and localization are not diametrically opposite; instead, can be complementary to pathways on inclusive work. We need to recognize the varied dynamics of systemic inequality, shaped by race, caste, gender, and religion, among other intersections for equitable design interventions for dignified work. We should distribute our energies, going beyond the design of tech to the everyday governance and redressal systems that keep these systems accountable, responsible, and just. Lastly, let us attend to collectives and cooperatives as critical in shaping reform and instituting legitimate choice.

Speaker bio: Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist and author of several award-winning books including “The Next Billion Users” with Harvard Press. She is a Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Co-founder of FemLab.Co (https://femlab.co/), a future of work initiative. Her expertise lies in global media cultures, inclusive design, and user experiences among low-income communities worldwide and comes with two decades of fieldwork in such contexts. Several international media outlets have profiled her work including the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, Quartz, Tech Crunch, The Boston Globe, F.A.Z, The Nation, NRC, and CBC.Forbes named her the “next billion champion” and “the right kind of person to reform tech.” She has spoken at/consulted for diverse organizations such as Adobe, UNESCO, Google, UNHCR, KPMG, GE, Spotify, and HP. She has given 250+ presentations in 57 countries and delivered keynotes alongside Jimmy Wales and Steve Wozniak and a TEDx talk on the future of the internet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiQa78tgbMk). She sits on several boards such as Columbia University Earth Institute and World Women Global Council in New York. She currently lives in Amsterdam.

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