Maya Indira Ganesh is Associate Director (Research Partnerships) and a Senior Research Fellow at CFI.
Until 1 July 2024 she was an assistant teaching professor at the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) where she co-directed the MSt in AI Ethics and Society run jointly between ICE and LCFI.
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. In her research role at CFI, 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. 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. An up-to-date list of publications, talks, and cultural practice can be found here.
Ganesh, MI (2022) Between metaphor and meaning: AI and being human. Interactions 29, 5 (September – October 2022), 58–62 Available here
Ganesh, MI and Nyrup, R (2022) Cultural work in ‘AI Ethics and Society’ pedagogy: Some early reflections at the AI Cultures workshop, Neurips 2022. Download
Ganesh MI & Moss E (2022). Resistance and refusal to algorithmic harms: Varieties of ‘knowledge projects.’ Media International Australia. Available here
Ganesh MI (2022) What is the autonomous vehicle? In Proof of Stake: Claims to Technology. A Book of Organizational Objects by Timon Beyes, Robin Holt, and Claus Pias (Eds) Oxford University. Available here.
Talat, Z, Blix, H, Valvoda, J, Ganesh, MI, Cotterell, R, Williams, A (2022) A word on machine ethics. A response to Jiang et al. (2021). A rebuttal to Delphi, a natural language processing project to model abilities and limitations of automated moral decision-making. Available here
I believe that a technical field such as AI can contribute a great deal to our understanding of human existence, but only once it develops a much more flexible and reflexive relation to its own language and to the experience of research and life that this language organizes. Phil Agre, Towards a critical technical practice: […]
AI in the street: scoping everyday observatories for public engagement with connected and automated urban environments AI in the Street is a group project led by the University of Warwick, with the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, and King’s College London, and with a non-profit partner, Careful Industries. Working with city-based AI innovation partners across sectors […]
The ‘Gender and AI’ research stream develops feminist and queer approaches to AI that are informed by critical race theory, postcolonial/decolonial theory, Asian American/Asian diaspora studies, crip theory, and areas of justice-oriented knowledge and work.
