This book presents a dialogue between two seemingly incompatible bodies of social theories - Critical Political Economy and Southern approaches - to the study of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. In doing so, the book presents scholarly engagement with the ways in which AI is being experienced in sites in the Global South, with authors exploring questions of sociality, further entrenching of inequities along labour and caste lines, socio-legal
ramifications of digital IDs, and undesired outcomes such as deepfakes and their integration in the political ecosystem, among others. These
perspectives interrogate and provide scholarly vocabulary to understand the various applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in our professional, legal and media spaces.
Preeti Raghunath is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield, UK. Over the past decade, she has traversed academic landscapes in India, Malaysia and the UK. Her research interests have broadly explored global communication, with a focus on policies, infrastructures and people. She conducted an expansive policy ethnography on community radio in South Asia, which was published as
Community Radio Policies in South Asia: A Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Her current theoretical and empirical research is on the global AI and data economy, especially as they play out in the Global South. Preeti has served as a research consultant with the United Nations University, Macau on projects on AI and its policies in Southeast Asia, and digital transformation and sustainability.
