Keynotes and enlightening talks > Sharath Srinivasan

Challenging the 'thingness’ of AI from Eastern Africa

Summary:
Lucy Suchman recently exhorted scholars to appreciate that "interventions into the field of AI controversies that fail to trouble and destabilise the figure of AI risk contributing to its uncontroversial reproduction”. This talk explores how interrogating AI encounters, innovations and resistances from a place-in-the-world such as the Eastern Africa region can serve not only to critique the global political economy of AI production and deployment, but also to challenge the 'figure of AI’ in distinctive and vital ways.

Bio:
Sharath Srinivasan is David and Elaine Potter Professor of International Politics and a Fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge, where he also co-directs the Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR). He works on contentious politics in Africa in global perspective and on technology and radical democratic theory. He is co-editor of Publics in Africa in a Digital Age (Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2019; and Routledge, 2021) and The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Assembly (Oxford University Press, 2025). He is also the author of When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans (Oxford University Press, 2021), and co-editor of Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Beyond (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2020). Professor Srinivasan is Vice-President for Research at the British Institute in Eastern African, a Fellow and Trustee of the Rift Valley Institute, and Co-Founder of the non-profit digital social research organisation, Africa’s Voices, all based in Kenya.