Ramesh Srinivasan

Ramesh Srinivasan (born 1976) studies the relationship between technology, politics and society. He has been a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles since 2005 in the Information Studies and Design Media Arts departments.[1][2] He is the founder of the UC-wide Digital Cultures Lab, exploring the meaning of technology worldwide as it spreads to the far reaches of our world.[3] Srinivasan served as a national surrogate on issues of technology policy for Senator Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign and also advises numerous other politicians within the United States. He has authored several books, including: Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Impacts Our World with NYU Press, and After the Internet (with Adam Fish) on Polity Press both published in 2017.[4]

Ramesh Srinivasan, 2009

His most recent and top selling book, Beyond the Valley: How Innovators Around the World Are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow (MIT press, 2019),[5] explores the relationships between new technologies and our political, economic, and social lives. This includes such themes as tech's relationship to democracy, social movements, and elections; automation, the gig economy, and worker futures; algorithmic bias and AI; and the relationship between tech and the nations and peoples of the global South. His book has garnered attention from dozens of networks and progressive media venues and was also named a top ten book in Tech by Forbes magazine. He has penned opinion pieces for the Washington Post, Wired, CNN, the Guardian, the LA Times, Quartz, and numerous other networks. In addition, he has published over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and received numerous prestigious grants from such organizations as the National Science Foundation.

Srinivasan earned his Ph.D. in design studies at Harvard; his master's degree in media arts and science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and his bachelor's degree in industrial engineering at Stanford.[6] He has served fellowships in MIT’s Media Laboratory in Cambridge and the MIT Media Lab Asia. He has also been a teaching fellow at the Graduate School of Design and Department of Visual and Environmental Design at Harvard. Srinivasan is a regular speaker for TEDx Talks, and makes routine media appearances on NPR, Al Jazeera, The Young Turks, MSNBC, and Public Radio International.[7][8] As mentioned above, his writings have been widely published by Wired, Al Jazeera English, Salon, Foreign Policy, the LA Times, The Financial Times, CNN, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and numerous other networks. He has written op-eds or contributed to work featured in dozens of major newspaper and magazines, including the Guardian, Wired, WNYC, Salon, FAZ (Germany), the World Economic Forum, Folda Sao Paolo (Brazil), BBC News, Christian Science Monitor, National Geographic, Quartz, CBC, and more.

Other projects that Srinivasan has worked on look at how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He has worked with bloggers who have overthrown the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime,[9][10][11] non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology,[12] and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at cultural heritage and the future of the internet and networked technologies.[13][14][15] His work has impacted contemporary understandings of media studies, anthropology and sociology, design, and economic and political development studies.[16]

He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Anthropological Association, and a member of the editorial boards of several academic journals, including Science, Technology, & Human Values, International Journal of E-Politics, and Information Technologies and International Development. Srinivasan has also been awarded two grants from the National Science Foundation in the Science, Technology, and Society division, as well as an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant. He has worked with governments, businesses, activists, and civil society organizations to advise on technological futures.