Seyram Avle

Global Horizons Senior Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Global Digital Media, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Seyram Avle studies digital technology cultures and innovation across Africa, China, and the United
States. This work primarily takes a critical approach towards understanding how digital technologies
are made and used, as well as their implications for issues of labor, identity, and futures. Avle’s research
centers the lived experiences of people who are consistently “written out of the archive” and interrogates
taken-for-granted notions of where technologies come from, what they are imagined to do, and for whom.
This research is interdisciplinary and is published across Media Studies journals such as Media, Culture
and Society; Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) venues such as CHI and CSCW; as well as Science & 
Technology Studies (STS) journals like Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. Other works are a
vailable in Global Studies journals such as Global Perspectives. 

Avle’s PhD is from the University of Michigan where she also completed a postdoc. She is a founding
member of the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab (GloTech) and is a board member at the Afro-
Sino Center for International Relations. She is also a Fellow at the International Institute for the Advanced
Study at the University of Ghana, and in 2021–22 was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for African Studies
 at Harvard University.

At SCAS, she will be working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Future Worlds: Chinese Techno
Power and African Imaginaries. This book examines the socio-technical practices underlying the design
and uses of digital hardware, AI, and data flows between Africa and China. 

Seyram Avle is in residence in the autumn of 2024.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.