About

Associate Professor Seyram Avle specializes in Global Digital Media, focusing on the impact of digital technologies on communication, culture, and society. His research explores the role of digital platforms in shaping public discourse, the digital divide, and the future of media industries.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Engineering ethics
• Political economy
• Law
• Anthropology
• Gender studies
• Engineering

Selected publications

• “Tecno-otimismo”? Acadêmicos explicam ideologia que diz que tecnologia é resposta para todos os problemas

  2024-04-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Insistir que há uma solução tecnológica para todos os problemas do mundo parece não apenas otimista, mas também bastante conveniente se você estiver entre as pessoas mais ricas do planeta e em posição de lucrar com o setor de tecnologia.

  PublisherDOI

• What is ‘techno-optimism’? 2 technology scholars explain the ideology that says technology is the answer to every problem

  2024-04-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What is History ‘for' in CSCW Research?

  2023-10-13 · 2 citations

  article

  This panel will host a debate about the possible roles of HCI within CSCW research. To do so, it assembles five intellectually diverse researchers who contribute to the field of CSCW, while taking divergent approaches to incorporating an historicist sensibility in their work, as a matter of design, politics, reflection, or research. Panelists will briefly answer the following prompts: What is history for? What does good historical work look like? And, what is distinct for historicism in CSCW? Then, panelists and audience will discuss and compare answers. The goal of the panel is to further hone the discussion and method of historicism, and to invite a wider cross-section of the community of CSCW into the conversation.

  PublisherDOI

• Historicism in/as CSCW Method: Research, Sensibilities, and Design

  2023-10-13 · 4 citations

  article

  This workshop furthers the growing adoption of historicism in HCI and CSCW. Inspired by mounting attention to history in the field, we aim to convene a broad range of scholars to advance the discussion around what a specifically historicist sensibility might look like for this research community, and how such a sensibility may be reflected in issues around research methods, evaluation, and training. In so doing, we will continue to trouble boundaries, disciplinary and otherwise, that demarcate what is considered to be history and whose histories are considered, as part of the broader turn to historicism that is underway. This one-day workshop will be in person and participant driven, with a stronger methodological focus than those that have come before. In addition to working groups focused on topics that emerge through workshop papers and initial discussions, we will develop practical next steps for creating a stronger enabling environment for historical approaches in HCI and CSCW research.

  PublisherDOI

• Triangulating Race, Capital, and Technology

  CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts · 2022-04-27 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  This workshop transnationally triangulates race, capital, and technology to understand how colonialism and imperialism linger and mutate across various sites and scales. Furthermore, it brings together transnational HCI work that engages with critical ethnic studies as well as postcolonial and decolonial studies to intervene on the field’s long-standing epistemology and site focus on the West and fixation on the nation-state at large. Attention to colonial residual, geopolitical tensions, and historical specificities brings HCI in conversation with geopolitical shifts and their very real impacts on the practice and theory of technology design, while troubling the presumptions of who “gets to be human” in HCI. We invite papers and presentations that seek to: 1) triangulate sites of study; 2) draw from different disciplines, theoretical approaches, and methodologies; and 3) engage themes of transnational capital, race, and technology.

  PublisherDOI

• Hardware and data in the platform era: Chinese smartphones in Africa

  Media Culture & Society · 2022-10-18 · 28 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The increased access to smartphones in Africa and elsewhere in the global south has opened new markets and new areas for surveillance/platform capitalism/data colonialism to operate. This article attends to the socio-technical practices of Transsion, the Chinese maker of Africa’s top selling smartphones, and through these showcases how essential hardware are to the global data economy. Working from a mix of data, including translocal fieldwork in Shenzhen, Accra, Addis Ababa, and a close reading of Transsion products and artifacts alongside business practices, the article shows how the company’s prioritizing of Black African consumer needs sustains its competitive position and how its constellation of hardware and apps are integral to its success in routine experimentation of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and other emerging areas of computation. Ultimately, the argument is that consumer hardware such as low-cost smartphones are critical to the datafication of the everyday in the global south via the bundling of surveillant and extractive software and should be considered sites of power within discourses on the platform era.

  PublisherDOI

• In Between Hogging and Passing the Mic; Or, the Unintended Consequences of Networked Radio in Ghana

  Bandung · 2022-02-24 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This paper explores the relationship between networked radio, media participation, and accountability in Ghana. Specifically, we examine how networked radio, the hybrid media space that is the convergence of radio and social media practices, works as a means of democratic accountability through citizen participation in media. We do this through an analysis of how two English-speaking radio stations in Ghana act as intermediaries between citizens and the state, underscoring how the networked elements of radio production facilitate public discourse and make the state less opaque to citizens. We show that while networked radio does provide multiple opportunities for media participation, this participation is relatively passive for the majority of listeners, in part because producers face increased interactivity in-studio and must employ gate-keeping tactics to fit the constraints of airtime. This trade-off inadvertently privileges elite voices over others, even if the radio stations work to diversify the voices heard on air. Still, networked radio provides a limited but necessary alternative to exacting accountability from public officials as those very dynamics of participation elicit the state’s responsiveness more regularly than the formal routes established for those purposes. Accordingly, we characterize Ghanaian networked radio as caught between ‘hogging the mic’ for an elite group of listeners and ‘passing the mic’ between them, the state, and the broader citizenry that constitute the listening public.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tech labor

  interactions · 2021-06-30 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  research-article Open Access Share on Tech labor: a new interactions forum Authors: Seyram Avle University of Massachusetts, Amherst University of Massachusetts, AmherstView Profile , Sarah Fox Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 28Issue 4July - August 2021 pp 24–26https://doi.org/10.1145/3466994Online:30 June 2021Publication History 0citation4,388DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads4,388Last 12 Months1,047Last 6 weeks61 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteView all FormatsPDF

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Time for Historicism in CSCW: An Invitation

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021 · 72 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This paper contributes to the development of an under-utilized area of focus for CSCW research and design: history. The design and evaluation of technology, as practiced in the field, has positioned CSCW as a largely forward-looking community. The enduring "presentism' and lack of historical view threatens to leave out a wealth of resources that can inspire design, support comparative analysis, and develop a deeper understanding of technology development and its social consequences. This paper argues that a historicist sensibility should inform the due diligence of all CSCW research, and we present connection points for the various ways in which historical research might more deeply inform CSCW, while offering a selection of historiographic challenges to sensitize CSCW scholars as we seek to better situate our collective work within both the present moment as well as ongoing temporal change.

  PublisherDOI

• A Feminist Geopolitics of Technology

  Global Perspectives · 2021 · 44 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  This article proposes a feminist geopolitics of technology framework that analyzes the connections between global politics and techno-empires through the lens of feminist scholarship. This framework has three dimensions: (1) grounding in place, (2) attention to everyday surviving and thriving, and (3) community. We draw on two long-term, community-oriented ethnographic research engagements in Cambodia and Ghana to illustrate how this approach might be used. This framework provides a resource for scholars to make sense of the contrasts between dominant narratives and lived experiences, particularly encouraging more sensitive and generative approaches to analyzing the conditions and dimensions of a shifting geopolitics of technology. In writing stories of caring, thriving, and grounded alternatives, we hope to foster and support initiatives that encourage personal agency and living the full human experience amid inequality and structural violence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Silvia Lindtner

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  5 shared

• Ọmọlade Adunbi

  4 shared

• David Ribes

  4 shared

• Robert Soden

  University of Toronto

  4 shared

• Nii Kotei Nikoi

  College of Wooster

  4 shared

• Phoebe Sengers

  3 shared

• Sarah Fox

  3 shared

• Rachel Kuo

  2 shared