Affiliate; 2021–2022 Faculty Fellow

Murali Shanmugavelan

Murali Shanmugavelan is a Data & Society affiliate, and a researcher with the Fairwork project at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. His academic research is concerned with the disavowal of protected categories such as caste, race, gender, and sexual orientation in media and communication studies and digital cultures. His research at Fairwork builds on this academic training and activism to scrutinize and mitigate re-manifestations of digital inequalities in platform economies.

As a 2021-2022 faculty fellow in race and technology at Data & Society, Murali’s work focused on reimagining communication and technology studies from (anti)caste perspectives. As part of his fellowship, he published a first-of-its-kind syllabus on Critical and Caste and Technology Studies. He has written research and policy briefs on topics including pro-poor access to communication, internet governance, access to knowledge, caste and development, and caste hate speech and digital media politics, and has been an active member of an anti-caste stakeholder’s forum in the UK. 

Murali is working closely with colleagues at Data & Society to advocate for an anti-caste agenda in digital cultures, labor, tech-associated policy debates, and emerging AI debates. He is also working on an edited anthology exploring the exploitation of minoritized platform workers in Bangladesh, India, and Brazil. 

A list of Murali’s select publications can be found here.