Round table – Rodrigo Ochigame, Payal Arora, Mark Westmoreland, Federico De Musso
Rodrigo Ochigame is an assistant professor in the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Their research examines unorthodox models of computational rationality, such as nonclassical logics from Brazil, nonbinary Turing machines from India, and frameworks of information science from Cuba. Their teaching specialties include digital anthropology, the anthropology of science and technology, and the social dimensions of robotics and artificial intelligence. Ochigame received a BA with highest honours from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist and an author, speaker and professor. She holds the Chair in Technology, Values, and Global Media Cultures at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is an Academic Director in UX and Inclusive Design at the Erasmus Center for Data Analytics and is the co-founder of FemLab.Co, a feminist future of work initiative. Her expertise draws from two decades of user experiences among low-income communities worldwide to shape inclusive designs and policies.
Mark Westmoreland is an Associate Professor of Visual Anthropology. He is primarily responsible for shaping the educational and research agendas within the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Westmoreland’s research engages both scholarly and practice-based approaches at the intersection between art, ethnography, and political agency. Mark has written extensively on the interface between sensory embodiment and media ae]resthetics in ongoing legacies of contentious politics. He is currently developing a new multimodal and collaborative research agenda about attending to broken landscapes.
Federico De Musso is an assistant professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. His research and teaching interests include multimodal anthropology, political ecology, and the anthropology of food. De Musso’s current research project focuses on ecological and economic strategies among different farming sectors in the Catalan Pyrenees in Spain.