Digital Governance: Power, Bias, and Decision-Making

Ayona Datta argues that while these technologies promise to eliminate the personal biases of individual officials, they often end up concentrating power in the hands of certain professionals. This shift isn’t just about machines taking over—it’s about how people and technology work together to make decisions.

To understand this better, we need to focus on how governments are restructuring decision-making in the digital age. Datta will wrap up by discussing how urban planning and governance are now driven more by desk-based computer systems than by the on-the-ground work traditionally done by officials.

Aftertalk 

The lecture will be followed by a conversation between Ayona Datta and Anouk de Koning, professor of Power, Politics and the State in the Anthropology department of the AISSR.

About Ayona Datta

Ayona Datta is a Professor of Human Geography at University College London. Her broad research interests encompass postcolonial urbanism, digital geographies, and regional futures. Her work is grounded in the ethos of co-production with grassroots communities, employing digital/mapping, visual, and participatory research methods to foster gendered capacity building in digital and urban margins.

Datta has secured funding from prestigious organizations, including the European Research Council (Advanced Grant), AHRC, ESRC, the British Academy, and the Swiss National Science Foundation, to explore the impacts of digital transformations on everyday urban life in the global south. Her current ERC-funded research project, Regional Futures, aims to advance both theoretical and empirical understanding of the interplay between digitalization and urbanization in the global south.

Since 2017, Datta has served as the frontline Editor of Urban Geography and is a member of the editorial boards of several prominent journals, including Antipode, Dialogues in Human Geography, Digital Geography and Society, EPD: Society and Space, and Territory, Politics and Governance.

In recognition of her contributions, Ayona Datta received the Busk Medal from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in 2019 and was nominated for the Presidential Lecture (Geography) by the British Science Association in 2023.

Drinks and networking afterwards at the bar in the CREA Music Hall.

This AISSR lecture is organized in cooperation with Research Priority Area 'Global Digital Cultures'.