Digital Asia Hub kicked off a new workshop this week, as part of its ongoing Platform Futures engagement. During “season 1” of the program, the Hub put together a network of experts contributing diverse perspectives about platform studies, cultures, and governance, and co-created two volumes of “Small Books for Big Platforms”. During “season 2”, the Hub invited subject matter specialists to join the expert network members in conversations about emerging developments that originated in, or had implications for, the Asia Pacific region.

 

“This Platform Futures Workshop is the culmination of five roundtable discussions hosted in the last year between July 2022 and March 2023. Drawing on key insights from the roundtables, we are translating this into a program for scholars and practitioners to deepen their expertise and knowledge to take into their work and beyond” – Dev Lewis, Program Lead

 

The workshop will be held virtually across a three-week period, from the 4th to the 20th of April. We are joined by a group of 14 scholars and practitioners from policy, industry, civil society, think-tanks, and universities:

 

• Aditi Surie, Indian Institute for Human Settlements

• Burton Ong, National University of Singapore

• Dilrukshi Gamage, Tokyo Institute of Technology/

• Dominic Paulger, Future of Privacy Forum

• Jake Goldenfein, University of Melbourne

• Nobuyuki Shirakawa, Niigata University

• Ping Sun, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

• Ryan Chua, Bosch

• Sangyun Lee, Korea University

• Sherly Haristya, Independent Researcher

• Shreya Tewari, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

• Siddhi Gupta, FemLab

• Soojin Nam, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

 

The cohort will be joined by scholars and practitioners from the region who will offer prompts and provocations about topics such as ‘platform narratives and stories’, ‘approaches to power and platforms’, ‘possible futures and how to shape them’. The group will also be exploring the regional and geopolitical shifts and contestations within which their work is situated and effected.

 

The program is led by Malavika Jayaram (Executive Director of the Digital Asia Hub), Dev Lewis (Program Lead and Research Fellow) and Erika Ly (Research Fellow), with substantive inputs and support from the Platform Futures expert network and the broader community.

 

 

Platform Futures is a program from Digital Asia Hub, an independent, non-profit Internet and society research think tank incubated by the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. It convenes an expert network of academics and civil society actors to discuss opportunities, challenges, and governance best practices across the Asia-Pacific region. The Small Books for Big Platforms series was produced in collaboration with knowledge partner ArtEZ University of the Arts, led by Dr. Nishant Shah.