Biography

Avantika Tewari holds an MPhil and a PhD from the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was awarded a visiting fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, where she anchored the Science, Technology, and Democracy project. She has also been a senior research associate with IT for Change, and research consultant at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences on a project exploring gendered access to housing. She also served as co-convenor of a 36-member global working group on Feminist Digital Justice. Her mentoring work includes supervising research assistants on Prakriye, a project documenting the everyday impacts of digitization and datafication on social security systems in rural Mysuru. 

Her recent work explores how labor, power, value, and subjectivity are (re)constituted in contemporary social and technological formations. More generally, she is interested in tracing the reconfiguration of class struggle through the historico-political mediations of techno-social reality. She is the co-editor of the book, “Feminist Perspectives on Social Media Governance” and has contributed chapters to “Psychoanalysis and ChatGPT” and “AI from the Global Majority,” the official outcome of the United Nation's Internet Governance Forum’s "Data and AI Governance Coalition." She also contributed to the Declaration of Feminist Digital Justice, launched at the Sixty-Seventh Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67), and has co-authored several policy and advocacy documents. 

She has been invited to deliver keynote addresses, participate in plenary roundtables, facilitate workshops, contribute as a speaker and panelist, and provide advisory inputs at national and international forums on critical political thought, digital governance, feminist politics, techno-politics and social transformation. Her engagements include a keynote plenary roundtable at the conference on “Digitalisation, AI, and Feminist Futures,” jointly organised by Feminist Africa and the International Feminist Journal of Politics in Maputo. She was also invited by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge and Centre for Science and Thought, The University of Bonn  and The University of Tokyo to speak at their collaborative seminar series on “Cross-Cultural Approaches to Desirable AI,” and was invited to conduct a masterclass for "Pandemic Perspectives," organized by the students and faculty of The University of Birmingham, among others.

She has written for the Economic and Political Weekly, journals published by Springer and Sage, Outlook Magazine, The Indian Express, Critical Legal Thinking, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Bot Populi, Everyday Analysis, Sublation Magazine, Critical Collective, and other academic and public platforms.