Padmini Ray Murray
Bio
Padmini Ray Murray (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is the founder of Design Beku.: a collective that emerged from a desire to explore how technology and design can be decolonial, local, and ethical. Padmini established the first degree level digital humanities programme in India at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology where she was course director from 2016-2018. She was the recipient of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Unbox Fellowship (2012-13) and the co-investigator with Claire Squires on The Book Unbound, also funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is currently co-investigator on Gendering the Smart City with Professor Ayona Dutta, and the digital lead on Two Centuries of Indian Print, a project in collaboration with the British Library and Jadavpur University. She served as a trustee for Wikimedia UK from 2013-2014, and led a research project on platform governance and design for the Ekstep Foundation in 2018.
As a creative practitioner, Padmini creates new media work which reflects her research and interests, such as Darshan Diversion (with KV Ketan and Joel Johnson), a feminist videogame about the Sabarimala temple controversy (2016); Halt The Hate (with Pratyush Raman) an interactive database of crimes against minorities for Amnesty India (2017) and is currently working on Visualising Cybersecurity – a Hewlett funded project that aims to alter how cybersecurity is depicted and discussed in the media (with the Centre for Internet and Society and Paulanthony George), and A is for AI: A Dictionary of AI (with Pratyush Raman, 2020). Padmini’s most recent published work focuses on how corporate online space, commit and perpetuate epistemological violence against the marginalised, through collusions of infrastructure and the interface.