Books
2024/
Charles Hayes, Executive Managing Director, Asia & Partner, IDEO‘
“This book is not a feel good, do good, symbolic appeal; it illustrates a rationally framed reality. The Global South, with its young and ambitious majority, approaches life with a “do more with less” mentality.
I agree with the book’s framing of many of the challenges of our time as opportunities for responsible design. While highlighting what is problematic about Western tech’s current impact on the Global South, the book offers ways to design social solutions that can benefit all. From drones on African wildlife reserves to music sharing in the Middle East to pornography as education in India, this book provides context and direction for business leaders, digital creators, policymakers, and anyone else looking to realize a better future—a future that both benefits and is benefited by the Global South.
Arora is at the top of my list when it comes to making sense of how to navigate many of these potential futures.”
2023/
Sabina Dewan, President & Executive Director, JustJobs Network.
“For over a century, feminism has fought for women’s rightful, equal place in economies and societies. This thoughtfully conceived, keenly perceptive, and accessibly written book continues the quest, capturing the modern-day struggle of women’s working lives in a digital world. A must-read for anyone interested in promoting more equitable and inclusive labour markets — today and in the future.”
2019/
Engadget (Top 5 in the ‘Technorati top 100’ and Times endorsed ‘best blogs on tech’): “The Next Billion Users is one of the most interesting, thought-provoking books on science and technology we can find.”
Winner of the 2019 PROSE Award “This powerful book explores actual online lives in China, India and Brazil and asks why many of us in the West are surprised and sometimes offended by the fact that the impoverished are just as committed as we are to the search for ‘moments of pleasure and joy.’”—Times Higher Education
2016/
Mark Warschauer, University of California Irvine and author of Technology and social inclusion
“Few efforts to do so are more successful than that of this book. Payal Arora takes on a research task that few have sufficiently valued and far fewer have accomplished: becoming one with a community and its people, gaining their trust, examining how they make use of technology according to their own context and needs, and revealing that to the world in all its nuance, biased by neither sentimentality nor judgment.” –
2015/
Crossroads in New Media, Identity and Law – Palgrave
“With critical approaches now well established in many communications programs, this book provides invaluable first-person narratives of the struggle to secure critical communication scholarship, and the ongoing challenges it presents for researchers, activists, and policy-makers worldwide.”- Terry Flew, Queensland University of Technology, Australia and author of Games: Technology, Industry, Culture
2014/
The Leisure Commons – Taylor & Francis/Routledge
Winner of the 2012 EUR Fellow Award
“This is a brilliant navigation of worlds that are not usually brought in conversation: digital space and thick situated struggles engaged in claim-making in the urban sphere. Payal Arora has deep knowledge and experience of both these worlds. Out of this encounter comes a concept the author deploys in diverse ways to mark digital space: the leisure commons.”- Saskia Sassen, Columbia University and author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy
Payal Arora 