Books
2023/
Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy
“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.”
Sabina Dewan, President & Executive Director, JustJobs Network.
2019/
The Next Billion Users – Harvard University Press
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/
Dot Com Mantra – Ashgate
“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.” – Mark Warschauer, University of California Irvine and author of Technology and social inclusion
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 