Aisha Sobey

Aisha works as part of the Desirable Digitisation project and is concerned with understanding the interaction of digital systems design and the human experience. Specifically, technologies and the narratives of technologies can shape what is acceptable and unacceptable, ultimately privileging and marginalising certain behaviours and existences. Her work now focuses on body-normativity and digital systems, especially those that make allocative decisions and the outputs of generative AI image models for the normative power they enact.

 Aisha’s background is in interdisciplinary research concerning technology, especially the power structures that they are part of. She gained her MPhil in International Relations and Politics at Cambridge, considering US power in the age of the Internet. For her PhD in Architecture, she was the inaugural LKY Scholar at Fitzwilliam College, and her thesis explored how connection in the digital ‘smart’ city is influenced by the narratives of the contextual understanding of ‘smart’ in Singapore.