Malavika is the Executive Director of the Digital Asia Hub, an independent, non-profit internet and society research think tank based out of Hong Kong with a regional focus. She is currently an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and has previously been a Fellow in residence, and a Faculty Associate.
In a former life as a practising technology lawyer, Malavika was an Associate at Allen & Overy, London, and was Vice President and Technology Counsel at Citigroup EMEA. Her activism around biometric identifiers, data privacy, and inequality in India and the majority world led her to pivot towards civil society and academia. She has been a Fellow with the Centre for Internet & Society, India, since 2009 when she helped start their privacy program. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and has had fellowships at the University of Sydney and the Institute for Technology & Society, Rio de Janeiro. She was on the faculty of the Yung Pung How School of Law at Singapore Management University, and has taught at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law as part of the Master of Science in Law program, bridging STEM and the law. She taught India’s first course on information technology and law in 1997 (not a typo).
Malavika is committed to expanding the universe of narratives and stories we tell about technology, and in bringing Asian and non-Western perspectives into dialogue with dominant paradigms and tropes. As part of this practice at Digital Asia Hub, she convened the AI in Asia series (2016), the Fairness Accountability and Transparency/Asia conference (2019), and the Platform Futures project (2020-2023). She helped bring Drones and Dreams, a speculative sprint story collection, to life (2019).
