Sociology Career in Technology: Q&A with Chenai Chair

Introduction

Zimbabwean sociologist, Chenai Chair, leads ground-breaking projects with global foundations and technology organisations. Chair has a Master’s Degree in Global Studies, as well as a Bachelor of Social Science (Honours).

She began her career as an applied researcher with an internship at Research ICT Africa, collecting data on mobile phone costs and mapping internet use. She then went on to work as a Policy Researcher, and then as a Communications Manager and Evaluations Advisor. Chair later managed technology programs addressing gender and digital rights at the World Wide Web Foundation, and she was a Senior Program Officer at the Mozilla Foundation, leading projects on African innovation and AI policy.

Chair now works as Director at the Masakhane African Languages Hub, leading investment into natural language processing for African languages, and she also founded the feminist platform, My Data Rights (Africa), which focuses on technology’s impact on society, including AI, privacy, data protection, and digital rights. Throughout her career, Chair has used quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as an African feminist perspective.

Q&A

You completed an internship at Research ICT Africa, collecting data on mobile phone costs and mapping internet use. Can you tell us about your experience as an early career researcher, and how your internship helped your career development?

My experience as an early career researcher was a whirlwind in a Global Master’s program, trying to narrow down a big research topic and focusing on refining my skills. One of the biggest learnings during the internship period was the value of refining how you approached research rather than coming up with this ground-breaking idea. My supervisor and internship organisation helped me to design research to speak to a group of women who were outside my own context—being a foreign student in South Africa, working with South African women. I also learnt the basics of working across multiple disciplines—I was writing on ICT [Information and Communication Technology] while in a sociology department. ICT was usually engaged with in the computer sciences department and so there few people who understood what I was doing in the sociology department. My work became about translating concepts and knowledge across the two departments.

You have led major technology programs addressing digital sexism and racism for global companies such as the World Wide Web Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation. How has sociology informed your senior leadership roles in the not-for-profit technology sector?

Sociology guided my thinking in nuancing issues from a structure and agency perspective. In trying to advocate for meaningful engagement on issues arising from the African continent, my main focus was to surface how structural issues impact how we frame African issues. For example, the need to shift from looking at Africans as consumers of technology to producers and consumers. The structural aspect being the way in which innovation from the continent is often seen as underdeveloped based on European standards. I also advocated for a people-centred approached in the work we did from an agency perspective. This meant that when we looked at impact—whether it be in the research or project we funded—how did we centre people’s agency in the work? Sociology has also really been helpful in understanding how society interacts with technology and being able to locate technology waves in the context of how society responds on them, based on social and cultural nuance. This pattern helps to show how we are still dealing with the same challenges, particularly when it comes to gender and disability inclusion, in spite of some claims of certain technologies being the great equaliser.

You are Director of the Masakhane African Languages Hub, leading investment into natural language processing for African languages. What does a typical day look like for you in this executive role?

A typical day for me is split in two mind frames—strengthening the organisation internally and building up our narrative externally. The former involves 1-on-1s with my team to check in on how they are doing as people. Its a practice of care, which we as a team collectively agreed was important as our core value. I also spend a lot of time being a thought partner with team members on what they are working on. If there aren’t as many 1-on-1s, I move on to reviewing work and communicating with the various stakeholders we have. As Masakhane Hub is still in its first year, a lot of my meetings are with partners curious to learn about the growth of Masakhane. We started off as a grassroots community, focused on creating the needed data sets in the ecosystem—now we invest through funding and partnerships into the sustainability of the ecosystem. I usually close off my day by catching up on news articles talking about languages and African AI.

You lead the feminist platform, My Data Rights, which focuses on technology’s impact on society. Can you tell us about the types of projects you oversee, and how sociological methods and African feminist theory guides your work?

This project has been a phased process to understanding AI, privacy and data from a feminist perspective. The project has focused on nuancing the framing of gender in existing policies and then working on feminist imagination on resisting practices in a datafied society. I strongly believe in going in-depth with a small group of people and build-up inferences from there. The majority of my methodology is desk review of existing discourse, surveys and qualitative interviews or focus group discussions. With working online, most of these have been done digitally—I do miss in person discussions. African feminist theory has helped in understanding the value of research as activism. The biggest struggle I had feeling like research was only meant for academic eyes. However, this framing helps me to see research as providing information for further activism. Going forward, I am looking forward to moving My Data Rights into a direction of across disciplines to understand the technology value chain and the issues related to data from a feminist perspective,

Do you have any advice for sociology students seeking to find employment in the technology sector, particularly given the rising interest in artificial intelligence?

My advice is that the human loop is crucial in building, evaluating and critiquing AI. This is the biggest contribution that sociology students hold in the era of AI. I have found the transference of skills easy as a sociologist trained to be able to debunk social phenomenon. It’s also important to lean into the ability for sociological framings to translate society and be able identify patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Don’t be intimidated by the jargon used in this space, but, rather, be curious and unpack this information.

Finally, where can we keep up with your research and activities?

You can stay up to date on my websites: chenai.africa and www.mydatarights.africa. I would also encourage people to look out for the Gendering AI conference in October that is open to all disciplines.

Learn more