I’m a Professor of Digital Anthropology at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology (CADS), where I also hold the UNESCO Chair in the Anthropology of Digital Diversity. In addition, I serve as Vice Dean for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. My research sits at the intersection of religious studies, social technology, and area studies. I’m especially interested in how emerging digital technologies shape cultural and moral meaning-making. Since the early 1990s, I’ve conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Muslim Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. As Principal Investigator of the One Among Zeroes |0100| project, I study archival records, policy documents, religious debates, and popular culture to understand how AI is imagined in Muslim Southeast Asia. I also lead the synthesis of the team’s findings through automated text analysis, social network mapping, and multimodal storytelling.
Weiyan Low
I was spawned from the land of intersectional food and ethnoconfusionism of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My research investigates visions and visuality through competing Islam-led futures, and the benign daily movement of people embracing generative AI between Kelantan and Kuala Lumpur. Meandering my way through the search of noise in music and photographs.
Daphne Wong A Foe
Hi, I’m Daphne, born and raised as a multi-ethnic woman in beautiful Paramaribo, Suriname. With a background in Computer Science, I developed strong technical skills and an insatiable curiosity about the human and ethical dimensions of the advanced technologies around us—which led me to my current field: Cultural Anthropology. Fun fact—I love traveling, dancing, painting, singing, and making music. But above all, I thrive on exploring the new and unknown. This curiosity fuels my use of creative methods for exploratory and innovative research, making me uniquely suited for my work on AI, Islam, and literacy in Indonesia. P.S. I also occasionally share insights from my PhD journey on Instagram—feel free to connect with me there! 🙂
James McGrail
I am from Hemel Hempstead, a commuter town north of London which was voted ugliest town in the UK – twice. My research is focused on what futures Muslims in Singapore imagine in increasingly AI governed Singapore. I explore these questions through multi-modal approaches including sonic ethnography, zineing and annotation to make the invisible infrastructures of the AI tangible. My research aims to describe the pluriverse of counter-futures imagined in opposition to those asserted by the Singaporean state. Twice a week I fall off a wall in a bouldering gym, it keeps me grounded.
Nurul Huda Binte Abdul Rashid
I am a postdoctoral research with Project 0100. I joined the team right after my PhD at the National University of Singapore, where I examined the role of algorithms in the circulation of Muslim women images. Framed in relation to data and AI studies, critical gender and race studies, and photo and archive theories, my dissertation mapped the shift of the image into big data, proposing unique research designs on the analysis of algorithmic bias, AI art, and annotation as pedagogy. Alongside my research, I am also a visual artist who engages in intersections of image and narratives, visual and sentient bodies, and feminisms. These have been articulated through visual projects such as membadan/mengatur (2024), Women in War (2016-2019), unknown women/perempuan kami (2021), and Hijab/Her (2012-2014), examined through the colonial archives, photography, and via performance. As a firm believer in creating work through collectives and community, I have developed and facilitated several art and photography workshops which focus on issues of care with collectives such as CITRUS, and in spaces such as Objectifs and the Substation in Singapore. I have collaborated on projects such as PulauSomething.space (2021), a Nusantara (Malay Archipelago) digital archive, and co-facilitated a decolonial pedagogical camp, New Curriculum for Old Questions (2019) where we creatively explored new ways of learning. I come from the sunny island of Singapore, and in my time of leisure, I’d watch films, make cute cats out of clay, and read (and smell) books.
Yasmin Ismail
I am the Project Manager and junior researcher on the project. I hail from Zambia, the funniest country in Southern Africa. I hold a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin. My research addressed translocal linguistic and ideological entanglements arising from the use of English-language Islamic curricula within Quranic schools in the minority settings of the UK, Zambia and South Africa. In the project I work on outreach and innovative ways of research dissemination. This includes establishing a collaborative network to share the research through digital platforms, a podcast, conferences, and workshops and partnering with relevant institutions and groups. In my spare time I can be found experimenting with yet another coffee blend or completing the latest k-drama.