Ramesh Srinivasan (born 1976) is a professor of Information Studies and Design/Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a scholar and author.

Education

Srinivasan earned his PhD in design studies at Harvard University, MSc degree in media arts and science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and B.Sc degree in Engineering at Stanford University. He has served fellowships in MIT's Media Laboratory in Cambridge and the MIT Media Lab Asia.

He has been a teaching fellow at the Graduate School of Design and Department of Visual and Environmental Design at Harvard University since 2005.

Career

Ramesh Srinivasan has been a faculty member in the Information Studies and Design/Media Arts departments at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 2005. He has appeared on The Young Turks and is founder/host of the Utopias Podcast.

Srinivasan founded the research group Digital Cultures Lab, a UC-wide research group.

He is also on the board of directors for Digital Democracy, which works with land protectors in the Amazon and around the world.

Srinivasan previously served as a national surrogate for Senator Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign and as an Innovation policy committee member for President Biden.

Writing & Appearances

His books include Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Impacts Our World, After the Internet with Adam Fish, and Beyond the Valley, which listed in 2019 by Forbes as a top ten book in Tech.

He has given TEDx Talks, and made media appearances on NPR, Al Jazeera, The Young Turks, MSNBC, and Public Radio International.

In 2024, Srinivasan launched his new Utopias Podcast which presents a new narrative, a vision of life futures based on a set of conversations that celebrate the work and perspectives of those who represent and care for the potential of human creativity, expression, and optimism.

Additional projects that Srinivasan has worked on look at how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He has worked with bloggers who overthrew the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at cultural heritage and the future of the internet and networked technologies. His work has impacted contemporary understandings of media studies, anthropology and sociology, design, and economic and political development studies.

Professional affiliations

Srinivasan is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Anthropological Association, and a member of the editorial boards of Science, Technology, & Human Values, International Journal of E-Politics, and Information Technologies and International Development.