We are an interdisciplinary collective within the Department of International Development with two related concerns: the rise of AI and cutting-edge technologies and inequalities of income, wealth and power.

Our research group also organises the Technology and Development seminar series.

About the group

In terms of technology, our research explores the developmental impact of innovation—particularly digital and emerging technologies—by analysing the infrastructures, systems, and political economy of technological diffusion. We investigate how these processes shape and are shaped by patterns of inequality, labour transformations, poverty, and vulnerability. In terms of inequalities, we investigate income, wealth and non-monetary inequalities, vulnerability, poverty, food insecurity, the super-rich, welfare systems, gender and structural change.

We seek to inform inclusive and effective development policies by bridging critical analysis of innovation with grounded understandings of social and economic inequalities.

We are an interdisciplinary team drawing on approaches from development studies, political economy, economics, sociology, and related fields to understand these challenges. This pluralism however is bound together by a common intellectual thread: a view that the world in the future will be determined by the technologies and inequalities of today.