Shalini Randeria

SHALINI RANDERIA

Shalini Randeria is President and Rector of Central European University (CEU).

American-born Indian social anthropologist/sociologist Shalini Randeria has had a distinguished academic career at institutions of higher education across Europe. She was Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, where she was also Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. She holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a research group on “soft authoritarianisms”.

She was educated at the Universities of Delhi, Heidelberg and Oxford, where she belonged to the first cohort of women Rhodes Scholars. She received her PhD and her Habilitation from the Free University of Berlin. She has held faculty positions at the Free University, Berlin; the University of Munich and University of Zurich, where she was Professor of Social Anthropology and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Competence Centre. She was Founding Chair of CEU’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in Budapest.

Currently she is Deputy Chair of the Class of Social and Related Sciences, Academia Europaea, Distinguished Fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, Canada, Distinguished Visiting Fellow of IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria and Member of the International Advisory Panel on Population and Development, UNFPA EECA group. She has served more recently on the Board of European Forum Alpbach and the CEU’s Board of Trustees.

Shalini Randeria has published widely on the anthropology of globalization, law, the state and social movements. Trained as a sociologist and social anthropologist in Western and non-Western social science traditions, she was exposed to a diversity of disciplinary orientations and theoretical perspectives. Her research on soft authoritarianism; democracy and demography; forced displacement and dispossession; and the politics of (un)accountability has been carried out in collaboration with historians, political scientists and legal scholars. She has led research projects with a comparative perspective on (i) the effects of international investment agreements and arbitration on governance in Argentina, Czech Republic, Mexico, India; (ii) counter-hegemonic globalisation in India, Columbia, Portugal, Mozambique; (iii) the (un)sustainability of changing patterns of food consumption and waste management among middle classes in south and south-east Asia; and most recently (iv) the puzzle of unspent public funds in Italy and India.

Her influential podcast series, Democracy in Question, is in its tenth season. In a wide-ranging exploration of the diversity of experiences of democracy and the challenges and dilemmas facing liberal democracies around the world today, each episode features Professor Randeria in conversation with a leading scholar. Together they address what needs to be done to ensure the future well-being of our democratic institutions and practices.

In June 2021, The Board of Trustees of CEU elected Shalini Randeria as CEU's 6th President and Rector. Professor Randeria is the first woman, and the first person from the global South, to take up this position since the founding of the university 30 years ago.

Moira Weigel

MOIRA WEIGEL

Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and founding editor of Logic magazine. Originally trained in modern languages, including German and Mandarin Chinese, she now studies digital media in a global context.

Weigel will deliver a talk focused on the history of critical theory, particularly as it has been taken up by technologists and right wing movements. Her research concerns the history of intellectual exchange between critical theorists, computer scientists, and other practitioners, with a focus on forms of conservatism and nationalism that are often perceived as antithetical to digital networks, yet increasingly prevalent in digital technology industries. Over the past few years she has published several articles on these subjects, as well as on conspiracy theories and “disinformation.”

Her current research focuses on transnational e-commerce entrepreneurs operating primarily between China and the US. Her book in progress, tentatively entitled Third Party, explores marketplace platforms from the perspectives of merchants, software and service providers, investors and other “complementors” who use and, thus, co-constitute them, attending to the forms of communication that these technologies mediate and the imaginaries of “the global” that they sustain.

Weigel’s first book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2016), countered widespread claims that the rise of mobile phones and social media were bringing about the “death of romance,” showing that modern courtship practices have consistently co-evolved with consumer capitalism and other forms of gendered work. The book has been translated into six languages and appeared in dozens of national and international outlets. Her second book, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff, is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020). A series of long-form anonymous interviews with workers at every level of the Bay Area tech industry, from startup founders to cafeteria workers and in-house massage therapists to Google engineers, it received positive reviews from The New York Times and The Nation, among other outlets, and was named one of WIRED’s “8 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence to Read Now.”

Prior to joining Harvard University, Weigel was an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Northeastern University and held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Data and Society Research Institute, and the Harvard Society of Fellows.