[Air-L] Steve Jones Lecture features Vincent Obia in 2026 ICA

[Sarina Chen]

Dear Colleagues,


Greetings!



Vincent Obia (University of Sheffield) will give the Steve Jones Internet
Research Lecture in the 2026 International Communication Association (ICA)
Annual Conference on Saturday, June 6, 3 pm to 4:15 pm, at CTICC Ballroom
East (CTICC1, Lev 1), in Cape Town, South Africa.


Obia’s lecture is titled “Governing for Humans: Reclaiming a people-centred
vision for AI and the internet.”  Obia argues that we are living in a
vision of technology conjured by Big Tech conglomerates, a vision enabled
by the prevailing regulatory architecture. Obia notes that from Section 230
of the US Communications Decency Act to AI policies in Africa and across
the world, governance instruments have propped up a vision for technology
that makes it possible for a few Big Tech executives to wield unprecedented
power and shape the digital ecosystem in their interests.  Obia states that
underpinning this vision is the belief that all human data is available for
extraction at scale, the march towards superintelligence cannot be
questioned, and unchecked AI expansion is ideal and should be left
unregulated, even if it destroys our environment and intensifies
exploitative labour and structural inequalities.


Obia believes that this vision underscores how our social realities are
being constituted in service of the mould created by Big Tech executives.
But crucially, Obia continues, it also reveals the ways in which governance
can be used to propel a different vision of technology that works for humans.
This is what Obia attempts in his lecture, for which he draws from his
research into platform governance and AI policy across Africa to highlight
regulatory imaginaries conceived by stakeholders who he has engaged with in
his tour of the continent. Obia states that his reflection highlights how
these imaginaries intersect with governance principles in other parts of
the world in order to shape norms and policies that challenge Big Tech’s
hegemonic vision and reinstate agency for people, movements, and
communities. He applies notions of sovereignty, decoloniality, and
participation to define a vision of technology and AI based on the
collective and the pluriversal, even more so for global majority countries
that are at risk of having their digital futures decided upon by corporate
actions and governance frameworks in rich nations. These form the
foundation of his argument on the need for governance mechanisms defined by
a people-centred vision to reshape the evolution of new media technologies.


Obia is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Information,
Journalism and Communication in the University of Sheffield, carrying out a
research project titled: “A continent on the margins: Investigating African
approaches to regulating AI.” Before joining the University of Sheffield,
he was a lecturer at the Department of Mass Communication, University of
Lagos (2023-2024), and a Commonwealth Scholar with full-funding for PhD
studies at Birmingham City University (2019-2023).  More information about
Obia could be found at
https://sheffield.ac.uk/ijc/people/academic-staff/vincent-obia


Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture Series, established by Carl Couch
Center for Social and Internet Research (CCCSIR, www.cccsir.com) in 2003,
brings leading Internet researchers to annual ICA conferences to promote
the development and interest of Internet research.  With the
interdisciplinary nature of Internet research, the lecture series brings
researchers from various disciplines as well as industry leaders to
establish dialogues with communication researchers about topics and issues
of Internet research.  The theme of Steve Jones Lecture Series is " The
Internet as Culture.”



For more information about this lecture and lecture series please contact
Shing-Ling Sarina Chen at sarina.chen at uni.edu.
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