Professor Mark Graham

Professor Mark Graham is a Governing Body Fellow and member of the Student Welfare Committee at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. He is the Professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute, a Research Affiliate in the university’s School of Geography and the Environment, a Research Associate at the Centre for Information Technology and National Development in Africa at the University of Cape Town, a Visiting Researcher at the Berlin Social Science Centre, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE) at The New School.

Mark’s research examines how digital technologies intersect with geographic contexts, transforming work, value chains, and inequalities on a global scale. He has contributed extensively to policy development for organisations and governments worldwide, serving as an appointed expert for the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, a Task Force Coordinator for the 2024 G20’s Task Force on ‘New Digital Technologies for SDGs and Decent Work,’ and a member of the UK’s DFID Digital Advisory Panel from 2014 to 2016.

His most recent book, Feeding the Machine, rips away AI’s veneer to reveal the global production networks that sustain it – a hidden labour force of millions enduring appalling conditions so these technologies can exist. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of fieldwork over more than a decade, it presents a look at the organisations that exploit human labour and collective intelligence to fuel AI’s relentless appetite for data. The book challenges the power structures that keep these workers invisible and has been translated into Chinese, German, Korean, Russian, Italian, and Spanish.

Contact: mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk