Salwa Hoque

Salwa Hoque is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the AIAI Network (based in Emory University), and a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project in Yale Law School. She works at the intersection of law and technology, specializing in legal pluralism, databases, automation, and women’s rights. Salwa is currently working on her book – Automating Law: Locating (In)Justice and the Industrialization of Legal Reason – which bridges digital media studies and legal anthropology to rethink questions of AI, law, and justice. Salwa has a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (NYU), an M.A. in South Asia Studies from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Communication and English (Honors) from the University of Washington. She taught several courses at NYU related to digital media and technology and will teach at Emory University (in 2025).

Academic awards for Salwa’s research include winning the Society of the History of Technology’s (SHOT) Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize (2022) for her paper-presentation of “Digital Databases: Colonial Legacies Reinscribed in Technologies.” She was awarded first place in the NYU Steinhardt Research and Showcase Competition (2022) for her doctoral dissertation. Her paper “Law and Digitality: Tracing Modern Epistemologies and Power” won the Asian Journal of Law and Society’s Best Paper award in the Graduate Student Paper Competition (2021). Salwa was awarded Distinction by NYU, Steinhardt and was the Doctoral Commencement Speaker at the 2024 doctoral convocation.

Grants and awards for her research include winning the Mellon-SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF), NYU Digital Humanities Fellowship, NYU Global Research Initiative Fellowship, and American Institute of Bangladesh Studies: Graduate Student Fellowship. Salwa was also awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award (2024) by NYU as well as Outstanding Service to the Department Award (2024).

Selected Publications

“Neocolonial Digitality: Analyzing Digital Legal Databases Using Legal Pluralism,” Asian Journal of Law and Society, Volume 10 , Issue 3 , October 2023 , pp. 516 – 549 https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2023.9

Email: shoque6@emory.edu