Technology & Human Rights Fellow (2026-27)
Dr Paige Benton is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS) at the University of Johannesburg, where her research sits at the intersection of political philosophy, political epistemology, politics of AI and digital justice. She completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Pretoria in 2023 with a thesis reconceptualizing the relationship between the right and the good in Rawlsian Political Liberalism, examined by scholars including Prof. Paul Weithman and Prof. David Reidy. Her PhD was the first PhD in political philosophy to be funded by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) node of the CSIR.
Paige’s current research examines how AI and digitally personalized information environments threaten the epistemic foundations of liberal democracy — work developed through concepts such as violent hermeneutical landscaping (in process), digital gaslighting (under review), and the erosion of civic friendship and public reason under platform capitalism and the attention economy. She draws on thinkers including John Rawls and C. Thi Nguyen, and grounds her analysis in real-world cases such as Meta’s role in the civil unrest in Myanmar and Ethiopia.
Her publications include peer-reviewed articles in Technology and Regulation, TOPOI, and Communications in Computer and Information Science, alongside a forthcoming chapter in AI & The Reinvention of Democracy (Edinburgh University Press) and a co-edited topical collection on Indigenous Knowledge Systems and AI in AI & Society, for which she serves as Guest Editor. She is also an Editor for Ethics and Society’s open collection "Political Philosophy of Technology," alongside Prof. Helena Mateus Jerónimo, Prof. Glen Miller, and Dr. Michael W. Schmidt.
Paige is a Research Team Member of the UNESCO Research Chair in AI for Community Resilience at the University of Pretoria (the first UNESCO Chair of its kind in Africa) led by Prof. Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem. She is Co-PI, alongside Prof. Veli Mitova, on the Global Excellence and Stature (GES) grant ‘Safeguarding Democracy in the Age of AI’ (2025–2026), which funds an ongoing ACEPS workshop series. She is Track Co-Chair for the Philosophy & Law Track at the Southern African Conference for Artificial Intelligence Research (SACAIR), and Co-Chair, alongside Dr. Avigail Ferdman and Dr. Michael W. Schmidt, of the Society for Philosophy and Technology's (SPT) Special Interest Group on the Political Philosophy of Engineering & Technology. She serves on the Advisory Committee for EthicsEdge and is an Editorial Board member for the University of Johannesburg Press book series Key Issues in African Political Science and International Relations. She has also served on the organizing committee for CIFAR’s (the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) Women in Research Leadership Development Symposium in 2025.
Paige organized the Digital Decolonisation and Digital Justice Conference, a T20 side event for the first G20 in Africa in August 2025. She was an invited panellist at the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies’ roundtable on “Data Commons: Creating Inclusive Data Capital and Enabling Fair Access”. Beyond her academic publications, Paige engages the public directly: she has written for the Mail & Guardian, and created “Whose Truth Is It Anyway,” an educational game designed to teach citizens about the dangers of the attention economy.
She is also an incoming fellow of the University of Oxford’s AI and Media Policy Summer Institute in July 2026.
Fellowship Project: Digital justice requires digital reparations. While scholars have documented digital harms extensively (algorithmic bias, surveillance, data exploitation), restitution remains undertheorized. Benton's project identifies distinct digital goods (data control, algorithmic fairness, online visibility, secure participation) whose violation constitutes harm that is not merely moral, political, or epistemic, but fundamentally digital. Digital reparations demand redistributive measures: equitable access to computational power, infrastructure, and AI governance authority, preventing the Global South from bearing AI’s environmental and labour and environmental costs while its benefits accrue elsewhere. By defining digital harms, goods, virtues, and duties, this project builds ‘digital normativity’, a framework for what a just digital sphere requires, and what is owed when it fails.