speaker photo

Malka Older (she/her)

Executive Director, Global Voices

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. She is the Executive Director of Global Voices, a community of writers, editors, and translators providing community journalism from all over the world and advocating for Indigenous and minority languages, media literacy, digital rights, and online freedom of expression. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named among the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, the Washington Post, and Book Riot; with sequels, it was a finalist for a Hugo award. The Mimicking of Known Successes, a murder mystery set on Jupiter, was on four best of 2023 lists and was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and Ignyte awards for Best Novella. The sequel, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, was named one of the best science-fiction books of 2024 by Esquire, and the third book in the series, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, came out in June 2025. She is a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, where she teaches on predictive fictions.

Sessions

Designing and communicating

Information and Democracy: Fitting together a digital age

In a time of information abundance, when we live with encyclopedias and wonder-cabinets at our fingertips, most people are simultaneously suffering from information poverty. The more profuse, well-bankrolled sources of news and media have narrowed down the definition of what - and who - is important, admirable, expert, beautiful. See More.