Dr Alexandrine Royer

I am a social and economic anthropologist whose work examines the intersections of technology, governance, economic theory, and human welfare. I hold a Joint Honours BA in History and Anthropology from McGill University, and an MPhil and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.

My research began at the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies and the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, where I held research roles exploring the ethics of artificial intelligence. During my MPhil at Cambridge in 2020, I coined the term emotion economy to describe the commercialisation of physiological data read as 'emotions' through affective computing tools. My dissertation examined how affective computing scientists judged the effectiveness of their technologies not purely by their capacity to 'read' emotions, but by their capacity to prompt users toward emotional self-regulation — opening up new ways of understanding how bodily sensations are regimented in the service of performance optimisation. I traced how the ideals of self-improvement embedded in affective computing are historically particular to post-1990s political and economic formations. I also participated in the JUST AI project, led by Dr Louise Hickman and Dr Alexa Hagerty, on disability justice in technological development, collaborating with visually impaired scholars to conceptualise more inclusive approaches to virtual reality.

My doctoral research extended these interests in AI-based technology, selfhood, and modes of economic production. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork in Kigali's start-up ecosystem, my thesis examines how tech entrepreneurship has emerged as a national, political, and multilateral developmental strategy in Rwanda. I investigate how state-sponsored and donor-funded accelerator programmes seek to cultivate a 'start-up mindset' among young, middle-class Kigalians, and how local youth co-opt such schemes to pursue upward class mobility as global tech elites leverage political connections to build and extract value from a new 'digital frontier.' Within Rwanda's fraught post-genocide context, I explore how the Rwandan Patriotic Front's future-forward tech imaginary is deployed to negate present-day insecurities and memories of violence.

The thesis rests on my concept of the politics of projection. I define 'projection' simultaneously as a future-oriented performative practice and as a representational regime. The concept captures how the 'make-believe' logic of start-up capitalism — in which entrepreneurs pitch technologies yet to be built — converges with the RPF government's governing philosophy: a seeing-is-believing approach in which infrastructure and high-tech spaces are deployed to project the image of a reconciled, prosperous ICT nation. This projection, I show, is constructed to attract donors and investors while masking Rwanda's deepening economic inequalities. Through this concept, I demonstrate how development organisations, speculative financiers, and the state itself are bound by a shared epistemic and performative logic.