Aisha Zia Khan is a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University studying how uneven geographies shape visibility and participation in the digital economy. Her research focuses on creators in Pakistan who navigate the constraints of platform governance, material inequalities, and cultural marginalisation.
She holds an MSc in Development Studies from the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, where her thesis examined the everyday realities of platform labour in Karachi’s food-delivery sector, focusing on how disadvantaged riders experience the city’s infrastructures, inequalities, and platform’s algorithmic systems.
Prior to that, she completed a Bachelor’s in Business Administration with concentrations in Human Resource Management and Sociology & Media Studies, grounding her work in the social and organisational dynamics of labour and production Her broader research interests lie in digital labour, feminist technology studies, and the economic and cultural geographies of digital production and platform governance in non-Western contexts
Algorithmic Visibility, Cultural Production, and Digital Inclusion: A grounded exploration of Pakistan’s unconventional creators
PGR Supervisors: Allan Watson (Primary) and Jilly Boyce Kay (Secondary)
Aisha’s research explores how digital creators in Pakistan navigate visibility, inclusion, and creative expression across uneven digital and material terrains. She investigates how infrastructural gaps, gendered restrictions, and class divides shape who gets seen, who is excluded, and how labour unfolds within the socio-technical architectures of digital platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Her project examines how creators work with and against algorithmic systems that amplify some voices while muting others. It brings together perspectives from platform studies, digital/human geography, and cultural production to understand how global digital economies reproduce existing inequalities and how cultural adaptations and creative resistance emerges from the margins.
Her work contributes to wider debates on digital inclusion and platform governance, offering insights into how platform and creator economies emerge and function within the fractured geographies of the contemporary internet.