Chrisanthi Avgerou Honoured as British Academy Fellow

We are thrilled to share the news that Chrisanthi Avgerou, Professor of Information Systems at the LSE has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy. The British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences, which aims to mobilise these disciplines to ‘understand the world and shape a brighter future’. It is incredibly meaningful to be elected Fellow of a national scientific academy, and we couldn't be happier for Professor Avgerou and the IS field.

Professor Avgerou has been an acknowledged leader of our field for many decades, being elected as a Fellow of AIS in 1999 (the inaugural year of offering) and awarded the LEO Award in 2023. For over 30 years, Professor Avgerou has been one of the world's leading scholars of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D). She has published pathbreaking papers on a wide range of topics including information systems planning, development, implementation, adoption, and evaluation, and organisational and societal implications. She has also been a major leader in the qualitative research community, where she is especially known for advancing critical and contextually sensitive research.

While it is impossible to do justice to Professor Avgerou's contributions in a short summary, we personally are reminded of the well-known question raised by her great colleague Professor Geoff Walsham: 'Are we making a better world with ICTs?' Avgerou's career is defined by a concerted exploration of how to achieve that goal with a deep respect for the many contexts in which it can and must be asked.