Deadline: October 15, 2026
Applications are open for the Polyfoni Social Sciences for AI Fellowship 2026-2027. The Polyfoni Fellowship is a four-month part-time research collaboration for social scientists with fieldwork experience in regions where AI products are being deployed. Fellows join remotely from November 2026 to March 2027 and conduct a cultural audit of a real AI product in their region of expertise.
Fellowship Details
Fellows conduct a cultural audit: an empirical analysis of how a specific AI product encodes assumptions about the context it is deployed in, and where those assumptions break. Each audit follows Polyfoni’s Cultural Audit Method: assumption mapping, contextual failure identification, severity assessment, and recommendations.
Polyfoni supervisors propose audit themes aligned with the research priorities. Fellows choose and shape their project in close collaboration with their academic and industry mentors. The output is a report written for a product team, published on Polyfoni’s Substack under the fellow’s name.
The audit target should be a real AI product in a region the fellow has genuine contextual knowledge about. Your fieldwork experience is the data. You are not starting from scratch. You are applying what you already know through a structured method.
Examples of audit targets:
- A health AI chatbot in East Africa
- A ocean AI tool in Southeast Asia
- An agricultural AI tool in West Africa
- An LLM deployed in a non-English-dominant market
Benefits
- Dual mentorship from an academic collaborator and an AI industry professional
- Training in Polyfoni’s Cultural Audit Method
- Online masterclasses and monthly group sessions, supported by our partner AI Mission Lab
- A published research on Polyfoni’s website and Making AI Listen (open access publication) under your name
Eligibility
- You can apply if you are interested in using your social science training to contribute to how AI products are built, evaluated, and governed.
- They are interested in candidates from a broad set of disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, sociology, STS, development studies, political science, humanities, and area studies. There are no strict degree requirements, although we expect that the most promising candidates will have fieldwork experience in a Global South context and an interest in technology careers. Prior AI experience is not required.
- When assessing applications, they will be looking for:
- Regional expertise with evidence of fieldwork: Deep contextual knowledge of a place, community, or sector where AI is being deployed. Priority regions: East Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, China.
- Clear motivation: A specific reason for wanting to work at the intersection of social science and AI, and a concrete idea of which AI product you would audit. They expect the fellows to work on the audit 5 hours a week.
- Language: Comfortable working in English. Additional languages are an advantage.
- They select for diversity of region and discipline.
Application
Application is now open. The selection process has two steps:
- Step 1: Initial application. Submit a short application with motivation (500 words maximum). Successful candidates will be contacted for a CV review.
- Step 2: Interview. Final candidates will have an interview and a research discussion with the Polyfoni team.
Polyfoni matches fellows with mentors based on regional expertise alignment (your fieldwork region and the mentor’s company market) and sector alignment (health, fintech, content moderation, etc.).
For more information, visit Polyfoni Social Sciences for AI Fellowship.
