Arif Woozeer

Research

So these questions didn't arrive fully formed. They accumulated through a computing degree that taught me how systems work, and an integrative studies major that kept asking why they work that way and for whom. Through two years of national service as a neighborhood police officer, where the gap between policy and lived reality was impossible to ignore. Through a mechanical engineering research project before university, a stint at a boutique investment bank, an exchange at UCL where I stumbled into behavioral science. Through building a startup for five years and closing it. Through research with migrant workers that kept dismantling its own assumptions.

Being from Mauritius, which means growing up without a clean answer to where I'm from, navigating three languages that carry three genuinely different value systems, and learning early that how you ask a question depends on which world you're standing in. None of this makes me the most qualified person to answer what follows. But it's probably why I can't stop asking.

These are pretty much interdisciplinary questions with no ground truth answers. I work through them across different modalities: building tools, reading, community, writing. What follows is an attempt to document the inquiry :D

I. AI & augmented work

How do tools change the way we think, not just what we produce?

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II. Economic power & how the world is structured

What are the forces shaping opportunity, and who gets to understand them?

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III. Belonging & social infrastructure

What does it mean to feel at home in a city, a language, a community, yourself?

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