Ongoing
AI in/from the Majority World: Mapping Conceptual Vocabularies and Curating Parables
(since Dec. 2020)
Through empirical work and partnerships, this project invigorates existing efforts to reframe the “Global South” as home to the majority of the human population — and to investigate and understand the diverse ethics, politics, and everyday experiences of living with data and AI.
While data-driven systems are often treated as tools that can/must be controlled, this project will further illustrate that recent theorizing from the majority world grounds these systems in everyday experiences. In brief, the project is oriented towards:
- mapping the discourse of AI in/from the majority world (concepts and keywords).
- curate a multiformat and multilingual anthology of stories narrated by experts, activists, practitioners, and data subjects on everyday experiences of living with data (parables).
- explore storytelling as a crucial resource for engaging with ordinary ethics of living with data and AI in/from the majority world (research methods and analytic strategies).
Research Team: Ranjit Singh, Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, and Sareeta Amrute.
Project Details:
- Mapping AI in the Global South on Points, Data & Society (D&S) Blog.
- Parables of AI in/from the Global South on Backchannels, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Blog.
Mailing List: Join the community of researchers working on AI in the Global South issues
Workshop: In collaboration with Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, I organized Parables of AI in/from the Global South, a two-day storytelling workshop (on October 21 and 22, 2021) asking the question: What stories do we tell of a world that has increasingly come to rely on AI-based data-driven interventions to resolve social problems?
Publication(s):
Sareeta Amrute, Ranjit Singh, and Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, ‘A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World: An Empirical Site and a Standpoint‘ and ‘Una guía para entender la inteligencia artificial (IA) en/desde el mundo mayoritario: un lugar empírico y un punto de vista‘ (New York: Data & Society Research Report, September 2022), 44 pages. DOI: ssrn.4199467. URL: https://datasociety.net/library/a-primer-on-ai-in-from-the-majority-world/
Ranjit Singh, ‘The Decolonial Turn is on the Road to Contingency‘, in Information, Communication & Society, Online First (Latest Articles, November 2021). DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1986104
Toward a Mindful Digital Welfare State
(since Dec. 2021)
This curatorial project focuses on inviting researchers, activists, investigative journalists, and thinkers who focus on emerging conditions of digital organization of welfare services in different parts of the world to write about their own takes on the mindful appropriation of digital technologies for welfare distribution, and/or narrate a field story or “parable” that drives their research.
What does mindful appropriation of digital technologies in the provision of welfare services look like? How do different countries take into account the conditions for, and consequences of “infrastructuring” digital technologies in their practices of delivering welfare?
By mindful appropriation, we mean an ongoing accounting of how digital technologies mediate state-citizen relations, and the affordances as well as the limits of these technologies in the management and provision of welfare services at the scale of any country’s population. The project will explore the unique contingencies of particular countries that not only have their own histories of administering welfare but are also experimenting with the appropriation of digital technologies in welfare distribution.
Curatorial Team: Ranjit Singh, Emnet Tafesse, Eryn Loeb, Seth Young, and Jacob Metcalf
Project Details: Toward a Mindful Digital Welfare State on Points, Data & Society (D&S) Blog.
Project Site: Featured Series on Points, Data & Society (D&S) Blog
Algorithmic Impact Assessments
(since Oct. 2020)
I am a part of the AIGI team at Data & Society (D&S) working on a research project to map the challenges of constructing algorithmic impact assessments (AIAs) by analyzing impact assessments in other domains—from finance and environment to human rights and privacy. Impact assessment is a promising model of algorithmic governance because it bundles an account of potential and actual harms with a means for identifying who is responsible for their remedy. But doing so successfully with algorithmic systems will require careful attention to how social and political power creates a preference for narrow technical metrics and can fail to adequately measure actual harms experienced by people, communities, and society. We use existing impact assessment processes to showcase how “impacts” are evaluative constructs that enable institutions to act; why it is necessary to always attend to how impacts get constructed; and occasions when the impacts measured do not capture the actual harms experienced by people.
Research Team: Emanuel Moss, Elizabeth Anne Watkins, Ranjit Singh, Madeleine Clare Elish, and Jacob Metcalf
Publication(s):
Emanuel Moss, Elizabeth Anne Watkins, Ranjit Singh, Madeleine Clare Elish, and Jacob Metcalf, ‘Assembling Accountability: Algorithmic Impact Assessment for the Public Interest‘ (New York: Data & Society Research Report, 2021).
Elizabeth Anne Watkins, Emanuel Moss, Jacob Metcalf, Ranjit Singh, and Madeleine Clare Elish, ‘Governing Algorithmic Systems with Impact Assessments: Six Observations‘, in Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, AIES’21 (Virtual Event, USA: ACM, 19–21 May 2021). DOI: 10.1145/3461702.3462580
Jacob Metcalf, Emanuel Moss, Elizabeth Anne Watkins, Ranjit Singh, and Madeleine Clare Elish, ‘Algorithmic Impact Assessments and Accountability: The Co-Construction of Impacts‘, in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT ’21 (Virtual Event, Canada: ACM, 2021), pp. 735-746. DOI: 10.1145/3442188.3445935.
Archive
Doctoral Dissertation: Seeing like an Infrastructure: Mapping Uneven State-Citizen Relations in Aadhaar-Enabled Digital India
(Aug. 2012 – Aug. 2020)
How does a citizen become a data subject? This dissertation examines on-the-ground problems and practices in building and appropriation of Aadhaar (translation: Foundation), the biometrics-based national identification infrastructure of India. It advances public understanding of the affordances and limits of biometrics-based data infrastructures in practically achieving inclusive development and reshaping the nature of Indian citizenship. Deploying a mix of interview-based multi-sited ethnographic research and documentary analysis, I examine how various Indian bureaucracies—especially, the Public Distribution System that establishes access to food rights for low-income households—are using Aadhaar to distribute welfare. Aadhaar is imbricated with existing practices of identifying and authenticating each eligible citizen’s claim to government services. I show how making these claims becomes a matter of making as much of the Indian population as possible visible through Aadhaar.
Tracing the sociotechnical, legal, and administrative development of Aadhaar, this dissertation captures the artful blending of the entrepreneurial culture of IT start-ups with the bureaucratic culture of the Indian government. In emerging regimes of data-driven governance, the work of resolving citizens through data is simultaneously a social and a moral problem: social, because making up and interpreting a population as data requires so much work, organization, and discipline; moral, because using data records to represent citizens inevitably involves responding to demands of fairness, accountability, and social justice.
Grant: Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, STS Program, Division of Social and Economic Sciences, National Science Foundation (NSF)
Committee: Michael Lynch, Steven Jackson, and Trevor Pinch
Dissertation:
Ranjit Singh, Seeing like an Infrastructure: Mapping Uneven State-Citizen Relations in Aadhaar-Enabled Digital India (Ann Arbor, Michigan: ProQuest Information and Learning, 2020). DOI: 10.7298/sadf-ye74
Publication(s):
Ranjit Singh and Steven J. Jackson, ‘Seeing like an Infrastructure: Low-resolution Citizens and the Aadhaar Identification Project‘, in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 5, CSCW2, Article 315 (October 2021). DOI: 10.1145/3476056 [ Best Paper Award | Recognition for Contribution to Diversity & Inclusion]
Ranjit Singh, ‘Study the Imbrication: A Methodological Maxim to Follow the Multiple Lives of Data‘, in Sandeep Mertia (ed.), Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Culture in India (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2020), pp. 51-59.
Ranjit Singh, ‘“The Living Dead”: Orphaning in Aadhaar-enabled Distribution of Welfare Pensions in Rajasthan‘, in PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture Ideas, Vol. 20, no. 60 (2020), pp. 92-104. DOI: 10.1386/public_00008_7
Ranjit Singh, ‘Give Me a Database and I Will Raise the Nation-State‘, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 42, no. 3 (2019), pp. 501-518. DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2019.1602810
Ranjit Singh and Steven J. Jackson, ‘From Margins to Seams: Imbrication, Inclusion, and Torque in the Aadhaar Identification Project‘, in Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Denver: ACM, 2017), pp. 4776-4824. DOI: 10.1145/3025453.3025910
Restoring Credit: How people understand and interact with credit scoring systems
(Sep. 2017 – Nov. 2021)
This project is a longitudinal qualitative study of the efforts of low-income individuals to improve their creditworthiness within the lending industry in the United States. It traces credit repair journeys of low-income individuals through qualitative interviews and monthly diary entries over a period of one year of select participants in Upstate New York to understand the implications of credit scoring systems for social and economic inequality. How do ordinary consumers make sense of credit scoring systems that appear to be inscrutable? By capturing credit repair journeys, we hope to understand (1) the key concerns that trigger self-awareness of participating in an algorithmic system, (2) the strategies and tactics used to act upon these concerns under conditions of restricted knowledge and access to the system, and (3) the practices of navigating the ever-shifting line between legitimate participation and illegitimate manipulation of the system. This project is a part of a broader collaboration on conceptualizing and organizing for a Digital Due Process Clinic, based on the model of clinical legal education, to study and support data subjects in their everyday struggles in securing fair representation in algorithmic systems.
Grant: Small Grants Award, Institute for the Social Sciences, Cornell University.
Researchers: Malte Ziewitz (Principal Investigator) and Ranjit Singh (Co-Principal Investigator)
Project Site: Restoring Credit, Cornell University
Publication(s):
Malte Ziewitz and Ranjit Singh, ‘Critical Companionship: Some Sensibilities for Studying the Lived Experience of Data Subjects‘, in Big Data & Society, Vol. 8, no. 2 (2021), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.1177/20539517211061122.
Life of a Tuple: The Assam NRC as an Infrastructure of Reform in Citizen Identification
(Nov. 2016 – Sep. 2020)
I am part of a research team, which is following bureaucratic trails of documents used in updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to differentiate between citizens and illegal immigrants in Assam, a state in the north-east of India. This update has required a series of interrelated technical, legal, bureaucratic, and policy fixes to streamline the collection and verification of document-based evidence in building a genealogical database of citizens in Assam. The people who are left out will eventually become immigrants for the Indian state. Its conceptualization and implementation have been rife with controversy with the involvement of diverse stakeholders such as the state bureaucracy, the Supreme Court of India, civil society groups, information technology companies, and communities of people facing different challenges in enlisting as citizens. The project involves producing a documentary film on who is an Indian citizen and the profound consequences for citizens marginalized in the processes of using documents and data records to map family relations and claim Indian citizenship. Discussions on migration have focused on contests over legal identity of immigrants, making bureaucratic sense of the other. This project contributes to these discussions with ethnographic vignettes of a state-sponsored citizen registration project, which aims to make bureaucratic sense of self (citizenry) in order to differentiate it from the other. It captures how the NRC manifests borders that are not geographical but are experienced as anxieties over new forms of alienation from the Indian state.
Grant: Research Grant Programme, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India.
Researchers: Sumandro Chattapadhyay (Principal Investigator), Khetrimayum Monish Singh (Co-Principal Investigator) and Ranjit Singh (Co-Principal Investigator)
Project Site: Life of a Tuple—Researchers at Work (RAW), Center for Internet and Society (CIS), New Delhi and Bengaluru, India
Back to the Future: Situating ‘Technology’ in ‘Science, and Technology Studies’
(May 2013 – June 2014)
This project explored the historical context within which the discussion paper on Social Construction of Technology (SCoT) emerged and the professional and discursive efforts of STS practitioners to sustain the eventual shift in focus of STS as an academic discipline from socio-cultural explanations of science to those of science and technology. Taking the SCoT paper as an exemplar of this turn to technology, this project traced the drafting, publication, and reception of the SCOT approach between 1982 and 1987 to provide insights into the development of STS as an academic discipline and extend the notion of boundary-work to professions beyond the sciences. Making a claim for expanding disciplinary boundaries is not a singular event in time. Boundary-work is a continuous practical accomplishment of professional practitioners who use accountably rational criteria of intelligibility to determine the boundaries of their professional work. An expansion claim, thus, is only as good as the work done to maintain it.
Supervisor: Michael Lynch
Collaborators: Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker
Award: The Sheila Jasanoff Prize for Academic Excellence in Science Technology Studies for the best graduate student paper within the previous three semesters (May 2015)
Invited Talk [Keynote Speaker]: Ranjit Singh, ‘Back to the Future: Situating the ‘T’ in ‘STS’‘, at the Workshop on Social Construction of Technology Coming of Age: New Challenges and Opportunities Ahead, (Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 3-5 June 2014).
Locating Publics: Co-Production of the Bt Brinjal Controversy and Publics in India
(Jan. – July 2011)
This project traced a sequence of historical events between 2005 and 2010 that led up to the National Consultations on Bt Brinjal in January and February, 2010 organized for the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). It evaluated the persistent notions of science governance in India and placed them within the historicity of the controversy. On 9th February, 2010, the then Indian Minister of State for Environment and Forests (MoSEF), Jairam Ramesh, imposed a moratorium on the agricultural production of Bt Brinjal after organizing a set of public consultations on the issue. The moratorium not only portrays the possibilities inherent within a public debate, but it also marks another significant event in the continuous evaluation of science and its impact on the developing economy of India. Right from the modern Chipko Movement of the early 1970s initiated as a protest against deforestation for industrialization to Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement) since late 1980s against the construction of Narmada Dam, the public conversations on science in India are marked by distinct peaks of criticism within the generic troughs of belief that development through science is equivalent to progress of the country. In this project, I explored the the Bt Brinjal controversy as yet another critique of this belief system around science-led development in India.
Supervisors: Wiebe Bijker and Esha Shah
Presentation: Ranjit Singh, ‘Testing for the Post-normal age: Investigating Scientific Risk Assessment in Bt Brinjal Controversy‘, at the Science Studies Reading Group Meeting (Ithaca: Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, 15 April 2013).
Institution: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS), Maastricht University
This project was documented in my research master’s thesis towards completion of my postgraduate studies in Cultures of Arts, Science, and Technology (CAST) at Maastricht University.
Vaacha: A Tribal HealthCare Management System
(Jan. 2007 – July 2008)
This project focussed on building a healthcare information visualization system of patients who came to the health camps organized by Bhasha, an NGO working on the study, documentation, and conservation of marginal languages in the tribal belt of Gujarat. It was an investigation of the circumstances which lead to disease outbreaks in the tribal belt of Gujarat and an intervention in evaluating contexts and devising healthcare policy using data visualization as a tool. In addition to creating a reference index of support systems for patients suffering from various diseases, the project set out to experiment with techniques to represent statistical indicators on quality of life of such patients. My attempt was to visualize health as a way of life.
Supervisor: Binita Desai
Institution: Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT)
This was my final year research project towards completion of my undergraduate studies in BTech in Information and Communication Technology at DA-IICT.
Publication(s):
Ranjit Singh and Ravi Kiran Atluri, ‘Democracy and Policy Games: The New Information Panchayats‘, in Journal of Creative Communications, Vol. 2, no. 3 (2007), pp. 329-344.