At The Good Robot Podcast, Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies ask the experts: what is good technology? Is ‘good’ technology even possible? And what does feminism have to say about it? Each week, they invite scholars, industry practitioners, activists, and more to provide their unique perspective on what feminism […]
Resolution
Originally published on A New AI Lexicon on 18th August 2021. \ ˌre-zə-ˈlü-shən \ Definition: the act or process of resolving: such as the act of analyzing a complex notion into simpler ones the act of determining the process or capability of making distinguishable the individual parts of an object, closely adjacent optical images, or sources of […]
Imbrication
Originally published on A New AI Lexicon on 13th July 2021. \ ˌim-brə-ˈkā-shən \ Definition: an overlapping of edges (as of tiles or scales) The tribal areas of Rajasthan [a state in the west of India] are very hilly. How would you get network [internet] there? Let me give you an example. The Fair Price Shop is […]
Orphaning
Paper Title: “The Living Dead”: Orphaning in Aadhaar-enabled Distribution of Welfare Pensions in RajasthanAuthors: Ranjit SinghJournal: PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture IdeasVolume: 30Issue: 60Pages: 92-104Year: 2020 Abstract: This paper follows the mutual shaping of the lives of citizens and their data records to illustrate how precarious forms of citizenship emerge in the use of biometrics-based data infrastructures for governance. It presents a case […]
Histories of Infrastructuring
Author: Ranjit SinghWorkshop: Fostering Historical Research in CSCW & HCI Venue: The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Date: 10 November 2019 Abstract: This paper outlines the evolution of my work to narrate the history of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based national identification infrastructure, in one of my dissertation chapters. I describe how and why this […]
Managing Aadhaar’s Scale
Paper Title: Give Me a Database and I Will Raise the Nation-StateAuthors: Ranjit SinghJournal: South Asia: Journal of South Asian StudiesVolume: 42Issue: 3Pages: 501-518 Year: 2019 Abstract: This paper draws on an ethnographic study of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based national identification infrastructure, to investigate how members of its design team conceptualised and understood their techno-bureaucratic enterprise of assigning unique numbers to Indian […]
Whose fault is it anyway?
“I do not understand why certain activists blame Aadhaar in this pension case. Aadhaar is designed to store only four data attributes about a person and their biometric information. It only guarantees uniqueness of their record with us. If you ask the database to confirm a person’s identity using their fingerprints, we only certify that […]