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 […]
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 […]
Following Digital Directions
Chapter Title: Getting “There” from the Ever-changing “Here”: Following Digital Directions Authors: Ranjit Singh, Chris Hesselbein, Jessica Price, and Michael Lynch Edited Volume: digitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies Publisher: Princeton University Press Pages: 280-299 Year: 2019 Abstract: Many familiar debates in STS, philosophy, and communication and information studies revolve around the relationship between formal […]