Tech hype as a mnemonic process: Misremembering the land problem in India

This research article considers tech hype as a mnemonic process that makes us remember or forget the world, technology, and the myriad ways we can relate to it. The argument is based on an auto-ethnographic vignette and a close reading of two key texts in the discourse on using technology for land management in India. The article shows how technology, the social, and the practice of knowledge-production can be rethought in this mock battle between hype and criticism of hype.Der Forschungsartikel betrachtet den Tech-Hype als Prozess, der uns an die Welt, die Technologie und die unzähligen Möglichkeiten, wie wir damit umgehen können, erinnert oder sie uns vergessen lässt. Die Argumentation basiert auf einer autoethnografischen Vignette und einer genauen Lektüre zweier Schlüsseltexte im Diskurs über den Einsatz von Technologie für die Landbewirtschaftung in Indien. Der Beitrag zeigt auf, wie Technologie, das Soziale und die Praxis der Wissensproduktion in diesem Scheingefecht zwischen Hype und Kritik am Hype neu gedacht werden können

Scientific, Technological and Gendered Relations: An Ethnographic Study of Women Scientists, Engineers and Factory Workers

The thesis draws from a year and a half long multi-sited ethnographic study of three empirically situated sites—1) a government space scientific research organization assembling satellites for the Indian State since the 1970s (which I will call iSpace), 2) a workplace in Whitefield, Bengaluru which is part of the largest Indian multinational information technology (IT) service and consulting company founded in 1968 that I refer to as iTech and finally 3) an Industrial Modern Township, commonly called IMT Manesar, 60 km from Delhi and 21.4 km from Gurgaon, which is a planned cluster for automobile manufacturing. Borrowing from Stengers’ (2009) notion of the figure of a scientist "where the scientist submits to a becoming that cannot be reduced to the simple possession of a knowledge" and Weeks’ appeal to envision an immanent political intervention within post-Fordist regimes of work, one that is "no longer about a self to save or to recover but one to invent" (Weeks, 2007, p. 248), the thesis weaves an affective relationship between different situations encountered at each field-site. At iSpace, I locate an articulation of exhaustion that informs the figure of a woman scientist and use this articulation to locate the limits of women in science discourse in India. At iTech, I identify a desire for im/mobility that informs the figure of the IT worker. This desire, the thesis contends, makes visible a horizontal relation between work/labour, life and urban, a relation that is obfuscated within the existing literature on IT work and Bengaluru. At IMT Manesar, where I collaborated with Faridabad Majdoor Samachar—a collective that has been documenting the lives of workers through its monthly newspaper in the industrial belt in and around Delhi for the last 30 years—I locate a horizontality of relations and how it influences the form and content of the newspaper, as opposed to a vertical relation between workers, unions, management and state. By engaging with the form and content of the Newspaper, I identify a crucial need to map the situatedness of situated knowledge. An affective, ethnographic map of exhaustion, im/mobility and horizontality weaved together in the thesis offers an illustrative critique of existing debates within women/gender studies in India on intersectionality while also locating the limits of existing debate on situated knowledges that is central to feminist (techno) science studies

Learning For/Towards Sustainable Development: Reimagining Education and Learning as a Key Vertical Across the SDGs (T20 Policy Brief)

In many parts of the world, there is uncertainty about the diminishing quality of higher education systems. Concurrent crises have negatively impacted the well-charted policy trajectories in education (i.e., what is being taught), learning (i.e., what is being learned and how), and knowledge (i.e., what ought to be taught). Existing policy interventions primarily focus on formal spaces of learning, despite the growing recognition of informal learning, and long-standing commitments to lifelong learning. While school, vocational, and higher education are addressed under SDG4, the new realities of impending, multiple emergencies demand a reimagination of what it means to learn in an unpredictable environment. There is a need to build robust equitable infrastructures that can sustain the global mobility of learners across sectors as well as pedagogic tools and processes to interrogate and share diverse sustainable approaches being practised across the G20 nations. This Policy Brief calls for sustained effort to expand spaces, tools and methods of learning and put forward a blueprint for learning for/towards sustainable development as a key policy directive across all SDGs

The Uli Dataset: An Exercise in Experience Led Annotation of oGBV

Online gender based violence has grown concomitantly with adoption of the internet and social media. Its effects are worse in the Global majority where many users use social media in languages other than English. The scale and volume of conversations on the internet has necessitated the need for automated detection of hate speech, and more specifically gendered abuse. There is, however, a lack of language specific and contextual data to build such automated tools. In this paper we present a dataset on gendered abuse in three languages- Hindi, Tamil and Indian English. The dataset comprises of tweets annotated along three questions pertaining to the experience of gender abuse, by experts who identify as women or a member of the LGBTQIA community in South Asia. Through this dataset we demonstrate a participatory approach to creating datasets that drive AI systems

Web3 and the state: The Indian state’s re-description of blockchain

This paper closely examines a discussion paper by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog and a strategy paper by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) advocating non-financial use cases of blockchain in India. By noting the discursive shift from transparency to trust to adjustably transparent enacted in these two documents, and consequently the Indian state’s re-description of blockchain, the paper foregrounds how blockchain systems are being designated as “decentral” but have recentralizing effects where the state reinvents and re-establishes itself as an intermediary. This paper illustrates how discursive shifts concerning trust, transparency, (de)centralization and (dis)intermediation are crucial sites for investigating re-descriptions of emerging sociotechnical systems

Guidelines to Build Robust Security Standards for the Financial Technology Sector in India

Given the rapid growth of the fintech sector in India and the lack of any national data protection framework, there is an urgent need to arrive at stop-gap measures to ensure robust information security standards for the sector. Owing to threats such as financial data leakages, malware attacks etc., information security standards are central to ensuring business and operational sanctity. We present a set of minimum guidelines, which privilege a co-regulatory framework for the fintech sector, that should be considered when building a regulatory framework for the fintech entities to ensure adequate data protection as well as the growth of the industry

Sexual Harassment and its Vicissitudes: Jadavpur University, 2014-17

The paper chronicles three fallouts of sexual harassment cases in Jadavpur University (JU) in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, using media reports, activists’ responses to those events, and their reflections. It highlights the differential trajectories that political praxis around sexual harassment and social media takes on the ground. By chronicling three different cases of sexual harassment from Hokkolorob (2014–15) to two other cases till 2017, the paper brings to light the enmeshed nature of on-ground institutions that deal with sexual harassment and social media and the disposition of actors towards them

No Publication, No Degree: Of Knowledge Production in Anthropology/Sociology in India

The paper rekindles a three-decade-old debate in the annals of Indian anthropology / sociology which became dormant after no significant headway was made. The debate which goes by the name of “crisis in sociology” in India provides the backdrop against which the paper makes sense of current regimes of knowledge production that a doctoral candidate in India must navigate. By doing so, the paper reflects on the limitations of epistemological critiques wherein an epistemic critique stops at the corridors of an academic workplace. The paper argues that doctoral candidates in India today are cognitive workers engaged in exploitative relations of knowledge production. However, these exploitative relations are obfuscated by the postcolonial epistemological critiques that indulge in foregrounding the hegemony of the North / West. The paper proposes an infrastructural critique of knowledge that does not respond with despair to perceived transformations and crises.The paper rekindles a three-decade-old debate in the annals of Indian anthropology / sociology which became dormant after no significant headway was made. The debate which goes by the name of “crisis in sociology” in India provides the backdrop against which the paper makes sense of current regimes of knowledge production that a doctoral candidate in India must navigate. By doing so, the paper reflects on the limitations of epistemological critiques wherein an epistemic critique stops at the corridors of an academic workplace. The paper argues that doctoral candidates in India today are cognitive workers engaged in exploitative relations of knowledge production. However, these exploitative relations are obfuscated by the postcolonial epistemological critiques that indulge in foregrounding the hegemony of the North / West. The paper proposes an infrastructural critique of knowledge that does not respond with despair to perceived transformations and crises.The paper rekindles a three-decade-old debate in the annals of Indian anthropology / sociology which became dormant after no significant headway was made. The debate which goes by the name of “crisis in sociology” in India provides the backdrop against which the paper makes sense of current regimes of knowledge production that a doctoral candidate in India must navigate. By doing so, the paper reflects on the limitations of epistemological critiques wherein an epistemic critique stops at the corridors of an academic workplace. The paper argues that doctoral candidates in India today are cognitive workers engaged in exploitative relations of knowledge production. However, these exploitative relations are obfuscated by the postcolonial epistemological critiques that indulge in foregrounding the hegemony of the North / West. The paper proposes an infrastructural critique of knowledge that does not respond with despair to perceived transformations and crises

To think of interdisciplinarity as intercurrence: Or, working as an interdisciplinary team to develop an ML tool to tackle online gender-based violence and hate speech

The paper reflects on the working of an interdisciplinary team consisting of researchers and activists from the field of computer science and social sciences involved in developing a user-facing, browser plug-in to detect and moderate instances of online gender-based violence, hate speech and harassment in Hindi, Indian English, and Tamil. There have been multiple calls within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to include qualitative methods in one’s research design. These calls, while attuned to the importance of qualitative methods for HCI, ignore the intercurrent nature of different research methods, disciplines and practices. The paper borrows the concept of intercurrence from Orren & Skowronek (1996) and reorients it to explicate the practice of interdisciplinary research. It argues that intercurrence i.e. (in between, an occurrence within an occurrence) is a useful image to perceive interdisciplinarity wherein we argue that at any given point, an interdisciplinary team navigates multiple, yet simultaneously occurring temporal dimensions of differently disciplined bodies. An awareness of these multiple temporalities adds another dimension to thinking about conflicts and possibilities emerging from interdisciplinary practices and reorients interdisciplinary research towards unexpected outcomes

Test of a Homeopathic Algorithm for COVID-19: the Importance of a Broad Perspective

Abstract Background/Objective Most of the symptoms of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are covered by large repertory rubrics and hence many remedies have been proposed as “genus epidemicus”. The aim of this study was to combine the information from various data collections to prepare a COVID-19 Bayesian mini-repertory/an algorithm-based application (app) and test it. Methods In July 2021, 1,161 COVID-19 cases from 100 practitioners globally were combined. These data were used to calculate “condition-confined” likelihood ratios (LRs) for 59 symptoms of COVID-19. Out of these, 35 symptoms of the 11 medicines that had at least 20 cases each were considered. The information was entered in a spreadsheet (algorithm) to calculate combined LRs of specific combinations of symptoms. The algorithm contained the medicines Arsenicum album, Belladonna, Bryonia alba, Camphora, Gelsemium sempervirens, Hepar sulphuris, Mercurius solubilis, Nux vomica, Phosphorus, Pulsatilla and Rhus toxicodendron. To test concordance, the doctors were then invited to re-enter the symptoms of their cases into this algorithm. Results The algorithm was re-tested on 358 cases, and concordance was seen in 288 cases. On analysis of the data, bias was noticed in the Merc group, which was therefore excluded from the algorithm. The remaining 10 medicines, representing 81.8% of all cases, were included in the preparation of the next version of the homeopathic mini-repertory and app. Conclusion The Bayesian mini-repertory and app is based on qualitative clinical experiences of various doctors in COVID-19 and gives indications for specific medicines for common COVID-19 symptoms