It’s that time of the year.
I am taking on PhD students in Fall 2025. Folx interested in critical, qualitative HCI/CSCW research w focus on Global South, labor, social media, platforms - pls email w CV and brief description of your research interests. Email raval
@seis
.ucla.edu
@debarghya_das
Yes because in India these platforms are able to exploit extremely poor and vulnerable folks for whom this is a low entry barrier job. The workers bear the risks and costs of the speeding up
Thread: I’ve been helping Indian students apply to PhD programs in the US for the past two years. I review applications, help draw timelines and make connections. It’s actually helped some amazing ppl get in. But it’s not just me...1/n
@ohKAYx33
have you been to a "third world country"? do you know where that term comes from? do you know any history at all? why are americans so fucking ignorant and immune to reading anything?
Piracy is not a crime or immoral. It is the only option for the majority of the world to get knowledge in a world hijacked by the publishing mafia. Pls pass it on and don’t make your students buy expensive books.
This thread is quite instructive on what makes a tech bro so uncomfortable. Just the mere mention of labor conditions is making this guy bristle :) he claims ppl complaining are “anons who order on Swiggy anyway”. Maybe he should check out
@aigwu_union
tweets
In San Francisco, I've stopped using DoorDash because I'm paying $25 to wait 55mins to get a bang average cold sandwich.
In Bangalore, I just ordered the most mindblowingly mouthwatering hot biryanis from Meghana's for $5 and it arrived in EIGHT MINUTES!
good sex is okay but have you visited the Helsinki Central Library where they don't frisk you and there are enough plug points and free wifi and people respect quiet spaces? idk i feel like crying
I defended my dissertation successfully today with literally the best advisor (and committee) ever. I am so thankful for the happy accident that made me a
@dourish
advisee. I am just so thankful for all who patiently heard my diss ramblings, quite humbled I say <3
pinned: (thank you for following me, i am passionate about postcolonial, intersectional feminist, no-futures, infrastructure and data politics issues but here i am mostly always serving salty tweets and shitposts as a critique of productivity)
I am grateful to the Histories of AI seminar at Cambridge University for offering me an international collaboration award. This work feeds into my general future work directions
I've been thinking about it for a few weeks. How do researchers in places and times of political crises manage to keep doing research? Is it key to be located in a place/time of stability to be able to keep writing, publishing?
And if this is your idea of an april fool gag, trying to be cool like google, the joke is actually on you. A cruel irony if you will. Your drivers sleep in their cars, pee on the roadside, in bottles. And you want to privatize toilet infrastructure.
I think the very worstest part of the chopra moment that we are all not addressing is that desi basic bitches need to s.t.o.p appropriating black language. saying girrrrl don't yell doesn't make you beyonce. just stop it
Do you ever chat with your ola/uber/swiggy/zomato driver/partners? Do you care about their work conditions? Pass them this link to our survey, we are studying gig worker conditions in India.
I am teaching Control/Power/Surveillance next in class. Do people have interesting/fav activities or interactive ways to encourage reflection? I don't want it to become "everything is surveilled and it sucks"
Also gully boy sucked. Like it doesn’t need explaining but it is a mediocre film that rides the hype of a real life story. I’m surprised at the privileged reviewers who want to like it so bad. How hard is it to make a city of god?
okay but we are talking about a county where bosses and companies don't respect time boundaries or weekends. We are also talking about a country where so much work is underpaid and unpaid. So these metrics will further push for hidden work
Since December 2019 at least three people have explicitly asked me if my profile picture contains my grandfather’s face. Just so you all protestors know what you’re up against.
Rex Theatre closed down recently and is in the process of being torn apart. Today we managed to get a glimpse inside and the kind folks also gave us the remaining posters. So now I have a thugs of Hindustan poster from Rex. Here’s a peek inside.
I want to do two things in the near future while still being embedded in privileges of US academia. 1) support Global South and non upper caste scholars in their phd applications to US unis. Mail me if you need help at any stage.
Thank you to all who attended the
@ResistanceAI
panel yesterday. Some of you really appreciated the points about global South and my critique of the Data/AI/ML for social good Developmental paradigm
#NeurIPS2020
. I want to add some thoughts:
I am so excited to be speaking at the Cinema and Media Studies colloquium at
@UPenn
on September 7th! Here is an abstract of my talk: . I am going to talk about how platformization has altered food, consumption and reproductive labor.
can't get myself to work because my country is burning and UC university colleagues are facing imminent firing. honestly no motivation to submit to any calls or write anything. feeling very hopeless
Extremely hilarious that massive infrastructural breakdown happens on the last day of an STS conference. Many academics just sitting at airports marveling
The new ACM Interactions issue on 'Tech Labor' is out! () I have an essay in it titled 'Interrupting Invisibility in a Global World'. My immense gratitude to
@perhaxis
and
@seyramavle
for inviting me to contribute. A small thread on (why) the essay:
Sharing my happy story publicly. Nearby desi uncle who works at grocery store. First brought me rice and now lentils. He shops for me at the Indian store cos I don’t have car. Guess what. He’s Muslim. From okhla. So I obv highlighted this to sanghi fam
I see a totally valid case for Bangalore Studies and if someone gave me the money I would do an edited volume on blr neighborhoods, mapping why certain urban forms such as 99 variety dosa exist in some parts of the city
There is a moment at the end of
#PastLives
where I found myself sobbing and simultaneously wondering what I was mourning. You know when you feel like you’re suddenly mourning so many things at once and even so, the objects of grief keep shifting.
I am offering my time to do a short info session for prospective PhD students/applicants. This could be useful to anyone in South Asia but some of the details more relevant to Indian students in Info Sci, Comm, Media Studies. Pls sign up
pls let us never forget this. we can do zoom research interviews and have transcripts ready because disability activists and scholars have made it possible. we all benefit from accessibility tech.
I’ve had at least three transformative teachers in my life and I know the power and magic of a good teacher. No amount of institutional politics and bullshit can corrupt the sacred joy of learning together in a class. That’s maybe why I love academia
also remember India, we are more than our leaders (good or bad). please don't advance hopelessness narratives, time is for action and political participation.
I’m genuinely surprised that by the muted response or complete silence by non-Indian academic friends who’ve “studied” India as a field site and benefited from their research on India while Indian students at home and abroad have stopped work to mobilize for
#nocaa
For those of you who are constantly pushing a bad faith argument of equality and diversity of perspectives, here’s that cartoon if you missed it. Men and women are not equal yet. Our opportunities, opinions are not equally valued yet. So think before you feed the “equalist” POV
I am hoping to convene a California+Silicon Valley reading+movie group in my dept. I have some starter texts including California ideology, the new Palo Alto book and more. Please add your recommendations and share this tweet? Will share the final list!
For any non-technical scholar who wants to start understanding how to talk about algorithms (is it an object, is it singular, what form, how many, what?!), I highly recommend these two papers to begin with: 1) and 2)
A bunch of people volunteered to do the same for different disciplines and non-US schools. Here’s the spreadsheet: (these were from last year but feel free to check w anyone relevant) So what now? 2/n
Annual reminder that NSF GRFP isn't open to international students and that is a problem. International PhD students pay taxes and do excellent research.
My very excellent cinema studies professor would keep reminding us, films are not books. What she meant is that it takes serious capital and energy to make cinema. And we must go beyond the textual analysis of films. Films are collaborative *productions*
I’m not sure why critical AI or data/software studies types never reach anthropology of development or global anthropology for that matter. There’s more relevant stuff there than going all the way to moral philosophy
Can you believe I grew up learning to draw kidneys, ovaries, neurons and nephrons? And even in that some harami kids would try to do shading and draw the prettiest mitochondria :/
What does it mean to keep doing research of the tech and social while the world around is imploding? When producing evidence isn’t going to stop genocide? Idk
I've always found tech and policy discussions in India dense, inaccessible and slightly unrelatable (minus net neutrality moment). There needs to be more citizen/worker/user centric engagement given how reckless datafication is penetrating our daily lives
I was quoted in this story on delivery drivers. To anyone curious about or looking to read more about service industry professions and the emotional and physical strains they put, I highly recommend Arlie Hochschild's 'The Managed Heart'
@debarghya_das
I don’t know why you feel the need to defend the govt or the wage level :) I’m simply answering your original question. You’re wondering why the difference in delivery. Some tech bro might tell you it’s because of the “vertical integration”. As a researcher I’m answering your Q
Please bear with me while I gush and rave about the fantastic work that our four
@cis_india
research fellows have been doing on gig work in India. Here we present preliminary work in a series of weekly blogposts. The first by the brilliant
@SimiranLalvani
☺️ But wait!
Today on the blog, we have the 1st in a series on
#gigwork
in
#India
. Each post also has an audio translation into the language of its interlocutors!
@SimiranLalvani
explores the role of fictive kinship in Mumbai’s app-based food delivery sector.
📢: New paper alert! I wrote a paper on what I call the 'Gender Data Assemblage' - gender(ed) data projects + larger trend towards "sex/gender disaggregated data" led by intl dev agencies, universities and others that trains its 'data gaze' primarily on global South women. A 🧵:
Read
@tetisheri
's paper where she examines data-led gender development, and offers critical historical insights to caution against the harms of gender disaggregated datafication, and the consequences of non-participatory datafication of women
shoutout to every over prepared woman who is mentally planning the whole next day and its contingencies while smiling and pretending to have a good time
@ShamikaRavi
Wow those are very poorly informed thoughts. You should read more about structural oppression and how it’s not just about individual choice. I could recommend books if you’d like.
If you’re in the NY area and looking to teach a tech and ethics course at NYU, please consider applying! I just finished teaching this course and just the whole experience was fantastic.
@debarghya_das
You perhaps felt so called out that you immediately went to wage levels my dude. If you’ve lived in blr, you would know the absolute traffic havoc, accidents, delivery guys getting beaten up and more. The wage doesn’t cover this, nor do they get personal or vehicle insurance
Also in case it’s not clear: if you find yourself responding to critical AI discussions but feel like you’re “not an AI researcher”, we are looking to converse with you! The critical AI language limits and draws lines around who or what can be said.
📢Call for Submissions/Project Launch alert!
@tetisheri
,
@ambaonadventure
and AI Now are thrilled to launch ‘A New AI Lexicon’ – inviting critical perspectives + new frameworks currently absent from the Western, corporate-dominated AI Ethics discourse. A thread 🧵:
Gentle reminder. Just because some people in some parts of the world cannot see who is doing the work, those workers do not become ghost workers. They have agency and are visible and even recognized in their own local contexts. Extremely tired of US-centrism.
small shout out to people who are willing to teach and share tricks of trade, mentor someone, no matter what their age or position is. for all u know ppl have been winging it alone for a long time
Idk who needs to hear this but if you’re a junior scholar who feels clueless and has been criticized and demoralized, you’re not alone. I used to be there and ppl I work with are recovering from that. You are worthy, you need mentors and tactical advice. I promise you will shine.
Before that, I will be moving to
@ucsc
- Silicon Valley campus in 2022 for a 1-year postdoc w/ Prof
@normsu
. South Bay/San Jose/Santa Clara fam pls reach out, let's hang!
There’s a lot of noise here but I genuinely feel like more thought should go into international solidarity and safe modes of showing support. Greta tweeted. It’s led to the very real arrest of an Indian climate activist because revenge is local.
After careful discussion our team decided not to publish a major year-end report. Instead, we're slowing down and reflecting on our work, and how we can best contribute to justice in the midst of a rapidly changing field in 2021. Our full statement here: