About
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at Vassar College. My research examines how AI, data-driven technologies, and digital infrastructures reshape labor, care, and everyday life in the majority world, with a particular focus on India. I hold a PhD in Information with a graduate certificate in STS from the University of Michigan, and an MA in Global Digital Cultures from SOAS, University of London, where I was a Commonwealth Scholar.
My first book project, Ungovernable Onions: AI, Agriculture, and the Fantasy of Precision, draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in one of the world's largest onion supply chains. The book follows AI graders, IoT sensors, digital marketplaces, and seed traceability systems as they collide with the multispecies realities of smallholder farming, asking what happens when AI-driven governance expands into the living world. It extends a longer trajectory of research in postcolonial computing that examines how technology restructures labor and knowledge across agrarian, care, and platform economies in India.
A second strand of my work focuses on labor in the digital economy. I have published extensively on gig work in India, and my current projects in this area take up physical AI and egocentric data to ask what it means to labor within the AI political economy.
Before returning to academia, I spent seven years as a development practitioner with international feminist human rights organizations, including UN Women, CREA, and MacArthur Foundation–funded initiatives. This work continues to shape my scholarly commitments to gender, labor, and technology justice.
Publications
A complete list is available on Google Scholar.
Monograph
Ungovernable Onions: AI, Agriculture, and the Fantasy of Precision. Singh, A. Proposal under review.
Journal Articles
Labor of Waiting: Probing Gig Work with Ethnographically Informed Design Fiction. Shaikh, R., & Singh, A. Under review.
Whose Country Is Digital India? Unpacking Dominant Power Relations Mediated by the Digital India Campaign. Singh, A.
Asiascape: Digital Asia, 8(3), 164–189, 2021. PDF
Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings
What's in a Place? On Platformization of Traditional Agricultural Marketplaces. Singh, A., Garcia, P., Chandra, P.
Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025. PDF
Not Just A Dot on The Map: Food Delivery Workers as Infrastructure. Shaikh, R., Singh, A., Brown, B., & Lampinen, A.
Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2024. PDF
Old Logics, New Technologies: Producing a Managed Workforce on On-Demand Service Platforms. Singh, A., Garcia, P., & Lindtner, S.
Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2023. PDF
No! Re-imagining Data Practices Through the Lens of Critical Refusal. Garcia, P., Sutherland, T., Salehi, N., Cifor, M., & Singh, A.
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW2), 2022. PDF
Automating Care: Online Food Delivery Work During the CoVID-19 Crisis in India. Singh, A., & Park, T.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), 2022. PDF
Peer-Reviewed Extended Abstracts
(Re)working for Sustainable Futures: Climate Change and Platform Economies. Thuppilikkat, A. A., Chung, H. F., Mahetaji, K., Singh, A., … & Chandra, P. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, pp. 848–852, 2025.
Datafication Dilemmas: Data Governance in the Public Interest. Huber, L., Singh, A., Dombrowski, L., Guha, S., Hardy, J., & Holten Møller, N. Panel. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), 2024.
Outsourcing Artificial Intelligence: Responding to the Reassertion of the Human Element into Automation. Iantorno, M., Doggett, O., Chandra, P., Chen, J.Y., Steup, R., Raval, N., Khovanskaya, V., Lam, L., Singh, A., Rotz, S., & Ratto, M. CHI 2022 Workshop.
Policy Briefs
Hearts & Minds — Women of India Speak. Gupta, D., Singh, A., & Bist-Joshi, S.
UN Women, India, 2013. Commissioned white paper presented at the UN General Assembly. PDF
Public-Facing Writing
AI is like a Child: The Dangers of an Oversimplified Narrative. Singh, A.
Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, 2026. Link
Contribution to Trust Issues Anthology. Singh, A. Data & Society, 2025.
Introducing Carbon Computing. Dryer, T., Kneese, T., Pasek, A., Lin, C., McGee A.M., Singh, A., Rodgers J., & Wiessner, M.
Branch Magazine, 2023. Link
'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!': Why Digital Security is Everyone's Issue. Singh, A. AWID Young Feminist Activism, 2016.
Mobile Phone: Patriarchy's New Red Alert. Singh, A.
The Wire, 2016. Link
Women have been branded — Liars! Singh, A., & Shukla, S.
Kafila, 2014. Link
Strength of a Woman. Shukla, S., & Singh, A.
Kafila, 2014. Link
The Pradan–Jagori Collaboration for Gender Equality. Singh, A. 2014.
Conference Presentations & Workshops
Conference Presentations & Workshop Papers
Plant-agnostic AgTech: Smallholder Relationality and AgTech Refusal in India. Singh, A. Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting (4S) — Technopower-Technoscientific Futures, Toronto, Canada, October 2026.
Tracing Embodied Knowledge in Synthetic Data. Shaikh, R., & Singh, A. European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) — More Than Now: Exploring Resilient Futures, Kraków, Poland, September 2026.
Theorizing the Gap: Brokenness of AI's Precision in Agronomic Approximations. Singh, A. Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting (4S) — Reverberations, Seattle, WA, September 2025.
Between the Forms and Fantasies of Designing the Future of Agriculture in India. Singh, A. Doctoral Consortium, North-East HCI Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, May 2024.
What's in a Place? On Platformization of Agricultural Marketplaces in India. Singh, A. Cultures of Datafication In and Across South Asia, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, April 2024.
Between the Forms and Fantasies of Designing the Future of Agriculture in India. Singh, A. Data & Society — Trust Issues: Perspectives on Community, Technology, and Trust, virtual, March 2024.
Between the Forms and Fantasies of Food Supply Chain Governance: Examining the Utopian Imaginaries of Blockchain. Singh, A. Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting (4S), December 2022.
Automating Care: Online Food Delivery Work During the COVID-19 Crisis in India. Singh, A. Graduate Research in STS (GRiSTS) Conference — Disrupted Lives, Harvard Kennedy School, October 2021.
'AI is not just a fad for us… AI is an existential need for us…'. Singh, A. Data & Society — The Hustle Economy: Race, Gender, and Digital Entrepreneurship, May 2021.
Collective Technocultural Imaginaries of Food Delivery Workers. Singh, A., & Chandra, P. CHI 2021 Workshop — This Seems to Work: Designing Technological Systems with the Algorithmic Imaginations of Those Who Labor, May 2021.
Towards Equitable Participatory Design: Data Feminism for CSCW amidst Multiple Pandemics. Singh, A. CSCW 2020 Workshop, October 2020.
Women's Participation in Information Society: A New Threat to Brahmanical Patriarchy. Singh, A. XI IASSCS Conference — Breaking Boundaries: Sexuality, Gender, Reproduction, Health, and Rights, July 2017.
Bitch Be Crazy! Stereotyping Women as Liars, Backlash to Our Collective Struggles. Singh, A. Second Junior Researchers' Conference on Law and Social Transformations, Stanford Program in Law and Society, May 2015.
Conferences, Workshops & Panels Organized
Outsourcing Artificial Intelligence: Responding to the Reassertion of the Human Element into Automation. Iantorno, M., Doggett, O., Chandra, P., Chen, J. Y., Steup, R., Raval, N., Khovanskaya, V., Lam, L., Singh, A., Rotz, S., & Ratto, M. Workshop, CHI 2022, virtual.
Michigan University-Wide Sustainability and Environment Conference (MUSE) — Sustainability and Environment after Catastrophe. School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, February 2022.
ICT for SRHR — National Consultation on Leveraging Technology for Advancing Knowledge for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. CREA, New Delhi, September 2016.