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Criminality, Risk, and Labor: Altruistic Surrogacy in Contemporary India

 Ritu Ghosh  April 20, 2026

Surrogacy is a form of assisted reproduction in which the gestational labor of birthing a child is carried out by someone other than the intending parent/s. Surrogacy in India has gained a great deal of popularity over the last three decades, emerging as a major transnational commercial hub. Generating close to $2.3 billion in annual revenue (Rudrappa 2015), the industry was largely unregulated, until recently. In December 2021, the Indian state passed the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, criminalizing commercial surrogacy and permitting only altruistic surrogacy for select clients. The Act bans the “commercialization of surrogacy services,” outlawing any possible compensation for surrogate workers, whether it is “payment, reward, benefit, fees, remuneration, or monetary incentive in cash or kind” (Government of India 2021, 2). In effect, surrogacy is legally permitted only if it is “altruistic,” with heavy punitive measures in place for commercial surrogacy. By “altruistic” surrogacy, the state means an unpaid surrogacy arrangement that is borne out of the good will and selflessness of the surrogate worker, upon whose body the biomedically intensive, complicated, and risky process of surrogacy is carried out. It is important to note that surrogacy arrangements in India are largely shaped by stark power imbalances. Surrogate workers tend to come from marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds, and are often low-income, oppressed-caste women from rural areas. Intending parent/s, by contrast, are typically more privileged – urban, middle-to-upper-class, and from dominant-caste groups. These structural disparities have significant implications for surrogate workers in the current moment, with the regulatory turn to “altruism.” (read more...)

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Data Borders: Three Years Later

 Melissa Villa Nicholas  April 14, 2026

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What should we do today? How would you write Data Borders differently today? But what can I do? People often ask me these questions when I present my research on my book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants (Villa-Nicholas 2023), which examines the growing industry of data collection for the surveillance and control of immigrants in the United States. These questions arise in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, at academic conferences, and among public workers in the United States. I respond by advocating for policy protections for immigrant information rights, providing examples of data rights activism, and demonstrating how we are applying techno-imagined futures within my Southern California community to advocate for humane shifts in technological design and data collection. (read more...)

Gender Dimensions of Platform Work: How Do They Shape Unionizing?

 Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta, Eesha Kunduri  April 9, 2026

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This article is the fourth article in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network. Read the introduction to the series here, the second post in the series here, and the third post here. In January 2024, hundreds of women workers associated with the on-demand home services app Urban Company (henceforth UC) gathered in protest outside the platform’s regional office in Hyderabad, India. The workers, many of whom were working as beauticians on the app, were protesting a slew of platform policies that had steadily eroded their working conditions over time (Figure 1). Most notable of these was the introduction of a new feature called ‘auto-assign’, which requires workers to mark the time slots that they are available to work on the app, following which they are assigned gigs automatically by the platform. The new ‘auto-assign’ policy marked a significant shift away from a previously more flexible system, where women could choose their gigs and hours. The promise of flexibility has been a prime reason that attracted women workers to platforms like UC, as it enables them to access paid work while also attending to their housework and care work responsibilities. It is this very erosion of flexibility that women were holding UC to account for. (read more...)

Techno-Ethics and Feminist AI: What Role for an African Studies Approach to Science and Technology?

 Alena Thiel  April 7, 2026

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This post is inspired by the collaborative conceptualization of a workshop on African feminist AI held at ETHOS Lab in May 2025. It is deeply indebted to the ideas shared by the workshop organizers and participants. (read more...)

From Hotspots to Outbreaks: Keywords for (Un)Grounding Space, Temporality, and the Boundaries of Infection

 Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich, Pat Kinley  April 2, 2026

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This special series examines the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. As a primarily analytic approach, the authors in this series unpack epidemiologic keywords such as outbreak, hotspot and epidemic, to assess their uptake, uses and meanings amongst scientists, public health and healthcare practitioners, experts and broader publics. As disruptions to public health ripple through the healthcare landscape in the United States, and whilst the global COVID-19 pandemic continues to haunt our collective present, the fundamental terms or “keywords” through which we understand disease transmission demand ethnographically-grounded inquiry, critique, and theorization. The posts in this series look at how infectious diseases and their conceptualizations spread through space and time, as well as how ethnography can articulate the expansive, lived realities of infection. (read more...)

On Resolving Controversies: Enduring Regulatory Neglect in Southern Tamil Nadu

 Misria Shaik Ali  March 31, 2026

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At India’s southern tip, eight reactor buildings line the shore of the coastal communities of Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu—one of the four districts my family and I call home. These reactor buildings are of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP), envisioned to be India’s largest nuclear park. People living in the nearby Idinthakkarai and Kootapalli villages mock the association of a risky technoscientific complex to anything close to a ‘park,’ or poonga—a forest or garden of flowers, in Tamil. The sea that rolls against the compound of KKNPP is where women protestors claimed that they derived their energy to lead the protest against the plant in March 2011. Following suit, fishermen rowed and drove their boats into the sea to protest the commissioning of the plant. (read more...)

The Human Cost of Precision

 Samiksha Bhan  March 24, 2026

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In 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s son died at the age of twenty-six from a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder caused by birth-related brain damage. When in 2017, Nadella delivered a talk about the use of assistive artificial intelligence for people suffering from disabilities like CP, he was contacted by one his colleagues in Spain. Julián Isla, a software engineer at Microsoft, emailed Nadella out of a sense of resonance, because his own son suffered from a rare genetic epilepsy making him a parent of a child living with disability as well. Like Nadella, Isla was also motivated to think of the role of artificial intelligence in the assistance of other parents who, as he described, were on the “odyssey of diagnosis”. (read more...)

Love at First Sprout: Wild Peanuts and Mars’ Plan for Climate Security

 Eva Steinberg  March 18, 2026

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An animated peanut with a bowler hat and a white beard sits on one side of a campfire, opposite three smaller peanuts grinning back at him adoringly. Amid the chirping crickets and the crackling of the fire, the older peanut calls out: “Gather round my little legumes, it’s story time!” A small redheaded pod responds, “Grandpa, tell us the M and M’s story again.” Grandpa responds in a chiding tone: “We’ll get there! But, let’s start at the beginning…” (read more...)