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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 and final 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...)

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Conceptual diagram with curved connecting lines linking key terms. On the left, “indexicality” and “inclusive AI systems” connect to “incompleteness” and “(queering) bridging.” These central ideas link to “building” and “text” at the bottom. On the right, “incompleteness” also connects to “large image models,” which relate to “fabulating” and “convivial GPT.” All elements are interconnected, suggesting a network of relationships between AI systems, language, and interpretive processes.

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...)

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A detailed black-and-white map of a 19th-century London neighborhood, showing square dots that indicate cholera cases, which concentrate around Broad Street.

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...)

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A view of Kudankulam's sea shore. In the foreground of the image, waves touch the shore where boats are moored on beach sand. In the background, is the tomb of KKNNP's nuclear containment.

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...)

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An artistic illustration of computer servers with patterns of white and blue connected through lines that converge into a single line at the extreme left side

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...)

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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!”

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...)

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A collage of three photos. One is a zoomed out image of buildings in New York City, one is a shadow of a pillar of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the final one is an intricate iron window grille with palm trees visible through the window.

Engineering Through Stuckness

Meenakshi Mani March 10, 2026
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This article is the first in a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here. What might we learn from the experiences of tech professionals being stuck? How does stuckness come about and what do these moments represent? This post traces two stories from different worlds: an Indian NGO and an American Big Tech corporation. One follows Leena , an employee at InnovateTech, an Indian education technology (EdTech) NGO. The other follows Cody, a software engineer at Microsoft, working in the United States. On the surface, Leena and Cody have more differences than things in common. Their employers operate in very different cultural and technological contexts influenced by distinct economic and political machinations. Their everyday experiences as they move through the world, one as a brown woman, and the other as a white man, have significant contrasts. (read more...)

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Hip Hop Sampling and the Akai MPC as a Platform for Spatiotemporal Discourse

Jonathan Givan March 5, 2026
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The Akai Music Production Center (MPC, formerly known as the MIDI Production Center) is a series of sequencers/samplers/interfaces first designed by Roger Linn and released in 1988 to critical acclaim. The MPC series soon became one of the most influential technologies in modern music production. The flagship model, the MPC60, included many features that made it an immediate hit with artists: a 4 by 4 layout of comfortable pressure sensitive pads, 16 voice polyphony, 13.1 seconds of sampling, frequency response of 18kHz, and MIDI (an acronym for musical instrument digital interface, a protocol that allows electronic instruments to communicate with each other). These feature allowed for easy connectivity to other MIDI devices found in studios at the time like synthesizers and other samplers, high quality sampling and playback, and an instrument that feels good to play. (read more...)

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