Ranjit Singh: Seeing through the Database

Utility + Function

Ranjit Singh is currently a researcher at Data & Society’s AI on the Ground Initiative, a nonprofit research center that convenes experts in industry and academia to address interdisciplinary questions surrounding the development of new technologies with the goal of advancing an understanding of the social relationships governing and governed by data and automation. As a qualitative sociologist, Ranjit treats technology as an object of its own so that he may study the cultural implications of it and how it is appropriated in contemporary society. Ranjit is currently writing on Big Data, and his work is often centered around Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based identification system. Aadhaar is unique in its massive scale, and its purpose is to allow the Indian government to determine who is eligible for their services. By questioning issues of data representation and shifting definitions of citizenship, Ranjit’s research examines data infrastructures as a collection of relationships, to both one another and to governments.