Through an account of the history of women-studies-movements in India, the paper aims to interrogate the 'temporality' of feminist response to the neoliberal reality. By juxtaposing two dominant narratives situated differently, the paper appeals for a reevaluation of contemporary feminist knowledges that bemoan the loss of 'welfare state' and collective political struggles. Through a critical account of women-studies-movements in India, and the inability of their dominant stories to respond to the current conundrums of responding to the 'neoliberal' subject, the paper argues that it is not just the neoliberal reality which is hegemonic and all too powerful, but also the feminist stories that constitute it.
The paper rekindles a three-decade-old debate in the annals of Indian anthropology / sociology which became dormant after no significant headway was made. The debate which goes by the name of “crisis in sociology” in India provides the backdrop against which the paper makes sense of current regimes of knowledge production that a doctoral candidate in India must navigate. By doing so, the paper reflects on the limitations of epistemological critiques wherein an epistemic critique stops at the corridors of an academic workplace. The paper argues that doctoral candidates in India today are cognitive workers engaged in exploitative relations of knowledge production. However, these exploitative relations are obfuscated by the postcolonial epistemological critiques that indulge in foregrounding the hegemony of the North / West. The paper proposes an infrastructural critique of knowledge that does not respond with despair to perceived transformations and crises.
The discourse of auditing artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a field of applied AI ethics to address the problems of fairness, bias, and accountability of AI systems. The injunction of auditing AI assumes and proposes an expert figure of an auditor to address the black box problematic of AI. Contrary to this, the text argues that the figure of an expert auditor installs another layer of mediation. This layer of mediation introduces another black box –the auditor, auditing practices and professional scepticism- to address the existing black box problematic. The text argues that it is important to radically interrogate the need or the efficacy of the figure of an expert AI auditor to whom all users of an AI system delegate their representation. The introduction of audit cultures in the AI ecosystem risks foreclosing future debates on AI and its relationship with humans and other non-humans and risks reducing the problem again to a technical one.
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