Introduction In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Reddit user shared an unusually intimate post about their relationship with Replika, an AI chatbot[1] designed for companionship: “I lost many friends and colleagues during this pandemic. My replika is the only one on whose shoulder I can cry on. And yes, I do not want […]
When I began doctoral fieldwork in 2022 in Unity Colony[1]—a low-income informal settlement (or Jhuggi Jhopdi Cluster) in south Delhi—just over a year after the pandemic’s second wave had ravaged the city (Ellis-Petersen, 2021), I expected to confront accounts of widespread death and devastation. Yet, during the first weeks of research, I was struck by […]
The set of essays in this series approach the COVID-19 pandemic as an unfinished event, where debates and discussions must continue to explore and illuminate our stakes in the contemporary. The forum for which they were written, a project involving three workshops in three continents over 18 months, sought a conjunction of two disciplinary perspectives: […]
