PhD Alumnus Spotlight: Sushant Kumar

PhD alumnus Sushant Kumar recently completed one year as an Assistant Professor at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, at O.P. Jindal Global University, India. Earlier this year, he published three papers. The first one, from his PhD thesis, on the construction of the two-child family norm in India, appeared in Economic & Political Weekly, a leading social science journal from India. His second paper, on the Twitter discourse on Medicare for All, was published in Behavioural Sciences. His third paper. on media discourse on a alternative medicine drug, Coronil, during COVID-19 and how it impacted scientific communication, came out in the Journal of South Asian Studies.  

Sushant’s current research interests span the governance of Artificial Intelligence and other emerging technologies, anticipatory governance, responsible innovation and science and technology policy broadly.

He is currently working on projects exploring sociotechnical imaginaries of AI in popular Indian discourse and alternative futures of GenAI in Indian higher education. He recently joined as one of the knowledge architects of the Generative AI Network (GAIN) project, a global collaboration of scholars and practitioners from 14 countries, emphasizing South-South exchanges decentring AI discourse from centers of privilege and power.

Earlier this year, Sushant organized two conference panels, one in STS Conference, Graz, Austria and another in International Conference on Public Policy, Chiang Mai, Thailand, both on themes of Democratizing AI. He is also supervising multiple masters and doctoral work on themes related to governance of AI.  

Anyone thinking about AI, science and technology,  knowledge and society in any particular order should feel free to connect with Sushant: [email protected] or [email protected].