AI & Equality Community Reading Circle
Narrative frames and re-framing narratives:
from AI as labor futures and regulation to AI as precarities and problematics
Wednesday November 25th | 3PM GMT
For November; we will be reading this book chapter on Narrative frames and re-framing narratives: from AI as labor futures and regulation to AI as precarities and problematics by anthropologist Sareeta Amrute, a chapter in the Handbook on Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence edited by Sahana Udupa and Peter Hervik (Edward Elgar, 2026).
Open Access: Amrute, S., 2026. 29. Narrative frames and re-framing narratives: from AI as labor futures and regulation to AI as precarities and problematics. Handbook on Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence, p.418.
Amrute starts from the idea that what AI can be is shaped by how we describe it. She examines two dominant ways of talking about AI and proposes alternatives. The first is the “robot replacement” story, which centres the fears of white-collar professionals. Amrute shifts our attention to technolabor precarity, the experience of most workers in the world who are enmeshed in AI systems through gig work, data labelling, and content moderation, from Kenya’s content moderators to rural workers in India. The second is an over-reliance on states and corporations to regulate AI. Here she highlights the power of shared problematics: community organising, such as the global movement against caste discrimination online, that brings into view harms that statistical approaches to fairness treat as minor. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Amrute asks which ways of seeing AI become unthinkable under dominant narratives.
We welcome all backgrounds, disciplines, and individuals to this reading group. Come one, come all!
How to prepare: 🌱
- Read the chapter
- Come with questions and reflections
Last modified: October 27, 2026