Little research examines how ethnographers perceive Responsible AI. This paper investigates Indian ethnographers’ knowledge, critiques, and envisioned roles through a qualitative study with 20 participants. Findings reveal knowledge heterogeneity, with most having indirect engagement through seminars while few demonstrated direct expertise through formal training. Drawing on field experiences, participants critique dominant Responsible AI frameworks as contextually misaligned with India’s social realities, failing to address caste, class, and regional hierarchies. Through concrete examples, they demonstrate how helpfulness and harmlessness logics operate without power analysis or cultural grounding, such as welfare metrics missing household dynamics and benchmarks excluding marginalized languages. Participants advocate situated approaches co-created with affected communities, proposing methodological innovations including ethnographic metadata in model cards, field-conditioned evaluation, and interpretive roles in reinforcement learning for human feedback workflows.

Robots are increasingly being used in restaurants to assist with service and increase efficiency. Yet, their impact on the daily work of restaurant workers, customers' perceptions, and robots' limitations are poorly understood - and so is the gap between these and official marketing narratives. In this paper we conduct an investigation of the impact of restaurant robots in a set of restaurant chains in Japan, through a combination of in-person ethnography and analysis of online customer reviews and news articles. We show how robots are used in practice, how they structure work, and their impact on workers and customers. In particular, while we find robots to be well integrated and 'invisible', and majorly well received by customers and management, we also find they lead to a customer-perceived loss of human contact, a restructuring of work, an incentive for shortstaffing, deskilling of workers, and several technical challenges that are collectively addressed by workers and customers in work-like tasks. We compare these findings with marketing and management-led narratives, identifying gaps consistent with labor and power-centered critical studies.

Social robots, particularly in assisting children with autism, have exhibited positive impacts on mental health. While prior studies concentrated on social robots in the Global North, there’s limited exploration in the Global South. It’s essential to comprehend special educators’ perspectives for effective integration in resource-constrained settings. Our mixed-methods approach, involving interviews, workshops, and a panel discussion with 25 educators in India, uncovers challenges and opportunities in integrating social robots into autism interventions. The findings highlight the urgent need to democratise the benefits of social robotics. Special educators express concerns about their functional capacity and fear potential redundancy due to the replacement of human efforts by social robots. Despite initial scepticism, professionals suggest various ways to incorporate social robots, emphasising the importance of technological innovation in reshaping and enhancing their roles in autism therapy. We discuss the implications of these findings for developing context-aware solutions and policy-level initiatives necessary in resource-constrained settings.