Sachil Singh
Assistant Professor
Co-Editor, Big Data & Society
Faculty & School/Dept.
Faculty of Health - School of Kinesiology & Health Science
Degrees
PhD (Sociology) - 2016
Queen's University
Selected Publications
- Singh, S. ‘Digital Surveillance in Datafied Societies’ in The Routledge International Handbook of Valuation and Society, Anne Krüger, Hilmar Schäfer, and Thorsten Peetz (eds) [forthcoming, 2024].
- Singh, S. 2021. ‘Racial Biases in Healthcare: Examining the contributions of point of care tools and unintended practitioner bias to patient treatment and diagnosis’, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine (first published online).
- Singh, S. and Steeves, V. 2020. ‘The Contested Meanings of Race and Ethnicity in Medical Research: A case study of the DynaMed point of care tool’, Social Science & Medicine, 265(113112):1-11.
- Singh, S. 2020. “Collecting Race-based Data During Coronavirus Pandemic May Fuel Dangerous Prejudices.” The Conversation.
- Singh, S. F. 2015. ‘Social Sorting as “Social Transformation”: Credit scoring and the reproduction of populations as risks in South Africa’, Security Dialogue, 46(4):365-383, (Special Issue: Questioning Security Devices: Performativity, Resistance, Politics).
- Singh, S. 2014. ‘How to protect your privacy online’ in Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada/Vivre à nu: La surveillance au Canada, Colin J. Bennett, Kevin D. Haggerty, David Lyon, and Valerie Steeves (eds), Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, pp. 207-213.
- Singh, S. and Lyon, D. 2013. ‘Surveilling Consumers: The social consequences of data processing on Amazon.com’ in The Routledge Companion to Digital Consumption, Russell W. Belk and Rosa Llamas (eds), London and New York: Routledge, pp.319-332.
- Singh, S. 2010. ‘The South African “Information Society”: Problems with policy, legislation, rhetoric and implementation, 1994-2008’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36(1):207-224.
Supervision
Currently available to supervise graduate students: Yes
Currently taking on work-study students, Graduate Assistants or Volunteers: Yes
Available to supervise undergraduate thesis projects: Yes
Current Research
Dr. Sachil Singh's main areas of research are medical sociology, critical race studies, algorithmic inequality, and surveillance of the body. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he works in these spaces to bring attention to how life chances are shaped by stereotypes and (mis)information about race and ethnicity. His work demonstrates how these problems can make their way into the medical field as ‘objective’ or 'scientific', thereby raising concerns for patient care.
More specifically, Dr. Singh examines how the implementation of many health technologies contributes to social inequality, such as through the unintended racial biases that influence patient care. His current work examines the sources of these biases that often stem from healthcare practitioners’ unintended personal biases and/or those embedded in the design of health technologies. Dr. Singh has published on this research in the peer-reviewed journals Social Science & Medicine and Health. He is also co-editor of the journal Big Data & Society.
Through his work, Dr. Singh is deeply committed to social inclusion and social justice which extends into the classroom. He teaches in areas of socio-cultural history, identity politics, racial discrimination, and surveillance. He also teaches a Karate-Do course at York that he frames from a social justice perspective.