Research

I am an interdisciplinary scholar using ethnographic, qualitative, and mixed methods to study relations of power and inequality that are invisible or unaccounted for in wider understandings of computing practice and culture. My work brings together theoretical, analytical, and methodological approaches from Computing and Information Science, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Feminist Studies to study caste, gender and computing.

Caste as a social relation and historical institution shapes the lives of close to 25% of the global population that is South Asian, yet our understanding of how it intersects with technology is very limited. At the same time, the analytic complexities of caste expose important insights into the broader theory and real-world practice of computing, especially around how lines of power and inequality in computing operate. In fact, the computing industry predominantly denies the existence of caste or sees itself as casteless. In my dissertation and graduate research, I examine this claim by asking how the universal, unmarked casteless category is produced, enforced, and sometimes broken or worked around, and what this means for caste as dynamic and modern phenomena.

Ongoing Projects

Book project on caste, gender and computing. (Read more about it here.)
Multiple projects on design, governance and caste (connect with me if you’re interested in collaborating on these topics!)
Archival research on oral histories of the Indian computing industry