research
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research /
I also make interventions into the emerging field of AI, writing in particular about approaches to understanding AI that go beyond demonization on the one hand and undue celebration on the other, and organizing these efforts through collaboration with scholars and practitioners. I am particularly inspired by majority world perspectives on this question.
Here are some of my publications:
2025
“Thinking with and Beyond Racial Capitalism: Race and Caste in Gig Work” Journal of Management Inquiry
“Weapons of the Snake: Fugitive Cryptography in Indian Diasporic Activism” Current Anthropology. 6(5):681-704.
“Pivots: The Logics and Evasions in Tech Company Policy and Anticaste Organizing” Technologies of Power, special issue. Manan Ahmed, Karim Maged Malak, Madiha Tahir, Marwa El-Shakry, and Adrien Zakar, eds. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. 45(3): 475-480.
“Thinking the Unthinkable in AI: Four Hegemonic Ways of Seeing AI” Antipode. 57(6): 2259-2281.
“Immigrant Sensibilities in Tech Worlds: Sensing Hate, Capturing Dissensus” Cultural Anthropology. 35(5):374-403.
2024-2021 [see the gap here? that’s COVID]
2020
“Immigrant Sensibilities in Tech Worlds: Sensing Hate, Capturing Dissensus” Cultural Anthropology. 35(5):374-403.
“Bored Techies Being Casually Racist: Race as Algorithm” Science, Technology and Human Values. Special Issue, Race as Ghost Variable. 45(5): 903-933. -Translated into Portuguese and republished in Frontieras—Estudos Midiaticos. 23(1) and in the edited book Os Laboriatorios do Trabalho Digital.
2019
“Of Techno-Ethics and Techno-Affects” Feminist Review. 123(1):56-73
2017
“Press One for POTUS, Two for the Bundeskanzler: Humor, Race, and Rematerialization in the Indian Tech Diaspora” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 17(1): 327-352.
2016
“Go the Fuck to Sleep: Wellbeing, Welfare, and the Ends of Capitalism in U.S. Discourses on Baby Sleep”. South Atlantic Quarterly. 115(1):125-148. -- cited in Karlis, Nicole “The Online Baby Sleep Boom”, Salon. May 12, 2023. https://www.salon.com/2023/05/12/the-online-baby-sleep-boom
2015
“Moving Rape: Trafficking in the Violence of Postliberalization”. Public Culture. 27(2):331-359.
I’ve been a scholar of labor and emerging digital technologies since at least 2016, when I published my first book on this topic Encoding Race Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin. I followed a cohort of a dozen programmers from India who took short-term jobs through a temporary worker visa program and told their stories as they navigated the demands of being upwardly-mobile, cosmopolitan middle class subjects of a post-colonial nation and backend, racialized coders for a global economy. I was thrilled when this book won the Diana Forsythe Prize in Anthropology and then absolutely shocked when it also won the International Convention of Asian Studies Book Prize after that. Shockingly, I was interviews by NPR’s Alisa Roth for Marketplace about this research all the way in 2026, so I guess this writing has some longevity.
I am currently working on a second book, tentatively titled For Unsafe Times: Cybersecurity and Anti-Caste Thought. I tell the story of attempts to bring caste to the center of concern across several sites of the India diaspora and in institutions ranging from Silicon Valley tech firms to local municipalities and labor collectivities. I focus on the cybersecurity efforts taken by anti-caste communities to argue that security can be emancipatory–when it leads to a greater understanding of the politics of doing anti-caste work.