Caste as/of Technoscience.
A collaborative, ongoing intellectual project convening interdisciplinary conversations at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) since 2021. Co-convened with Dr. Palashi Vaghela, Canada Research Chair at Simon Fraser University.
Despite its importance as an analytical category in the social life of South Asia and its diasporas, caste has remained relatively undertheorized in the social studies of science and technology. Where caste does appear in STS, it has most often figured as an identity category rather than as a sociotechnical formation in its own right.
This project asks: what happens when we reframe the study of caste as a study of technoscience? What conceptual and methodological toolkits does such a move require? How are caste and technoscience intertwined — historically, infrastructurally, materially? What does it mean to approach caste as a technoscientific project of domination and subjugation, or as a form of media that mediates sociotechnical relations?
2021 · 4S (virtual) — Caste as/of Technoscience. A four-session open panel inaugurating sustained attention to caste as a generative analytical framework for STS. The panel drew together anthropologists, historians, media studies scholars, and information scientists working across empire, colonialism, and postcolonial technoscience. Conversations from this panel are taking shape as a journal special issue.
2025 · 4S Seattle — Caste as/of Technoscience II. Advanced the 2021 work by identifying a limit within much critical scholarship: that the field often remains organized around opposition to Brahmin hegemony, which inadvertently keeps Brahminism at the center. The 2025 panel began the harder task of thinking both technoscience and caste without centering Brahminism at all.
Forthcoming — Caste as/of Technoscience III. The next convening continues the trajectory of the series. More soon.