“From Snake Charmers to Technologists” – Computing and Caste Modernity in India

What happens when we analyze computing as a key constitutive element in the forging of caste modernity in India? In light of the recent institutional murder of Sahil Wakode and numerous other Dalit students across engineering institutions like IIT in India, this talk digs into how institutional casteism is made normative in high tech spaces. Extant literature has examined the relationship between merit, capital and religion in shaping the ethos of scientific and technological institutions. This talk builds on that work and takes a different tack – it pays close attention to the relationship between the body, the computer and the mind in everyday cultural, political and discursive processes of the IT industry. Drawing from ethnographic and archival research done over the last decade with both upper caste and Dalit interlocutors, I show how a Dalit theorization leads us to understand caste modernity as it is constituted through computing. By arguing that computing is a formidable site to understand the forging of modern caste subjectivities and relations, I put forth a rendering of caste as a contingent process that is caught up in how computing is imagined and realized in the world (aka how it is infrastructured.) By extension, I hope to open the possibilities of its disruption and annihilation. Palashi Vaghela is an assistant professor and the Canada Research Chair in Technological Change for Inclusion at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. They direct the Liminal Technologies Lab which is an interdisciplinary research community focusing on understanding how practices, policies, and cultures of computing reproduce, reframe, and resist structures of power and inequity. Their own work centers on the study of caste and gender in computing with a goal to imagine and develop anti-caste, Dalit feminist futures of technology. Their work has won awards in leading computing venues like ACM CSCW and CHI, published in magazines like Logic(s), and featured in news outlets like thewire.in and The Hindu. They hold a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University and were previously a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Diego. Their research has been funded by the Government of Canada, Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Microsoft Research, among others. More details can be found at