Exhaustion: beyond the chilling effect

Sareeta Amrute is an anthropologist whose work investigates the social meanings of data-centric technologies. She is the author of the award-winning ethnography Encoding Race Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke, 2016), and is currently at work on a new book project on cybersecurity and anticaste thought, titled Staying Safer. She was the inaugural Director of Research at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she co-authored the AI in/from the Majority World Primer and founded the Trustworthy Infrastructures Initiative, which re-imagines AI and related technologies from the perspectives of global majority epistemologies. Sareeta is Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design, The New School.

In her GIDEST presentation, which is drawn from her current book project, Sareeta will discuss doxing, harassment, and online attacks against activists in the South Asian diaspora, developing an experiential account of digital violence, and argue that speech-based approaches to online communications cannot capture this experience. With a view to understanding how such violence may be overcome, she develops the idea of exhaustion as a contronym using the scholarship of Denise Ferriera da Silva, ethnographic accounts of responding to digital violence, and the writings of anti-caste scholar Periyar. The paper is part of a larger argument about the relationship among diasporic activism, anti-caste thought, and development of new ways of staying safe online.