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NY NY 10003

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought at the New School incubates advanced transdisciplinary research and practice at the intersection of social theory and design and fosters dialogue on related themes across the university.

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Sareeta Amrute

Sareeta Amrute is Associate Professor of Strategic Design at Parsons School of Design. She is an anthropologist who studies relations among technologies and peoples. She investigates the production of race, caste, class, and capital in data-centric worlds through ongoing ethnographic inquiry of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.

 

Sareeta Amrute is Associate Professor of Strategic Design at Parsons School of Design. She is an anthropologist who studies relations among technologies and peoples. She investigates the production of race, caste, class, and capital in data-centric worlds through ongoing ethnographic inquiry of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Her first book, Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke, 2016), tells the story of Indian programmers who took up jobs in Berlin, Germany. It asks, how does corporate programming work, as an example of cognitive labor—work that manipulates symbols rather than makes objects—rely on and reimagine race and class across transnational boundaries?

Encoding Race, Encoding Class was the recipient of the Diana Forsythe Prize in Anthropology and the International Convention of Asian Studies Book Prize. Sareeta was the inaugural Director of Research at the Data & Society Research Institute where she initiated a research and publication program on Trustworthy Infrastructures, which centers the ways that people of color and other “majority world” communities build trust within distrusted data regimes and AI-backed systems. Her work has appeared in such academic journals as Cultural Anthropology, Public Culture, and Science, Technology, and Human Values, and in popular venues such as Slate and the Tech Policy Press.


Sareeta’s current book project, tentatively titled Staying Safer: Activism and Cryptography in the South Asian Diaspora, explores the co-constitution of technological infrastructures and anti-caste thought. Based ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted during and after the pandemic, Sareeta follows sites of risk and responses to safety risks that emerge when activists in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora organize online.

Movement members create strategies around particular campaigns and concomitantly consider the on- and offline safety of participants. She focuses particularly on connections between practicing cybersecurity and anti-caste thought to conceptualize a vision of democracy and digital worlds that is grounded in histories of opposition and the intersections among global movements for justice and particular histories of difference. Sareeta draws on theories of fugitivity and mobility to think through parallel formations in the exploration of Black and Dalit radicalism that demonstrate how activists work to create out of platform capitalism protective platforms of refuge.

During the fellowship, Sareeta hopes to extend her formulation of the relationship between sociotechnical and democratic practice by specifically investigating the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of security formulated outside of nation-state discourses. In other words, she wants to ask—and answer—the question of how cybersecurity might be formulated beyond both state-ratifying security discourses and corporate bromides about individualized trust.