Sareeta Amrute
Biographic Data
| ID | 648881 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sareeta Amrute |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sareeta |
| FAMILY NAME | Amrute |
| SIGNATURE | AMRUTE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5320-4600 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Interlocking technologies of caste and gender: An interview with Dr. Shailaja Paik
This interview with MacArthur Fellow and Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Asian Studies Shailaja Paik builds on her insights in the relationship of gender and caste in India to elucidate communications technologies. Paik describes caste as relational in two dimensions, both between communities and within them. She explains her carefully developed methods of historical inv…
Pivots
This essay for the “Technologies of War” special section of CSSAAME reflects on the relationship between tech worlds and Dalit activism. The author deploys the idea of the “pivot” and the “swerve” to undertake a two-part analysis. First, the essay describes the use of the tech pivot to describe a movement to produce value that has been a particular, and particularly lauded, feature of data-centric entrepreneurial cultures, namely, the ability to …
Thinking the Unthinkable in AI: Four Hegemonic Ways of Seeing AI and Five Majority World Ways to Move Beyond Them
When powerful technologies emerge, they bring with them questions of frame, view, and narration. Often, these technologies, like Artificial Intelligence (AI), appear to determine what happens on a world stage, even as they are embedded in arrangements of power that elevate particular places, subjects, and ways of seeing. This paper investigates four dominant ways of narrating AI developments in the current moment: labour futures , information int…
Weapons of the Snake: Fugitive Cryptography in Indian Diasporic Activism
Twitter, Facebook, and Google all have a trust problem
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
What the facebook files tell us about racial capitalism
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
Citational justice and the politics of knowledge production
research-article Share on Citational justice and the politics of knowledge production Authors: The Citational Justice Collective View Profile , Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed University of Toronto University of TorontoView Profile , Sareeta Amrute University of Washington and Data & Society University of Washington and Data & SocietyView Profile , Jeffrey Bardzell Pennsylvania State University Pennsylvania State UniversityView Profile , Shaowen Bardzell Pe…
Introduction to the Special Issue: Immunocapital and Capitalist Immunities
Raça como algoritmo: Trabalhadores De Tecnologia Entediados Sendo Casualmente Racistas
Conectando o trabalho de software corporativo nos Estados Unidos e na Alemanha, este artigo analisa a racialização de engenheiros de software indianos majoritariamente masculinos por meio do trabalho temporário. Ao fazê-lo, mostro as conexões entre a violência anti-imigrante de hoje e o uso contínuo da raça para sedimentar as divisões do trabalho na indústria como um todo. Para explicar a racialização na indústria tecnológica, desenvolvo um conce…
A conversation with Kamela Heyward-Rotimi: Part 1
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
A conversation with Kamela Heyward-Rotimi: Part 2
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
A conversation with Iván Chaar López
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
Follow the Money. Follow the Bodies. Follow the Design: An Afterword to Computing in/from the South
Afterword to the Special Section on Computing in/from the South
Introduction: Computing in/from the South
In this introduction to the special section “Computing in/from the South,” we position the South as a method to change dominant frames about the past, present, and future of computing. We discuss three narratives frames—developmentalist, postcolonial, and decolonial—to trace a significant body of thinking on computing otherwise. We argue that each of these frames provides a different optic to emphasize the contributions of non-Western, feminist, …
Aadhaar and the creation of barriers to welfare
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
Bored Techies Being Casually Racist: Race as Algorithm
Connecting corporate software work in the United States and Germany, this essay tracks the racialization of mostly male Indian software engineers through the casualization of their labor. In doing so, I show the connections between overt, anti-immigrant violence today and the ongoing use of race to sediment divisions of labor in the industry as a whole. To explain racialization in the tech industry, I develop the concept of race-as-algorithm as a…
Immigrant Sensibilities in Tech Worlds: Sensing Hate, Capturing Dissensus
Seattle and its environs are home to more than eighty tech companies, which have added 780,000 new jobs between 2014 and 2019. Along with these jobs comes increased immigration, especially from India and China. Some of Seattle's Eastside areas now rank among the most diverse in the nation, even while the Pacific Northwest bears a legacy of white supremacist agitation. This essay explores the relationship between the Eastside's tech industry, migr…
Silicon Satire
Of Techno-Ethics and Techno-Affects
As digital labour becomes more widespread across the uneven geographies of race, gender, class and ability, and as histories of colonialism and inequality get drawn into these forms of labour, our imagination of what these worlds contain similarly needs to expand. Beyond the sensationalist images of the 'brogrammer' and the call-centre worker lie intersecting labour practices that bring together histories of bodies and materiality in new ways. In…
Press one for Potus, two for the German chancellor: Humor, race, and rematerialization in the Indian tech diaspora
In some ways, there is nothing worse than academizing humor. But what happens when jokes are the vehicle for reconciling precarious economies? Anthropological attention has examined humor as a means of nonideological political critique, and as a means of maintaining social relations. Building on these traditions, I explore the jokes that Indian transnational migrant programmers tell about outsourcing and call center work-such as envisioning a wor…
Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin
In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the lives of Indian IT coders temporarily working in Berlin, showing how their cognitive labor reimagines race and class and how their acceptance and resistance to their work offers new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies
Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin
In 2003, twenty-five-year-old Meenakshi P. worked in Berlin for a wellknown software and business ser vices firm.She was on a short-term visa for computer programmers called the German green card.At the end of each long day, she came home to the flat she shared with her friend Rajeshwari talking excitedly about her work.Most nights, she shared dinner and sometimes tea with other Indian programmers and students who gathered at their house.In the m…
Go the Fuck to Sleep: Well-Being, Welfare, and the Ends of Capitalism in US Discourses on Infant Sleep
Current debates in the United States on baby sleep index how economic unease manifests itself variably across class and race in the neoliberal contemporary. Drawing on sleep guides, SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) discourse, popular tomes about baby sleep and governmental public health policies, this essay demonstrates a split discourse on welfare-understood as care of the social body-that at once privatizes child care and continues to treat …
Moving Rape: Trafficking in the Violence of Postliberalization
This article discusses violence against women in cars in India, including the recent high-profile Delhi rape case, arguing that these cases should be set in the context of economic liberalization. The dynamic between women and their drivers should be understood as a labor relationship within a mode of consumer citizenship that revalorizes Indian middle classes. I argue that the men who drive are members of a lower class with an ambivalent positio…
Proprietary freedoms in an IT office: How Indian IT workers negotiate code and cultural branding
This article explores how Indian IT workers who have been hired on short‐term contracts in Germany negotiate their racialisation as fast, cheap and disposable. They elaborate modes of freedom that take advantage of the pace of work and its varied temporalities while simultaneously developing a critique of corporate coding as limiting mobility. Their critique upends the usual way that freedom and ownership are conceived, since they try to own the …
Of Techno-Ethics and Techno-Affects
As digital labour becomes more widespread across the uneven geographies of race, gender, class and ability, and as histories of colonialism and inequality get drawn into these forms of labour, our imagination of what these worlds contain similarly needs to expand. Beyond the sensationalist images of the 'brogrammer' and the call-centre worker lie intersecting labour practices that bring together histories of bodies and materiality in new ways. In…
Press one for Potus, two for the German chancellor: Humor, race, and rematerialization in the Indian tech diaspora
In some ways, there is nothing worse than academizing humor. But what happens when jokes are the vehicle for reconciling precarious economies? Anthropological attention has examined humor as a means of nonideological political critique, and as a means of maintaining social relations. Building on these traditions, I explore the jokes that Indian transnational migrant programmers tell about outsourcing and call center work-such as envisioning a wor…
Bored Techies Being Casually Racist: Race as Algorithm
Connecting corporate software work in the United States and Germany, this essay tracks the racialization of mostly male Indian software engineers through the casualization of their labor. In doing so, I show the connections between overt, anti-immigrant violence today and the ongoing use of race to sediment divisions of labor in the industry as a whole. To explain racialization in the tech industry, I develop the concept of race-as-algorithm as a…
Moving Rape: Trafficking in the Violence of Postliberalization
This article discusses violence against women in cars in India, including the recent high-profile Delhi rape case, arguing that these cases should be set in the context of economic liberalization. The dynamic between women and their drivers should be understood as a labor relationship within a mode of consumer citizenship that revalorizes Indian middle classes. I argue that the men who drive are members of a lower class with an ambivalent positio…
Immigrant Sensibilities in Tech Worlds: Sensing Hate, Capturing Dissensus
Seattle and its environs are home to more than eighty tech companies, which have added 780,000 new jobs between 2014 and 2019. Along with these jobs comes increased immigration, especially from India and China. Some of Seattle's Eastside areas now rank among the most diverse in the nation, even while the Pacific Northwest bears a legacy of white supremacist agitation. This essay explores the relationship between the Eastside's tech industry, migr…
Go the Fuck to Sleep: Well-Being, Welfare, and the Ends of Capitalism in US Discourses on Infant Sleep
Current debates in the United States on baby sleep index how economic unease manifests itself variably across class and race in the neoliberal contemporary. Drawing on sleep guides, SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) discourse, popular tomes about baby sleep and governmental public health policies, this essay demonstrates a split discourse on welfare-understood as care of the social body-that at once privatizes child care and continues to treat …
Weapons of the Snake: Fugitive Cryptography in Indian Diasporic Activism
Living and Praying in the Code: The Flexibility and Discipline of Indian Information Technology Workers (ITers) in a Global Economy
This paper uses Jean Comoroff's argument in Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance to reflect on the changing nature of religious practice in the contemporary world. It draws on Comaroff's method, which situates "religion" in a complex social, economic, and political field that is itself in the process of unfolding. Using Hindu practices among Indian IT workers in the diaspora as a case in point, the paper suggests that the forms of techo-scientific…
D-2-Hydroxyglutaric Aciduria: Hypotonia, Cortical Blindness, Seizures, Cardiomyopathy, and Cylindrical Spirals in Skeletal Muscle
An infant girl was demonstrated to have D-2-hydroxyglutaric aciduria, the fifth case described and the first with muscle biopsy of this rare organic aciduria that differs clinically and genetically from the more common L-2-hydroxyglutaric aciduria. Her clinical features included mildly dysmorphic facies, developmental delay, generalized hypotonia, myoclonic seizures, cortical blindness, and dilated cardiomyopathy requiring treatment. Muscle biops…
Living and Praying in the Code: The Flexibility and Discipline of Indian Information Technology Workers (ITers) in a Global Economy
This paper uses Jean Comoroff's argument in Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance to reflect on the changing nature of religious practice in the contemporary world. It draws on Comaroff's method, which situates "religion" in a complex social, economic, and political field that is itself in the process of unfolding. Using Hindu practices among Indian IT workers in the diaspora as a case in point, the paper suggests that the forms of techo-scientific…
Where the World Ceases to be Flat
This article reviews two recent contributions to the study of Indian Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES), Working the Night Shift: Women in India's Call Center Industry by Reena Patel and Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves by Shehzad Nadeem. The contributions each makes to the study of outsourcing, especially to analyses of gender and consumer citizenship, are reviewed. The article concludes…
Proprietary freedoms in an IT office: How Indian IT workers negotiate code and cultural branding
This article explores how Indian IT workers who have been hired on short‐term contracts in Germany negotiate their racialisation as fast, cheap and disposable. They elaborate modes of freedom that take advantage of the pace of work and its varied temporalities while simultaneously developing a critique of corporate coding as limiting mobility. Their critique upends the usual way that freedom and ownership are conceived, since they try to own the …
Moving Rape: Trafficking in the Violence of Postliberalization
This article discusses violence against women in cars in India, including the recent high-profile Delhi rape case, arguing that these cases should be set in the context of economic liberalization. The dynamic between women and their drivers should be understood as a labor relationship within a mode of consumer citizenship that revalorizes Indian middle classes. I argue that the men who drive are members of a lower class with an ambivalent positio…
Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin
In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the lives of Indian IT coders temporarily working in Berlin, showing how their cognitive labor reimagines race and class and how their acceptance and resistance to their work offers new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies
Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin
In 2003, twenty-five-year-old Meenakshi P. worked in Berlin for a wellknown software and business ser vices firm.She was on a short-term visa for computer programmers called the German green card.At the end of each long day, she came home to the flat she shared with her friend Rajeshwari talking excitedly about her work.Most nights, she shared dinner and sometimes tea with other Indian programmers and students who gathered at their house.In the m…
Go the Fuck to Sleep: Well-Being, Welfare, and the Ends of Capitalism in US Discourses on Infant Sleep
Current debates in the United States on baby sleep index how economic unease manifests itself variably across class and race in the neoliberal contemporary. Drawing on sleep guides, SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) discourse, popular tomes about baby sleep and governmental public health policies, this essay demonstrates a split discourse on welfare-understood as care of the social body-that at once privatizes child care and continues to treat …
Press one for Potus, two for the German chancellor: Humor, race, and rematerialization in the Indian tech diaspora
In some ways, there is nothing worse than academizing humor. But what happens when jokes are the vehicle for reconciling precarious economies? Anthropological attention has examined humor as a means of nonideological political critique, and as a means of maintaining social relations. Building on these traditions, I explore the jokes that Indian transnational migrant programmers tell about outsourcing and call center work-such as envisioning a wor…
Silicon Satire
Of Techno-Ethics and Techno-Affects
As digital labour becomes more widespread across the uneven geographies of race, gender, class and ability, and as histories of colonialism and inequality get drawn into these forms of labour, our imagination of what these worlds contain similarly needs to expand. Beyond the sensationalist images of the 'brogrammer' and the call-centre worker lie intersecting labour practices that bring together histories of bodies and materiality in new ways. In…
Follow the Money. Follow the Bodies. Follow the Design: An Afterword to Computing in/from the South
Afterword to the Special Section on Computing in/from the South
Introduction: Computing in/from the South
In this introduction to the special section “Computing in/from the South,” we position the South as a method to change dominant frames about the past, present, and future of computing. We discuss three narratives frames—developmentalist, postcolonial, and decolonial—to trace a significant body of thinking on computing otherwise. We argue that each of these frames provides a different optic to emphasize the contributions of non-Western, feminist, …
Aadhaar and the creation of barriers to welfare
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
Bored Techies Being Casually Racist: Race as Algorithm
Connecting corporate software work in the United States and Germany, this essay tracks the racialization of mostly male Indian software engineers through the casualization of their labor. In doing so, I show the connections between overt, anti-immigrant violence today and the ongoing use of race to sediment divisions of labor in the industry as a whole. To explain racialization in the tech industry, I develop the concept of race-as-algorithm as a…
Immigrant Sensibilities in Tech Worlds: Sensing Hate, Capturing Dissensus
Seattle and its environs are home to more than eighty tech companies, which have added 780,000 new jobs between 2014 and 2019. Along with these jobs comes increased immigration, especially from India and China. Some of Seattle's Eastside areas now rank among the most diverse in the nation, even while the Pacific Northwest bears a legacy of white supremacist agitation. This essay explores the relationship between the Eastside's tech industry, migr…
Raça como algoritmo: Trabalhadores De Tecnologia Entediados Sendo Casualmente Racistas
Conectando o trabalho de software corporativo nos Estados Unidos e na Alemanha, este artigo analisa a racialização de engenheiros de software indianos majoritariamente masculinos por meio do trabalho temporário. Ao fazê-lo, mostro as conexões entre a violência anti-imigrante de hoje e o uso contínuo da raça para sedimentar as divisões do trabalho na indústria como um todo. Para explicar a racialização na indústria tecnológica, desenvolvo um conce…
A conversation with Kamela Heyward-Rotimi: Part 1
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
A conversation with Kamela Heyward-Rotimi: Part 2
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
A conversation with Iván Chaar López
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
Twitter, Facebook, and Google all have a trust problem
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
What the facebook files tell us about racial capitalism
Being watched means much more than being seen. This forum investigates information flows of sensing culled from sources as diverse as temperature check and iris scans to sound and movement sensors across terrains. After Veillance discusses how these systems distribute risk unevenly and shape the lives of populations across the globe. --- Sareeta Amrute, Editor
Citational justice and the politics of knowledge production
research-article Share on Citational justice and the politics of knowledge production Authors: The Citational Justice Collective View Profile , Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed University of Toronto University of TorontoView Profile , Sareeta Amrute University of Washington and Data & Society University of Washington and Data & SocietyView Profile , Jeffrey Bardzell Pennsylvania State University Pennsylvania State UniversityView Profile , Shaowen Bardzell Pe…
Introduction to the Special Issue: Immunocapital and Capitalist Immunities
Pivots
This essay for the “Technologies of War” special section of CSSAAME reflects on the relationship between tech worlds and Dalit activism. The author deploys the idea of the “pivot” and the “swerve” to undertake a two-part analysis. First, the essay describes the use of the tech pivot to describe a movement to produce value that has been a particular, and particularly lauded, feature of data-centric entrepreneurial cultures, namely, the ability to …
Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Business (9 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (8 works) · Geography (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Art (6 works)