Kalindi Vora
Personal Website: www.kalindivora.com
Kalindi Vora is a cultural theorist and anthropologist who studies the impact of histories of science and technology on contemporary arenas of labor, health and design. Her work engages with STS, critical race and gender studies, historical materialist theories. Her first book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (4S Rachel Carson Book Prize 2018), takes up questions of technology, colonialism and raced and gendered labor under globalization. Her second book is Surrogate Humanity: Race Robotics and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke 2019), co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, a project on the racial and gendered politics of robotics and artificial intelligence. With the Precarity Lab, she is co-author of Technoprecarious (2020), which tracks the role of digital technologies in multiplying precarity. Her collected ethnographic work on transnational gestational surrogacy in India is published in the book Reimagining Reproduction: Surrogacy, Labour and Technologies of Human Reproduction (2022)..
She has also edited three anthologies, “Whiteness and Technoscience,” in Catalyst: Feminist, Technoscience, Theory Critical Perspectives (2018) and “Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution” (2018) in Social Identities with Neda Atanasoski; and with Fouzieyha Towghi, “Bodies, Markets and the Experimental in South Asia,” in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (2012). Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution as a book collection in late 2022.
Her past research has included STS and ethnographic study of information and communications technology, assisted reproductive technology, and robotics and machine learning, about which she has published in journals such as: Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Social Identities, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Postmodern Culture, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She currently sits on the editorial board of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and The Anthropology of Work.
Professor Vora is currently involved in several research projects. She continues writing and publishing on artificial intelligence and automation through the lens of STS and critical race and gender theories. She is also beginning a book project, supported by a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Studies award (2022-2024) tentatively titled, Autoimmune: Chronic Conditions and Care in a Time of Uncertain Medicine. It places contemporary narratives of illness by patients facing racism and sexism in their daily lives within an analysis of the history of the concept of autoimmunity and contemporary practices of healthcare self-monitoring to understand the potential for patient-physician co-production of medical knowledge. “Asking Different Questions” is a pedagogical project funded by the National Science Foundation’s “Innovations in Graduate Education” award program (2018-2021). Through modules, workshops, and Ph.D. seminars, this curriculum trains advanced STEM researchers to incorporate social (justice) impacts into their research design and practice. She is also working on the collaboratively authored book, The Science We are For: A Feminist Pocket Guide (under review), with the Star Feminist Collaboratory (K. Vora, L. Irani, C. Hanssmann, S. Varma, S. Zarate, L. Quintanilla). Intended for researchers and readers invested in technoscience of all types, this how-to guide breaks down basic concepts in gender/sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and science and technology studies for pragmatic and applied uses in a variety of learning and research contexts.
Prior to Yale, she was the Director of the Feminist Research Institute and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at The University of California Davis and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Her research has been supported by several National Science Foundation grants, Hellman fellowships, as well as University of California Humanities Research Institute fellowships. She was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Anthropology Department at UC Berkeley, and has been a visiting fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University in Luneburg, Germany and at GEXcel at Linköping University in Sweden.
Research areas:
Feminist Science and Technology Studies
Anthropology of Medicine
Postcolonial Studies
Critical Race & Ethnic Studies/American Studies
Critical Disability Studies/Studies of Chronic Illness
Select Publications:
Reimagining Reproduction: Essays on Surrogacy, Labor and Technologies of Human Reproduction. New York, London, New Delhi: Routledge Press. 2022.
Technoprecarious. Precarity Lab, MIT Press/Goldsmiths Univ. Press. (authors: Anna Watkins Fisher, Silvia Lindtner, Ivan Chaar-Lopez, Cengiz Salman, McKenzie Wark, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, Cass Adair, Lisa Nakamura, Cindy Lin, Meryem Kamil). 2021.
“Why Calls to Diversify Trial Populations Fall Short.” S. Varma, K. Vora, K. Fox, S. Berkhout, T. Benmarhnia. Med (Cell Press). 2021
Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures. Co-authored with Neda Atanasoski. Duke University Press. 2020.
“Why the Sex Robot Becomes the Killer Robot: Reproduction, Care and the Limits of Refusal.” Co-authored with Neda Atanasoski. Spheres. 6, pp. 1-16. 2020
Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. University of Minnesota Press. 2015. Winner of the Society for the Social Study of Science Rachel Carson Award, 2018.