Research

This collaboratively authored multigraph analyzes the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. The authors use the term precarity to characterize those populations disproportionately affected by the forms of inequality and insecurity that digital technologies have generated despite the new affordances and possibilities they offer.

In Surrogate Humanity Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system entrenched in racial capitalism and patriarchy. Analyzing myriad technologies, from sex robots and military drones to sharing-economy platforms, Atanasoski and Vora show how liberal structures of antiblackness, settler colonialism, and patriarchy are fundamental to human---machine interactions, as well as the very definition of the human.

How global capitalism has turned human beings into a new form of biocapital

From call centers, overseas domestic labor, and customer care to human organ selling, gestational surrogacy, and knowledge work, such as software programming, life itself is channeled across the globe from one population to another. In Life Support, Kalindi Vora demonstrates how biological bodies become a new kind of global biocapital.

This book presents an ethnographic study on gestational surrogacy in India. It frames the ethnography of the surrogacy clinic in conversation with concerns raised in the arenas of law, policy, medical ethics, and global structural inequality about the ethics of transnational assisted reproductive technology (ART) practices. Engaging ethical discourses that both advocate for and trouble the subject of reproductive rights that remains of interest in feminist studies, the volume takes up the work of critical feminist, anthropological and science studies scholarship in India, the United States, and Europe concerned with reproductive technologies.

Based on fieldwork and archival sources, the volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of ethnography, gender, social and public policy, South Asian studies, and global public health, especially reproductive health.

Editor, Catalyst: Feminist, Technoscience, Theory Critical Perspectives (Section). 4:1, March/April, 2018.

Editor with Neda Atanasoski

The introduction to this special issue offers a theorization of postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist–socialist dynamic to think about how political action need not take shape in ways that are familiar as revolutionary, or oppositional. We argue that postsocialism marks a queer temporality, one that does not reproduce its social order even as its revolutionary antithesis. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, postsocialism creates space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present.

Editor with Fouzieyha Towghi, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Special Issue.

University of California Humanities Research Institute “Living Through Upheaval” Award (2021-2022). Kalindi Vora, Christophe Hanssmann (SFSU), Sal Zarate (UCI), SAiba Varma (UCSD)

“This project centers decades of humanistic scholarship and community practice that critique and reimagine care, healing, and wellbeing from BIPOC and LGTBQ+ perspectives to consider how to build a curriculum to train medical practitioners to work with patient communities. We propose to use UCHRI funding to enact the first year of a multi-year vision by fostering a multidisciplinary community of pedagogy, centering community partners, and including humanities scholars and students along with current and future health professionals, who will collaborate towards building a curriculum to train medical practitioners in social justice-informed medicine.

This project id funded by the NSF Science and Technology Studies program (2022-2024). It focuses on how healthcare practitioners and patients coproduce knowledge about autoimmunity and its treatment. This study looks at how the organizing metaphor of autoimmunity understanding of the body and its processes. It will explore how autoimmunity is being actively conceptualized through patient communities and alternative practice in functional medicine by looking at how patients and patient communities with chronic conditions communicate.

Asking Different Questions: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Science is funded by National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education grant (#1807056, Co-Principal Investigators Kalindi Vora and Sarah McCullough). Feminist science studies has unearthed the unacknowledged contributions women and people of color have made to scientific discovery. The field has also challenged how scientific knowledge and processes may often rest on histories of patriarchy and colonialism, due to the historical embeddedness of science within culture. Integrating this rich body of research into STEM graduate training promises to introduce greater equity and a more balanced perspective to scientific research.

Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (2020), Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures

Sex with robots might at first seem to be an illustration of the queering of sex – the separation of intercourse and sexual pleasure from the realm of human biological reproduction – and a form of desire that sidesteps reproducing the link between sex, sexuality and the family. Take for example the ‘Silicone Samantha’ sex robot prototype by Barcelona based engineer Sergei Santos. Samantha has been described as an exact replica of a ‘real’ woman because she includes functions that offer physical pleasure to users, such as a “fully functioning” mouth and vagina “with a G-spot”. Yet, of course, Samantha is not sexually reproductive. Even though sex with robots ostensibly separates biological reproduction from the act of intercourse, as we argue in this article, it is in fact a premier example through which we can address robots as a locus of social reproduction within engineering and popular imaginaries.

Kalindi Vora (2019), Radical Philosophy

Human reproduction in the form of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and nurturing of infants and children has been at the core of Marxist feminist understandings of reproductive labour. When this labour is overtly commercialised, as in the case of surrogacy, it brings together biological processes of gestational and social processes of nurture and parenting into market relationships. Just as feminist scholars have had to work to theorise how domestic labour, sex work and service are economically and socially productive activities, researchers are now extending and building upon those theories to encompass practices like commercial surrogacy as hired human reproduction, and in general the biological processes of bodies (i.e. clinical trial subjects) and tissues (novel cells in the lab that come from an individually important body) as sites that generate economic value.

Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (2019), interviewed by Lesia Pagulich and Tatsiana Shchurko

What does it mean to demand thinking of postsocialism or “postsocialist reading practices” that do not use the tropes legitimized by Western reason? How to center postsocialist imaginaries, “radical and decolonial imaginaries of col-lectivity and political action” (Atanasoski and Vora 2018, 142) that destabi-lize and dismantle Western hegemony, imperialism, colonialism, and racial capitalism? Can postsocialism simultaneously be a critique of coloniality of knowledge, of imperial and colonial difference, and a theory of political ac-tion, ethical solidarity, and coalitions? In this interview, Atanasoski and Vora offer a complex and nuanced engagement with time and space in relation to postsocialisms. They suggest looking at obscured historical connections be-tween past and present examples of political solidarity and coalitions that expand approaches to politics and futurity.

Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (2018), catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience

This paper offers preliminary reflections on the relationship between the seemingly opposed logics of white supremacy and racial liberalism by sketching the contours and workings of what the authors call technoliberalism that is a part of the so-called fourth industrial revolution.

Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (2017), Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture

The introduction to this special issue offers a theorization of postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist–socialist dynamic to think about how political actionneed not take shape in ways that are familiar as revolutionary, or oppositional. We argue that postsocialism marks a queer temporality, one that does not reproduce its social order even as its revolutionary antithesis.

Kalindi Vora (2017), Gender: Matter, Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, Stacy Alaimo (editor)

Part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender studies, Gender: Matter focuses on matter and its relation to gender. Organized around four parts totaling 28 chapters, the volume maps out feminist engagements with matter and materiality.

Kalindi Vora (2015), Somatechnics

Since 2004, India has emerged as a premiere location for fertility tourism and Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) services. The rapid escalation of global access to in vivo services is enabled by the low-resourced Indian citizens who serve as surrogates (Vora 2012;2013). However, this availability of resources for a potential market infertility travel and surrogacy does not completely answer the question raised by Amrita Pande: Why, with India’s historical anti-natalism and low rates of medicalisation of reproduction, is there a ‘labour market’ for surrogates based on pro-natalist technologies (2014: 33)?

Kalindi Vora (2014), Ethnos

This article marks experimental modes of sociality in a transnational Indian assisted reproductive technology (ART) clinic as a contact zone between elite doctors, gestational surrogates, and transnational commissioning parents. It examines efforts within one ART clinic to separate social relationships from reproductive bodies in its surrogacy arrangements as well as novel social formations occurring both because of and despite these efforts. Draft regulative legislation in India marks a shift in the distribution of risk among actors in the clinic that parallels a shift in medical practice away from a technique of caring for the body to producing bodies as instruments of contracted service. The clinic provides an opportunity to observe forms of sociality that emerge as experiments with modernities, with different relationships to the body and the social meaning of medicalized biological reproduction, and with understanding the role of the market and altruism in the practice of gestational surrogacy.

Fouzieyha Towghi and Kalindi Vora (2014), Ethnos

The articles in this issue examine how bodies and subjects are made available as experimental through differential material conditions under which people live in the contexts of domestic and transnationally circulating policies, regulations, bodies, and commercial interests, and within the frameworks of humanitarian discourses on rights and social reform projects. Engaging medical anthropology, science studies, and feminist critique of the social sciences, medicine, and technology, we consider the social relations and understandings of personhood, the body, and its ownership that are produced at the sites of contact between bodies, technologies, and medico-humanitarian interventions.

Kalindi Vora (2013), Current Anthropology

Based on fieldwork at a transnational surrogacy clinic in India and analysis of assisted reproductive technology (ART) legislation under consideration in the Indian parliament, this paper examines how bodies become potentialized through a combination of technology and networks of social and economic inequality.

Kalindi Vora (2012), The South Atlantic Quartlery

What call center work and commercial surrogacy have in common is the labor of producing and transferring human vital energy directly to a consumer, through the work of affect and the intentional or dedicated use of bodily organs and processes. The work of producing vital energy through biological and affective labor is distributed unequally at the level of international exchange, as are opportunities for its consumption. In performing this labor with its trans-national transfer of value, racialized and gendered bodies/subjects become the bearers of colonial legacies and neoliberal restructurings that create an opportunity to expand as well as think outside of current ways of conceptualizing labor. Examining these new forms of labor also provides an opportunity to reevaluate the role of race and gender in relation to subjectivity and humanity, forms of ownership and property, and technology as part of capitalist expansion and territorialization.

Kalindi Vora (2010) in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, edited by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Indian workers occupy particular positions in the international division of labor as a result of the material conditions India inherited from the British colonial period, as well as from its postcolonial economic and political history. Indian workers are also figured by an economy of imagination and desire that is interlaced with these histories, part of what allows for a spark of recognition on hearing the phrase Bangalore butler. In the past fifteen years, as innovations in telecommunications reached a level that allowed affordable real-time interaction with service workers abroad, English-speaking middle-class college graduates in India became the appropriate source of inexpensive service labor for industries relying on English-enabled customer service. This work is cheaper for U.S. corporate entities than in-country labor both because of the international strength of the dollar and because of the maintenance of a de facto lower level of life necessities of the Indian worker—the material reality behind the lower cost of living and cheapness of Indian labor.

Kalindi Vora (2008), Postmodern Culture

“Others’ Organis” explores the particular limits on the mobility of rural agriculturalist South Indians, middle class Sri Lankan women, and young Indian Pakistani men, whose needs for jobs become entwined with the commodification of "life." I argue that the material constraints of these workers, as well as the creation of excess body parts and lives through medical and transportation technologies, creates a system where Indian lives function to support other lives in the West, rather than their own.

Who is trusted to take care of others? Investigating the relationships between surrogates and commissioning parents, feminist science and technology studies scholar Kalindi Vora discusses the ethics of assisted reproductive technologies. She argues that the global distribution of care and service work these technologies promote requires structures of trust and security that are in line with recent ideals of work, family, social, and biological reproduction.

This article is an excerpt from FRI Director Kalindi Vora's closing remarks at the Feminist Futures Research Symposium on January 23, 2020.

In an interview with Brazilian publication DigiLabour and Dr. Rafael Grohmann of University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Director Kalindi Vora explains how techno utopias, linked to colonial imaginary, impact the future of work, including the potentials and limits of digital commons.