I had the pleasure last week to attend a lecture by Kavita Philip on “Databases and Politics: Some Lessons from Doing South Asian STS,” part of a series sponsored by UVa’s STS department (as well as, in this case, both Women’s Studies and Middle Eastern Studies). Philip is a professor of history at UC Irvine who specializes in, among other things, transnational histories of science and technology, and who has postgraduate training in physics and social science (STS). Her background and topic of research are especially interesting to me since they exemplify a new form of data scholarship, something we are trying to develop here at UVa at the Data Science Institute and the Center for the Study of Data and Knowledge. With the technical knowledge to understand the gory details of how sociotechnical agents such as databases are built and function, as well as mastery of a social science discourse with which to contextualize this knowledge, historically and socially, one may pursue some interesting lines of research.
Philip’s argument, as best as I can retell it from my notes, is as follows. In 2011, after eschewing the equivalent of what in the US is called postracialism, the people and government of India decided to reintroduce the category of caste into the national census for the first time since 1931. In creating the database to capture this…
