The Case for Critical Caste and Technology Studies
A new syllabus offers an in-depth guide to caste and its expressions in digital culture
Data & Society faculty fellow and anti-caste scholar Dr. Murali Shanmugavelan has spent years studying the effects of media, communications, and digital cultures from (anti)caste perspectives in South Asia and the global diaspora. Now, Dr. Shanmugavelan has released a first-of-its-kind syllabus for Critical Caste and Technology Studies, available online for any student, teacher, or concerned individual to access and use to grapple with the pernicious historical and contemporary harms of caste.
The following is adapted from Shanmugavelan’s foreword to the syllabus, in which he lays out the myth of a caste-less digital present, the need for critical caste studies, and the value of a communicative approach to the everyday practices of caste.
Caste is a social disease.
Caste determines social hierarchy and divisions of labor and restricts people’s access to fundamental human rights; it is a form of social stratification with graded inequalities assigned at birth. Endogamy — marriage only within the same caste group — is a precondition of caste ascription. Caste produces social, political, and economic dispossession and the denial of opportunities wherever the practice is prevalent — South Asian countries as well as the global diaspora — and cannot, therefore, ensure social justice, equality, fellowship, fraternity, or fairness.
Today, those who most benefit from the inequities of a globalized caste system argue that the modern world, through its embrace of social networks, capital and technology, has effectively become “casteless.” They proudly observe how the “disruptions” of digital networks are putting the question of caste oppression to rest, a relic of older times.
This is an ideological myth, one that enables Brahminism, coloniality, and tech-driven global capitalism in much the same way that “post-racial” rhetoric props up racism and racial capitalism. Decades of locally rooted anti-caste activism in the UK and US as well as caste-ist experiences in Africa and Latin America demand the need for a global caste theory akin to critical race theory.
Fortunately, Critical Caste Studies (CCS) is emerging as a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement that examines the effects of caste ideology and practices in everyday lives. Conceptually, CCS is committed to examining the ramifications of caste in social, economic, and political functions through the everyday practices of all caste-affected lives in South Asia and beyond.
And this is where the Critical Caste and Technology Studies (CCTS) syllabus comes in: as a new attempt to organize the field of anti-caste scholarship around a fundamental consideration of communicative practices. The syllabus introduces an account of contemporary caste narratives to counter the growing narratives of “castelessness” and dominant religious identity in the public domain that marginalize Dalits and other oppressed castes by erasing or obfuscating real caste issues. It does so by examining the everyday caste practices of India’s present, its economic growth and the rising authoritarian, communal, and Hindutva (Hinduness) political power in India and recently in the UK, Europe, and North America.
In addition, it offers a communication-, media-, and technology-based critique of contemporary caste narratives, and aims to unravel how and in what ways caste is embedded in the field of technology influenced by dominant caste origins. As the syllabus illustrates, such an approach is a critical extension of the existing — cultural, ideological, social, structural — approaches to caste because it gives a new angle on understanding everyday caste realities. For example, online matrimonial sites, caste-exclusive online spaces, caste-ist trolls, hate speech and abuse, and casteism in tech corporations show how deeply caste networks have the power to shape digital life.
In recent decades, media and internet technology studies have responded to a justified set of critiques about the elision of race, gender, and sexuality analyses in its disciplinary, practical, and theoretical remit. However, the same has not been true in its engagement with caste, which affects a fifth of the world’s population. There is hardly any theoretical and practice-oriented research on the interconnectedness of caste, media, communication, and internet technology studies; a detailed bibliometric review of Communication Abstracts (indexing 240 top media and communication journals with 360,000 records) showed that only thirteen articles considered the subject of caste.
Whether benign or the so-called exceptional aberration, communicative elements such as codes, signs, verbal materials such as hate speech, sarcasm, rituals, gendered relations, physical walls or abstract spaces have always been the means of transmitting the power of caste authorities and are often a source of triggering violence (Eco, 1978; Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992). As ever, brutal forms of violence erupt when Dalits and other oppressed caste group members challenge caste rules of communications.
Designed as a broad-ranging collection of sources, the Critical Caste and Technology Studies syllabus is an in-depth, interdisciplinary resource that aims to ensure that students have a nuanced understanding of historical and contemporary understandings of caste and its remanifestations in everyday digital cultures — and of the relationship between benign interactions and brutal displays. Rooted in an anti-caste political position, its academic objectivity lies in its accountability and its commitment to standing in solidarity with Dalits, oppressed caste groups, and other social minorities.
I hope students and scholars of anti-oppressive cultures will find this syllabus to be a starting point in considering the contemporary relationship between caste, technology, and power — and that they will be inspired to build upon this scholarship with their own.
If you use this syllabus in your teaching, we would love to hear about your experience. Please get in touch at hello@datasociety.net.
