Kalindi Vora

Kalindi Vora is Visiting Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Rachel Carson Book Prize 2018), takes up questions of technology, colonialism, and raced and gendered labor under globalization. Her second book, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robotics, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke 2019), co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, examines 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. A book of her collected work on transnational gestational surrogacy in India is forthcoming under the title Reimagining Reproduction: Surrogacy, Labour and Technologies of Human Reproduction.

 

She has also edited three special journal issues: “Whiteness and Technoscience” in Catalyst: Feminist, Technoscience, Theory Critical Perspectives (2018); “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).

 

Her past research has included STS and ethnographic studies of information and communications technology, assisted reproductive technology, robotics, and machine learning. 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 serves on the editorial boards of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and The Anthropology of Work.

 

Professor Vora is currently involved in several research projects. She continues to write and publish 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. This project 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 current practices of healthcare self-monitoring, exploring 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” 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 all forms of technoscience, this how-to guide breaks down basic concepts in gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and science and technology studies for pragmatic and applied use in a variety of learning and research contexts.