Abstract: Recent caste discrimination lawsuits in Silicon Valley have brought global attention to the phenomenon of caste discrimination in the computing industry. It has also led to the addition of caste as in nondiscrimination policy in universities and firms like Apple and IBM. This recent attention is set against a long-standing counter-narrative in the global Indian diaspora that computing is essentially meritocratic and, thus, casteless. As we move towards understanding and resolving issues of bias, fairness and equity in technological design, culture and policies, the phenomenon of caste raises many questions. Is computing indeed casteless? How does caste operate in the worlds of computing? How does one study caste in computing? What can a study of caste in computing tell us about other forms of historical marginalization like gender, race or sexuality? Caste is a socio-religious hierarchy that is thousands of years old that still shapes the lives of the 25% of the global population that is South Asian. Yet our understanding of how it intersects with computing and technology is limited. In this talk Palashi will discuss how caste and its complexities offer important insights for the critical and humanistic study of computing. She will draw on two years of ethnographic work in India and the Indian diaspora with Dalit (formerly untouchable) engineers and upper-caste engineers where she uses a Dalit feminist method to reveal the relationship between caste, gender and computing. She will show how caste is not a residual or a vestigial issue of the past, but in fact a sociotechnical relation that is being reconstituted and reconfigured on an ongoing basis in computing cultures and practices. Palashi will demonstrate how this phenomenon can be studied in computing cultures and sociotechnical systems, as well as how it can inform and extend our understanding of how lines of power and inequality operate in these spaces.

Bio: Palashi is a PhD Candidate in Information Science at Cornell University. An engineer turned anti-caste feminist scholar, her research interests lie at the intersection of information sciences, science and technology studies, feminist studies, socio-cultural anthropology and critical caste studies. Her dissertation is an ethnography of gender and caste in the Indian computing industry. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Mellon Foundation, Microsoft Research, University of Siegen, and others. She has previously worked in the technology industry, nonprofits and social enterprises in India and continues to be actively involved with these communities through research and service.