Please join us on Friday, June 2, for Vijayanka Nair’s presentation “Building the Digital Nation: Biometric IDs and Belonging in Contemporary India.” Vijayanka Nair is a sociocultural anthropologist at San Diego State University (SDSU). Her current project focuses on biometric identification technologies and the state in South Asia. Prior to joining SDSU, Nair was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Unversity of Wisconsin-Madison and a Fellow at The New School’s India-China Institute. Her recent publications include “Becoming Data: Biometric IDs and the Individual in ‘Digital India’” (JRAI, 2021), “Governing India in Cybertime: Biometric IDs, Start-Ups and the Temporalized State” (Journal of South Asian Studies, 2019), and “An Eye for an I: Recording Biometrics and Reconsidering Identity in Postcolonial India” (Contemporary South Asia, 2018).
Abstract
It has been over a decade since India inaugurated its centralized national biometric ID system, Aadhaar, the largest of its kind in the world. Nearly every Indian has an Aadhaar number linked to individual biometric information such as fingerprints and iris scans. In this talk, I will explore how Aadhaar serves as the foundation for Digital India, a government program that aims to “transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.” Adopting an ethnographic approach, I will ask how Digital India is imagined, and how people are inducted into Digital India. Further, I will consider what it means to become a competent member, and how state-citizen relations unfold in a nation reimagined.
When
Friday, June 2, 2 p.m.
Where
Room 408, 4h floor, Institute for European Ethnology, Anton-Wilhelm-Amo Str. 40-41