Posted on January 21, 2025 in Interviews
This TIE Talks features Kalindi Vora, Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies with an affiliate appointment in History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. As her titles suggest, Kalindi’s research sits at the intersections between science, technology, medicine, and inequality. Her projects include applying disability justice practices to studies of chronic illness, the ethics of the surrogacy process in India, and understanding bias in artificial intelligence tools. In this interview, Kalindi discusses the utility of interdisciplinary scholarship, updates on her fascinating research, and the importance of mentorship in academia.
My first book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (2015), looks at India’s information technology sector, customer service call centers, and women performing gestational surrogacy for overseas commissioning parents. It argues that starting in the 1990s, outsourcing, a practice of sending tasks with lower social value overseas to lower costs, built on a longer history of assigning cheap or even unpaid labor to European and US imperial territories. My goal was to show that these kinds of work require employees to retool their selves and subjectivities in ways that necessarily engage their affects. This wasn’t something that can be fully captured by just interviews or just looking at cultural texts like novels or film. I created a method of bringing together ethnography with literature and literary theory, particularly work coming out of anti-colonial feminisms and Black feminism, to get at the interior nature of the kinds of care, creative and bodily labor being performed in these sectors. By doing this I could show how labor connected to new technologies—the internet and assisted reproductive technologies—grew out of long-existing histories of labor and extracting value from women’s bodies.
The project of this book began while I was immersed in studying theories of how largely unseen labor produced the world in the early 2000s. I was struck by news of the growing incidence of people selling their kidneys in India as fewer and fewer opportunities to sell their labor could be found. The kidneys were being sold to brokers who transported them to places where more mobile Indian workers were striving to migrate, such as the Persian Gulf nations, Europe, and the US. Untangling the version of globalization that could explain this phenomenon, and the role of technology and colonial histories behind it and a spectrum of other transnational bodily and service work sectors in India, grew into this book project.
Since that time, I’ve used this approach, of excavating the hidden histories of race, gender, and imperialism supporting “new” technologies, to expand the areas of science and technology I’ve studied. I published books of how new digital technologies extend existing precarity for many populations in the book Technoprecarious (authored with the Precarity Lab), as well as Surrogate Humanity, which focuses on artificial intelligence and robotics. We work to surface the embedded histories of race, gender, and to a lesser degree, ableism, within the design of these technologies.
First, I would say that the speculative investments that keep Big Tech research and development motivated is often driven by fantasy. The main fantasy we describe towards the end of Surrogate Humanity is one where we’ve inherited a belief from liberal philosophy from the European continent that the purpose of humanity is to progress towards more and more achievement, self-mastery, and self-improvement. I am particularly interested in complicating the notion of intelligence informing the design of machine learning systems from the perspective of the postcolonial critique of reason and feminist epistemologies and ontologies of alternate forms of human knowing.
Since the publishing of Surrogate Humanity, I’ve been writing articles about how this drive towards reproducing ourselves as one narrow kind of human driven by a belief in liberal individualism and mastery gets interpreted in different ways but drives development in technology in everything from Mars colonization (the human race should progress to expand beyond the planet) to super-intelligence in machines (AI) or even in transhumanism, a belief that humans can exceed the limits of our biology through technology (for example with body modifications such as neural implants or life-extension technologies).
AI could be used to reduce suffering rather than to produce something super-human. It could be used to reduce labor but instead is being used to disguise increased outsourcing of what gets called “microwork.” Extending the work in my book Life Support, I see this labor of cleaning and preparing the data to train LLMs, or the work of content moderation, the labor of removing harmful content, as a kind of unwilling support of that fantasy, one that harms workers by extending poorly paid outsourcing work and exposing moderators to damaging material so users can be protected.
Together with my National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded work on enriching the potential of STEM research design imaginaries through engagement with STS and critical race and gender studies, a project I completed as the director of the Feminist Research Institute at UC Davis called “Asking Different Questions,” I am working on bringing together these critiques with contemporary challenges to the capacities of AI. These are both questions of machine-human ethics, but also of inter-human ethics.
Towards the end of research for my first book, I conducted a postdoctoral field study at a surrogacy clinic in northern India in 2008. This created a new trajectory as I began to publish empirical data from my fieldwork for the benefit of the growing number of scholars and policy groups tracking the growth of Indian surrogacy as a transnational industry. Bringing together my field research with study of legal and medical scholarship concerning assisted reproduction, I published Reimagining Reproduction: Essays on Surrogacy, Labor, and Technologies of Human Reproduction. It frames the ethnography of the surrogacy clinic in conversation with concerns raised in the arenas of law, policy, medical ethics, and global structural inequality about the ethics of transnational ART practices.
Being given the opportunity to spend time with women who were considering surrogacy, and with parents who were commissioning surrogates, was an immense privilege. Part of the practice of ethnography in anthropology is to discover and amplify the way that people understand and make meaning of their own lives and experiences. Witnessing how doctors, commissioning parents, and surrogates all attached different significance to some of the same practices was essential to my understanding of the kinds of risks and promises each found in their rather brave decisions to participate. Ultimately, I felt that as a feminist anthropologist, my primary responsibility was to amplify the narratives, vision, and desires of the women who were choosing to become gestational surrogates, because they were the least empowered and lowest resources actors in the practice.
Absolutely. Across my projects in medicine and new technologies, I remain committed to understanding the long histories of power, exploitation, as well as resistance and protest that characterize the material reality of how science and engineering develop. Interdisciplinarity requires more work than applying the tools of a single discipline—you must read deeply in several fields, as well as communicate and justify why a given project demands these specific methods rather than others. I’ve seen it done poorly, of course. But a strong interdisciplinary approach is necessary for those of us who are concerned with the politics of how knowledge is produced. Often working within a single discipline means you are ultimately reproducing much of the knowledge that came before your study. Working across disciplines allows you to draw attention to the process of archiving, or meaning-making, and of creating subjects even as we study them. We can be self-reflexive, a crucial tool in ethnic studies and feminist studies. I am extremely concerned with what Aníbal Quijano calls the “coloniality of modernity,” and what knowledges and worldviews have been or continue to be annihilated by that process, to paraphrase Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work in Toward a Global Idea of Race.
Often working within a single discipline means you are ultimately reproducing much of the knowledge that came before your study. Working across disciplines allows you to draw attention to the process of archiving, or meaning-making, and of creating subjects even as we study them.
We are wrapping up a successful first semester (last year was a planning year) bringing together students at both Yale and UC Davis in a hybrid classroom, with guest speakers and field events with disability justice leaders, organizations, artists, and community members who have been advocates for disability rights. We are getting set up to launch a website and social media intended to invite the public to share in our conversations, as well as to circulate a call for participants in a pilot program, a network of small access workshop groups around the country that invite people from disability communities inside and outside academic spaces to come together and share knowledge.
Our goal is to build a community for the participants, not just at Yale or UC Davis but across the country. Along with seminars for graduate students that Ryan and I will co-teach, we’ll hold workshops, seminars, and two summer symposia to bring together academics and collaborators from across communities, all to consider the intersection of research and advocacy concerning disability and chronic illness.
We’re also thinking about the future of academic leadership in these fields. Disabled people are very much underrepresented in the U.S. professoriate, so we’re trying to create mentorship structures for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses.
I am a deeply collaborative researcher, and part of my feminist ethic is to build non-hierarchical structures for co-thinking with my students and colleagues. Mentorship means that while I may know more about the profession and can provide guidance there, my mentees have individual expertise from which I want to learn. My lab is a way to recognize that though interdisciplinary, there are a set of theoretical, methodological and ethical commitments that bring me together with other scholars interested in technology and social equity. Academia tends to be a profession that glorifies individuals, and this is at its most extreme in qualitative social science and humanities. With my students and junior colleagues, I’ve collaborated on research design, data collection, even the very personal and creative process of writing. In this way we advance an insistence that knowledge is a collective project, and mentorship can span across the different tools we need as thinkers and educators.
Kalindi Vora is Professor and Chair of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and of American Studies with an affiliate appointment in History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She is author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (winner of the 2018 4S Bernal Prize); Surrogate Humanity: Race Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures (co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, 2019); Re-Imagining Reproduction: Surrogacy, Labor and Technologies of Human Reproduction; and Technoprecarious (with the Precarity Lab).
This interview was conducted by Sabrina Cofer. She is the digital media producer at Choice.
This interview feature invites academics, librarians, teaching faculty, and higher education stakeholders to discuss their latest projects and research. Spotlighting both early and late career researchers, TIE Talks aims to sit down with fascinating individuals whose engaging and informative work inspires others in their fields and intersects with DEIA topics.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.
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