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snigdha

@snigz.bsky.social

researching ai, ideology & education • qmul

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snigdha@snigz.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My MSc thesis has been published by the Department of Media and Communications at LSE! I examined how security technologies and practices are used to disproportionately control caste and class-oppressed domestic workers in Noida’s gated communities. Read it here: www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-co...

The cover page of thesis: Media@LSE MSc Dissertation Series Editors: Simidele Dosekun, Zichen Hu TITLE: A Very Like-minded Community: Surveillance Infrastructure in India’s Gated Communities by Snigdha AdilABSTRACT Gated communities are rapidly mushrooming across urban India as the upper-middle class elite seek exclusive access to public spaces, without the intrusion of the working class. However, this project of caste and class-based exclusion is complicated by their dependence on the working class for service labour. This has led to the rise of a booming domestic security sector, where increasingly advanced surveillance technologies are being developed to meet the elite demand for ‘safety’ from the threat represented by the working class. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with residents and security guards in a gated community in Noida, India, this paper investigates how the elite aspiration for ‘safety’ in domestic spaces is enacted through investment into surveillance infrastructures that target oppressed- caste/class domestic and service workers. Drawing on Jasanoff and Kim’s framework of ‘socio-technical imaginaries’, I centre banal forms of technological surveillance, that have been sidelined by the dominant policy-centric discourse. In studying caste/class-based surveillance, I argue against the assumption of pre-existing caste/class-based ‘collectives’, to instead examine how these collectives come into being in the first place through processes of mediation. First, surveillance infrastructures enable the circulation of affects—including fear and care—that construct oppositional collectives of ‘criminal Others’ and ‘like-minded insiders’. Second, fragmented surveillance infrastructures generate systemic ignorances among guards and residents, thus stabilising a socio-technical imaginary of ‘safety’ that necessitates caste/class-based surveillance as a moral imperative.
LSE Department of Media and Communications@lsemedia.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The latest exceptional student research from our MSc programmes is now online. Congratulations to all who feature! 👏 📖 Have a read, with topics ranging from #GenZ #Strava tracking & climate disinformation to algorithmic adaptation, #AIgovernance & Gen Z horror #gaming: www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-co...