Join The Department of Anthropology on April 24 from 12 – 2 p.m. for The 17th Annual Endowed Bernard Gallin Lecture in Asian Anthropology: Biometrics and Their Discontents in India: Surveillance Capitalism, Techno-utopianism, and Public Health on the Gendered Margin. The lecture will be held in room 303 of the International Center.
Zoom option:
https://msu.zoom.us/j/98407758700
Passcode: ANP@MSU
Talk description:
Biometric ID emerged, over the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, as a key figure for national security in India, as security was variably reimagined in relation to shifting economic and political futures. One key site where biometric governance came to matter as both utopian promise and dystopian threat was in a new managerialism for health and welfare. Beginning with the reimagination of drug-resistant tuberculosis by computer scientists, this talk turns to a series of ethnographically rendered sites of contestation over the biometric future, focusing on debates on AIDS and TB care and the prevention of violence among Indian transgender (kinnar, hijra, thirunangai) networks in relation to the forms of life and of death that biometric security promises.
