Sareeta Amrute

My scholarship focuses on contemporary capitalism and ways of working. I am particularly interested in how race and class are revisited and remade in sites of new economy work, such as coding and software economies. I investigate how post-genomic racial imaginaries inform popular conceptions of person, population, and proclivity. My book, called Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT workers in Berlin was published by Duke University Press in Autumn 2016. This book tells the story of short-term coders from India who sought work in Germany under a temporary visa program called the German Green Card. I investigate how their middle class aspirations both are made possible by and are stymied by the regimes of racialized labor that greet them as temporary programmers. My aim in this book is, in part, to re-materialize what has thusfar been called an immaterial economy. I have several new projects in the works, which look at: the politics of rumor and rage in India and the United States, emerging out of my ongoing interest in understanding the nodes where sentiments, uncertainty, and legal-technical infrastructures meet; transnationalisms and women's rights in India and the U.S. in the early 20th century; and ethics practices among technologists. Encoding Race Encoding class won the Diana Forsythe Prize for best book in the anthropology of work, technology, or science (including medicine) in 2017 and the International Convention for Asian Studies Best Book Award in 2019.

I received my B.A. in Art History from Columbia University and my M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.