CURRENT PROJECTS
Stratified Intelligence
A Multi-Country Study on Microwork and AI
(2026-27)
Caste and Slavery
(2025-28)
With Damian Grimshaw, Snigdha Adil and Uma Rani, this project asks: To what extent do digital data labelling practices underpinning AI systems reproduce intra-national hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and race, and how are these inequalities embedded in the organisation of AI value chains in India, Kenya, the UK, and the US?
Key objectives:
1) To understand how class, caste, gender, and race interact with transnational hierarchies to structure AI microwork, and how these intersecting dynamics shape working conditions and wellbeing across AI value chains.
2) To map how local hierarchies interact with transnational hierarchies to structure AI labour within AI value chains.
3) To analyse how labour and technological infrastructures mediate inequality and produce embodied consequences for AI microworkers.
Antislavery campaigners recognise that workers’ vulnerability to violent labour abuse on the Indian subcontinent often links to caste, but assume that "modern slavery" can be tackled independently of the struggle against caste as a system of social stratification.
Using archival research, rhetorical analysis, and ethnography, this project explores the historical co-constitution of caste and slavery, its appropriation/ erasure in modern slavery campaigns, and the lived experience of Dalit sugar workers to interrogate whether caste should be theorised not merely as a background variable, but as a system that actively produces the violent labour conditions denounced by campaigners as “modern slavery”.
Key objectives:
1) Explore the colonial and Eurocentric logics that inform the discursive construction of “modern slavery” on the Indian subcontinent in antislavery campaigns;
2) Investigate Dalit workers' experiences of modern slavery interventions, focusing on the impact (or lack thereof) on their broader claims to rights and dignity; and
3) Theorise the significance of caste for critical scholarship on slavery and “modern slavery”.
Technology and "Modern Slavery"
(2025-26)
The rise of technological tools to address what is perceived as “modern slavery” has led to the emergence of a growing industry. This space is populated by a wide range of actors, organisations, and initiatives, all claiming to address exploitation through the use of technology.
In collaboration with Sharmila Parmanand, Ayan Yue-Gupta and Aswad Hussain, this project asks: How is technology discursively constructed as a credible and necessary solution to modern slavery?
We critically examine the rise of techno-humanitarianism, investigating the moral economy of digital interventions. Through a critical discourse analysis, we aim to understand how these technologies gain legitimacy over time, and what debates and power dynamics shape their adoption.