I am currently working on a three-year project studying digital policing in India, funded by the Oslo Metropolitan University and Norwegian Research Council https://www.oslomet.no/en/research/research-projects/agopol
I have submitted my PhD thesis titled ‘Policing and the Construction of the Criminal: A Study of Bureaucracy and Algorithms in Delhi Police’ at CSSS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in December 2020 and waiting for viva.
I look at social consequences of predictive systems especially in the area of policing. I am also interested in surveillance infrastructures in general that are enmeshed in identification systems. My dissertation for MPhil (2016) was titled: "Governance, Identification and Surveillance: A Study of UID/Aadhaar." It is now available as a book titled Surveillance as Governance: Aadhaar| Big Data in Governance at Amazon and Flipkart and for international shipping at Pothi
I am interested in looking at facial recognition technologies and the overarching infrastructure of police surveillance that informs current ideas of governance. Another areas of interest are social media, caste hate speech, the ever-expanding reach of AI, and platform governance.
I have a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communications engineering from Uttar Pradesh Technical University (2002-2006) and have worked as a systems analyst for HCL Comnet (2007-2008). In 2009, I graduated from Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai with a PG Diploma in Journalism and went on to pursue a masters degree in Sociology (2010-2012) from Centre for Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi followed by a two-year stint in technology policy journalism at Governance Now magazine (2012-2014). I finished MPhil/PhD program in Sociology at CSSS JNU in December 2020