iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

snigdha

@snigz.bsky.social

independent researcher • ai, ideology & education at qmul • migration & ai labour at king’s

snigdha @snigz.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

September has been a terrifying and rewarding month of conferences! I could not be more grateful to be a part of such intellectually rigorous teams, working on questions that truly excite me, and engaging with feedback that challenges how I think about these questions.

‘Speculative Degrees’ presented at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference, with Dr. Philippa Williams and Dr. Kerry Holden from the Department of Geography, Queen Mary University of London

‘Stratified AI: Intra-national Inequalities and the Coloniality of Digital Labour’ presented at the International Network of Digital Labour (INDL)-9 with Dr. Pankhuri Agarwal and Dr. Damian Grimshaw from King’s Business School, King’s College London

‘Encountering the Field as a Caste-Marked Body’ presented at the British Sociological Association’s Theorising Lived Experience Early Career Researchers’ Workshop

010

snigdha @snigz.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

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 Adil

ABSTRACT
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.

012

Reposted by snigdha

Shakuntala @banaji.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

My public lecture from March 16th: www.youtube.com/live/jM7wUqZ...

youtube.com

Infinite justice: political cosmologies that protect our future | LSE Event

YouTube video by LSE

092