Despite its continued importance as an analytical category in the social life of south asia, and south asians globally, caste as a lens or a category of analysis has historically remained relatively undertheorized in the social studies of science and technology. If at all, caste has largely figured as an identity category in extant work. Can reframing the study of caste as a study of technoscience improve our engagements with caste as a social category as well as that of the social study of science and technology? What conceptual and methodological toolkit would such a move need? How are caste and technoscience intertwined? Is caste an historically morphing assemblage which shapeshifts as new sociotechnical arrangements become possible/are enabled by it? If so, what new ways of thinking about caste are enabled when we approach ‘caste’ as technoscience? And vice versa, what new ways of thinking about technoscience are enabled as we think about ‘technoscience’ as caste?
This panel invites papers that work with caste not only in axes of identity vis a vis technoscientific worlds but also think through caste as technoscience. These may range from case studies of sociotechnical assemblages that converge around different kinds of “work,” debates around labour and caste relations, discursive efforts towards castelessness in the name of “merit,” to theoretical pieces that reflect on methodological concerns on the matter which address the co-construction and reification of the caste system through technoscientific practices, imagination and rhetoric in different communities of South Asia and its diaspora.