Events
Prehistories of the Digital Database: Technoscience, Body Parts, and the Law by Assoc Prof Itty Abraham
| Date | : | 03 Nov 2017 |
| Time | : | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm |
| Venue | : | Tembusu College Level 3, Tembusu Master’s Common Lounge |
| Contact Person | : | TAY, Minghua |
CHAIRPERSON
Dr Connor Graham, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
This paper offers a postcolonial genealogy of the use of body fragments (e.g., fingerprints, retinal scans) to authenticate and validate entries in a universal national database. This is a story that begins with judicial skepticism over the identity and veracity of the colonial subject and traces the development of those anxieties into the present. When scaled up, the intertwining of identity and truthtelling in the courtroom brings forensic technoscience into dialogue with colonial biopolitics, connecting the fingerprint with the DNA sample, leading finally to the universal database. The paper is framed through a close reading of the judgment in the landmark Indian Supreme Court decision, Selvi and others vs. Karnataka, and closes by asking whether the individual constituted by the database is the same as the liberal middle class citizen subject imagined by Selvi.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Itty Abraham specialized in international relations and poltical theory for my PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For his PhD dissertation, he compared the experiences of India and Brazil with respect to the development of indigenous high technologies in both countries. It was during this period that he began what has become a life long interest in nuclear power, from its management to its excesses. He then worked for a number of years in the US, first as program director at the Social Science Research Council in New York and Washington, D.C., before moving to the University of Texas at Austin, where he was Director of the South Asia Institute. At the SSRC he worked with the Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Global Security and Cooperation programs. After receiving a Fulbright award followed by a senior research fellowship at the Asia Research Institute, he moved to NUS in 2012. Currently, he is Head of the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at NUS.
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