Sareeta Amrute is an anthropologist who studies race, labor, and class in global tech economies. She is currently investigating sensation and social movements among Asian immigrants in the United States and digital payments in India. Her recent book, Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin, is an account of the relationship between cognitive labor and embodiment, told through the stories of programmers from India who move within migration regimes and short-term coding projects in corporate settings.
Encoding Race, Encoding Class was awarded the 2017 Diana Forsythe Prize in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, conferred jointly by the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing and the Society for the Anthropology of Work, and the 2019 International Convention of Asian Studies Book Prize for the Social Sciences.
Amrute is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.
Hannah Appel an economic anthropologist interested in the daily life of capitalism, the private sector in Africa, and the re-emergent dialogue between economics and anthropology. Her research and teaching interests are guided by the economic imagination.
Currently, she is developing a second ethnographic project—Pan African Capital: Finance, Banking, and Economic Self-Fashioning—to continue her inquiry into the licit life of capitalism in Africa’s private sector, and the displacement of how and from where we think about global capitalism. Pan African Capital is a multi-sited project based on ethnographic work with transnational, African-owned banks and financial institutions on the continent.
Finally, she also works extensively with ongoing Occupy Wall Street projects including Strike Debt and the Debt Collective. These projects work to reimagine finance, capitalism, and economic possibilities for our time, and they demand that the tools of critical theory and the anthropology of finance be tested and sharpened in dynamic public praxis.
Astra Taylor is a writer, documentarian, and organizer. Her films include Zizek!, a feature documentary about the world’s most outrageous philosopher, and Examined Life, a series of excursions with contemporary thinkers including Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Peter Singer and others. Both movies premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Taylor’s writing has appeared in The Nation, the London Review of Books, n+1, The Baffler, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Examined Life, a companion volume to the film, and co editor of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America. She helped launch the Rolling Jubilee and co-founded the Debt Collective. Most recently she is the author of the book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, winner of a 2015 American Book Award. She is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow.
