Sareeta Amrute, a Data & Society affiliate, is an anthropologist who studies race, labor, and class in global tech economies. She served as Data & Society’s inaugural director of research, and then as the founding director of the organization’s Trustworthy Infrastructures program, which explores emerging approaches to building trust online and the possibilities they set in motion.
Her 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. The book was awarded the 2017 Diana Forsythe Prize (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.
Sareeta is an associate professor of strategic design at Parsons, The New School. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago.