Nafis Hasan presentation

"Correct your record!" - the material politics and public ethics of digitizing bureaucracies

Information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as computer databases, web dashboards and mobile applications are being used extensively by governments across the world to change the collection, storage and dissemination of data and information. Even while the goals of 'transparency' and 'accountability' ascribed to ICTs are not always met, new information policies have specific material effects. Drawing on 15-months of ethnographic research on technical policies to digitize public bureaucracies in India, I show in this talk that such policies produce an encounter between a new sociotechnical system and a prior configuration of work, leading to a change in institutional knowledge and citizens' role in accessing services. Taking the specific case of a sociotechnical system to archive information relating to agricultural land, I show how digitization scatters bureaucracy across several technical and non-technical nodes, impacting bureaucratic knowledge and shifts the labor of repairing broken data from the administration to citizens. I discuss the implications of digitizing and automating the information architecture of public bureaucracy for data justice and public ethics.

Bio: Nafis Aziz Hasan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation thesis for a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2021, addressed how profound changes introduced through the use of digital technologies in public bureaucracy are impacting the information architecture, institutional knowledge and ethical commitments of public bureaucracy. To study these changes, he conducted ethnographic studies of large, long-term digital projects in public bureaucracies, applying theoretical concepts from political anthropology, science and technology studies, information, media and communication studies.

Prior to his dissertation, he has conducted research on the policies and technologies of social identification and rights based legislations around public services. Hasan's research has been published across a range of venues including Political and Legal Anthropology Review and Journal of South Asian Studies. He has a co-authored book entitled The Crises of the Informational Subject under review and is working on a monograph from his dissertation.