Dr. Vijayanka Nair joined the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies earlier this spring, as she views the center as a “venue that brings together students and faculty from a dizzying array of disciplines, catalyzing unusual and invigorating conversation”. Nair joins the diverse membership of the Holtz Center, as an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Humanities and an Associate Lecturer in Anthropology. She has been a participating member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus for the past year.
Her research examines large-scale, technology-driven governance experiments in contemporary South Asia. She is currently working on an ethnography of the world’s largest biometric identification drive, India’s Aadhaar program, a platform that has issued unique, twelve-digit identification numbers to over one billion Indian residents.
Nair holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and an MPhil in Social Anthropological Analysis. She also received her MA in Sociology and her BA in Philosophy from Delhi University. You can catch her engaging brown bag presentation with The Holtz Center on March 12.
“There’s a lot to be learned from this community”, says Nair about the Holtz Center. “The Center has also created something vital – a space for members of the public to jointly contemplate the sociocultural significance of science and technology in the contemporary world. I value being part of this conversation, if in a small way.”.