Research media banner Research Interests

My research interests are in the interdisciplinary fields of Science and Technology Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Critical Race and Gender Studies, South Asian Area and Diaspora Studies, Labor and Globalization, Marxist Theory, and Cultural Studies. I am very interested in working with rigorously interdisciplinary methodologies, and my book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor, uses a combination of ethnographic, literary and cultural studies methods to examine the ongoing legacies of colonial biopolitics in contemporary transnational India labor markets. These have been mediated by technologies and histories that require a new thinking about political action and agency, for which I bring together critical race and postcolonial studies with feminist science studies approaches.

My current research project, in collaboration with Neda Atanasoski (UCSC), takes up the relationship between notions of the “network” and “revolution” in the postsocialist era. We assess the ethical frames and moral imperatives undergirding current-day modes of waging war, biomedical modes of extending life, and understanding the politics of dissent and consent that both use and critique the “revolutionary” technologies associated such social and political shifts of our postsocialist era.

Selected Publications

Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. University of Minnesota Press. Difference, Inc. (series). 2015.

“Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. June 2015. (co-authored with Neda Atanasoski).

“Re-imagining Reproduction: Unsettling Metaphors in the History of Imperial Science and Commerciall Surrogacy in India.” Somatechnics. 2015.

“Potential, Risk and Return in Transnational Indian Gestational Surrogacy.” Current  Anthropology. 54: Supplement 7. October 2013. Pp. S97-S106

“Bodies, Markets and the Experimental in South Asia.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. 79:1, 1-18. 2014. With Fouzieyha Towghi.

Experimental Sociality and Gestational Surrogacy in the Indian ART Clinic. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. 79:1, 63-83. 2014.

Vora, Kalindi A. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. University of Minnesota Press. Forthcoming 2015.

“Limits of Labor: Accounting for Affect and the Biological in Transnational Surrogacy and Service Work.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 111:4, Fall 2012. pp. 681-700. http://saq.dukejournals.org/content/111/4/681.full.pdf+html

“Medicine, Markets and the Pregnant Body: Indian Commercial Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in a Transnational Frame.” Scholar & Feminist Online. 2010. http://barnard.edu/sfonline/reprotech/vora_01.htm

“The Commodification of Affect in Indian Call Centers.” In Intimate Labors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Care, Sex, and Domestic Work. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas, eds., Stanford University Press. 2010.

“Indian Transnational Surrogacy and the Commodification of Vital Energy. In special issue, “Re-tooling Subjectivities: Exploring the Possible Through Feminist Science Studies.” Subjectivities. 28.1. 2009.

“Other’s Organs and the Production of Life: South Asian Domestic Labor and Human Kidneys.” Postmodern Culture. 19.1. 2009.