Sreela Sarkar is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University. Her research critically examines technology-led economic modernization and development as “neutral enterprises.” Drawing from approaches in global communication, feminist studies, and critical policy studies, her ethnographic research seeks to understand how economic development is experienced by urban, marginalized communities who have complex and intersecting identities of class, caste, religion, and gender.
Dr. Sarkar’s current research project is an institutional history and an ethnographic examination of the production of digital labor in India’s globally, acclaimed information economy through popular “skills training projects.” Her sustained, ethnographic work examines Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) projects in slums and “resettlement colonies” that are targeted at urban poor, “Muslim women” and lower-caste communities in the rapidly globalizing city of New Delhi. Dr. Sarkar is also working on another research project that examines immigrant techies and their politics of societal transformation in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Dr. Sarkar’s work appears in media studies, technology studies, and feminist studies journals. She has been a part of interdisciplinary research institutions such as the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School and the National Center for Digital Government.