The Politics of Digital Interventions
Digitization in ‘New India’: A Material and Moral Technology
Dr Nafis Aziz Hasan (University of Amsterdam)

Dwelling in Ambiguity: Tanzanian-led AI Innovation and the Technological Otherwise
Tom Neumark (University of Oslo)

As a material, ideological, aesthetic and moral force, digitization of public administration in India, has, over the past four decades, intervened in the social, political and technological life of the state, broadly conceived. In this talk, drawing on an ethnography of public bureaucracy as it encounters the multiple infrastructures of mobile apps, dashboards and databases as the interfaces through which forms of algorithmic software and now AI meet prior writing and documentary technologies, I describe some key effects of the charisma of new technology on a diverse constituency of actors and institutions – local bureaucrats and their offices, senior bureaucrats and new forms of expertise and national pride and the everyday hopes and despairs of people interacting with a digitizing state. Undergirding these descriptions are anthropological concerns about the shaping and re-shaping of collective and individual identities in ‘New India’.

Dr. Nafis Aziz Hasan is an assistant professor in the department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) specializing in the human and organizational effects of digitization in the Global South. Prior to joining the UvA, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. His articles have appeared in American Ethnologist, Science Technology and Human Values and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, among other venues. Along with Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Nishant Shah, he is also the author of the open access book Overload, Creep, Excess: An Internet from India

This talk draws on my ethnographic research among Tanzanian computer and data scientists working on healthcare and medical technologies. I begin by posing a simple question: should Tanzanian-led digital technological innovation fill us with despair or inspire us? Debates that hinge on the idea of a technological otherwise often polarise. Critics see sameness in a derivative Silicon Valley solutionism, techno-fixing, and neoliberal capture. In contrast, others emphasise difference, pointing to local, situated knowledge, forms of care, or technological self-determination. I argue that both perspectives are as problematic as they are illuminating, and we must focus more consistently on ambiguity. My argument is not simply descriptive – that ambiguity exists in practice – but normative and methodological: we should retain and centre it in our explanations and political response. I show how centring ambiguity potentially offers new opportunities for learning with not only our interlocutors but also other disciplines.

Tom Neumark is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on interventions to alleviate poverty and ill health in East Africa. He is the author of Caring Cash: Free Money and the Ethics of Solidarity in Kenya, published by Pluto Press, and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
Date: 24 February 2026, 14:00
Venue: St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details: Pavilion Room
Speakers: Dr Nafis Aziz Hasan (University of Amsterdam), Tom Neumark (University of Oslo)
Organising department: Asian Studies Centre
Organisers: Janaki Srinivasan (University of Oxford), Prof Rebekah Lee (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Part of: South Asia-Africa Seminar Series
Booking required?: Not required
Booking email: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Audience: Public
Editors: Clare Salter, Amy Crane, Thomasina Eustace