About

Kavita Dattani is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is a feminist researcher specializing in digital technologies and data, with a focus on how data-driven digital systems enable new forms of violence and marginality, as well as exploring the potential for more progressive data futures. Her research encompasses biometric technologies, digital dating apps, and digital labor platforms across various geographies. Dattani's work includes an in-depth analysis of India's biometric identity system Aadhaar and India Stack, examining the roles of corporate and government stakeholders in creating these big-data systems and how they perpetuate colonial data practices. She has also studied the use of digital dating apps among women and gender minorities in Mumbai, highlighting how platform algorithms reinforce class and caste endogamy through the concept of 'data-bility.' Additionally, her research on digital labor platforms, including her work with the Oxford Internet Institute's Fairwork project, sheds light on the gendered experiences of platform workers globally. Her scholarly contributions have been published in various academic journals, and she has been recognized with awards such as the Royalty Research Fund Scholar Award.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Political economy
• Economics
• Economy
• Engineering
• Linguistics
• Art
• Law
• Economic growth
• Aesthetics
• Neoclassical economics
• Business
• Market economy
• Mechanical engineering
• Media studies

Selected publications

• Book Review | Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India by Hemangini Gupta (California University Press, 2025)

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2026-03-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India traces the complex and sometimes conflicting constitutions of techno-future making in India.What is unique about "experimental time" as an analytic is that it allows for the tracing of two processes that may at first seem at odds: global startup capitalism in tandem with feminist future making.Through a deep ethnography of startup culture and startup capitalism in Bangalore, Hemangini Gupta unpacks how these processes are aligned.Gupta illustrates the textures of these startup capitalism and feminist future making projects through a journey across various sites, including office spaces, post-work drinks, startup festivals, and other kinds of networking and leisure meetings in the city of Bangalore, sometimes referred to as India's Silicon Valley.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction: Book review forum for Erin McElroy's <i>Silicon Valley Imperialism</i>

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2025-12-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Data‐bility: Endogamous social intimacies on dating apps in Mumbai

  Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2024-05-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In this paper I argue through the double entendre of ‘data‐bility’ that how dateable one is on a dating app relies on data. This techno‐social framework enables an understanding of how dating apps are reconfiguring a politics of sexuality, circumscribed by digital technologies and data. Drawing on research with middle‐class women and gender‐minority dating app users in Mumbai and one dating app executive, the paper investigates how algorithms and users' digital behaviour together constitute data‐bility in three ways. First, dating app algorithms are designed to match those of similar social identities to one another. Second, dating app users engage with others' digital data on profiles and through message chats, reading class through these processes, deciding who to match/reject and correspondingly who is data‐ble. Third, users and algorithmic infrastructures come together to create new regimes of verification, through deeming some users ‘real’ and others ‘fake’ on dating apps, extending violent legacies of categorisation. Together, these processes result in data‐bility, a techno‐social order of digital dating oriented around the exclusion of those labelled ‘creeps’ along class and caste lines.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Porous by Design: How Childcare Platforms Impact Worker Personhood, Safety, and Connection

  Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2024 · 10 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Computer Science

  Care work is always already unequal. It involves looking after others’ physical, psychological, emotional, and developmental needs. Paid care work tends to be conducted in private spaces, lack regulation, and reproduce unequal dynamics between clients and workers. These conditions lead to porous boundaries, a permeability experienced by workers between care and work, professional and personal, and private and public (sectors and spheres). Drawing on interviews with 16 workers who find work using Care.com, we argue that the porous boundaries of care work are reified in new ways through the design and use of emerging digitally mediated matching platforms. This has particular impacts for ranking personhood, reducing worker safety, and increasing atomization. In contrast, we find benefits in the forum-like structure and visible, interactive conversations of other platforms used to access childcare work. We end with a discussion of porousness by design and the trouble of locating design within worker platforms.

  PublisherDOI

• Labour Standards in the Platform Economy: Vietnam Ratings 2023

  2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Spectrally shape-shifting: biometrics, fintech and the corporate-state in India

  Journal of Cultural Economy · 2023 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  Through a hauntological frame, this article investigates how the ghosts of colonial pasts are re-emerging in India's national universal biometric identity system, Aadhaar, and a software infrastructure built on top of it, India Stack. It shows how Aadhaar and India Stack facilitate the extraction of data as a form of ‘data colonialism.’ Examining data colonialism through an enquiry of how the multifarious and unstable relations of colonialism are bound up with the extractive processes of digital data, the article uses a historical approach considering the shifting trajectories of identity ecologies in India to see what is dispossessed through Aadhaar and India Stack. In doing so it continues a trend in spectral writing – forcing an intervention between colonial pasts and presents. Detailing a specific chronology of events, the article reveals how ‘data relations’ have been co-produced by the Indian state and corporate fintech bodies over the last decade to coerce populations into a ‘digital financialisation.’ Using the metaphor of ‘structural-shape-shifting’, it shows how colonial relations continue within data relations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Platform ‘glitch as surprise’

  City · 2021 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Economy
  • Economics

  The emergence of on-demand domestic work sectors in cities across the world has been called the ‘Uber-isation of domestic work’. In India, the sector and its surrounding hype was short-lived as some of the country's key on-demand domestic work providers were unable to maintain sufficient profit margins and were forced to change their models or shut down altogether. This paper examines the rise and fall of the on-demand domestic work sector in urban India, drawing on 22 interviews and 2 focus groups with 32 women domestic workers across Delhi and its surrounding National Capital Region (NCR), and 2 interviews with experts in Delhi and Mumbai. Through these narratives, the paper reveals the factors which govern the failure and absence of the sector. Using Uber as a heuristic, the paper unsettles the concept of ‘Uber-isation’ as a universally applicable framework to understand platform economy activities, exposing the intersectional gender and class assumptions built into this conceptualisation. It argues that the techno-masculinist logics of on-demand domestic work platforms, which are built into the attempt to ‘Uber-ise’, have disregarded the socio-spatial relations of the city. An empirical case of what Leszczynski has called ‘glitch as surprise’, when the platform economy unexpectedly fails to manifest, this case reminds us that the city, rather than a simple site of economic practice, is socially reproduced.

  PublisherDOI

• “Governtrepreneurism” for good governance: The case of Aadhaar and the India Stack

  Area · 2019-09-04 · 35 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In many of the ex‐colonies of European empires, biometric technology systems are being built under an ethos of welfare and financial service delivery. One case in this broader trend of postcolonial governance is India's Aadhaar and India Stack. This paper uses this case to explore how the in‐sourcing of technology into means of governing, behind a front of participatory “good governance,” is contributing to the historical trajectory of citizenship regimes in India. Through claims of reducing financial “leakages,” Aadhaar, a biometric identification database consisting of fingerprint, iris scan, and photograph, has become compulsory for accessing welfare in India. The Indian government makes a case for Aadhaar using a propaganda discourse of its success, based on weak evidence. The India Stack, a set of cloud‐based application programming interfaces ( API s) built on top of the Aadhaar database, offers a digital infrastructure for private companies to verify identities using Aadhaar data and to offer other “services” including “financial services.” The ability to access data, paired with a “revolving door” of individuals between state and corporations, points to an ulterior goal of both Aadhaar and the India Stack: creating winners in the corporate and financial technology sectors. The Indian corporate‐state run through a “governtrepreneurism” uses Aadhaar and the India Stack as new digital technologies of governmentality to transform populations into subjects or customers.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniela K. Rosner

  University of Washington

  1 shared

• Meghna Gupta

  Institute of Management Technology

  1 shared

• Audrey Desjardins

  University of Washington

  1 shared

• Maya A Kaneko

  University of Washington

  1 shared

• Caitlin Lustig

  University of Washington

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Royalty Research Fund Scholar Award (2024)
• Society of Scholars Fellowships (2025)