Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Practice of Registering Indian Citizens Using Biometric Information

一般观众摘要 该奖项是一个博士论文改进补助金。它支持对印度基于生物特征的登记做法进行研究。该研究通过密切关注公民“自愿”加入Aadhaar的做法，重点关注赋权的承诺与实现赋权的挑战之间的紧张关系。“它还将重点关注印度的各种官僚机构，如公共分配系统（PDS），如何利用Aadhaar来分配公民的福利权利。这项研究的结果将有助于扩大科学和技术研究（STS）奖学金的范围，这些奖学金是使用生物识别技术增强公民权能的新兴现实挑战的关键。更广泛地说，这些结果将作为正在进行的关于Aadhaar在调解国家与公民关系方面可能成功或失败的程度的审议的资源。此外，通过严格审查Aadhaar使弱势群体得以融入社会的主张，它们也可能有助于设计更具包容性和更负责任的身份识别系统。 在这项研究中，调查人员将使用多种方法进行多地点研究，包括对所涉选区的人种学研究和文件分析，以检查Aadhaar部署中的技术、法律的和官僚干预。调查人员将记录公众参与政府承诺通过在Aadhaar登记赋予居民权力的合法性，同时淡化对监视的担忧，他们将记录利用Aadhaar谋取个人利益的能力差异。然后，他们将阐明对国家识别实践的影响。这些影响将有助于STS关注的信息基础设施的部署，数字和指标的政治，以及国家治理的人类学。他们还将通过识别在使用生物识别技术进行公民身份识别时出现的公民身份形式，为基础设施研究中的生物政治转向做出贡献。

General Audience Summary This award is a doctoral dissertation improvement grant. It supports a study of India's biometric-based registration practices. The study focuses on the tension between the promise of empowerment and the challenges of achieving it by paying close attention to the practices of enrolling citizens into Aadhaar "voluntarily." It also will focus on how various Indian bureaucracies, such as the Public Distribution System (PDS), are using Aadhaar to distribute welfare entitlements of citizens. The results of this study will serve to extend the reach of Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship to sites and practices that are key to the emerging real-worldly challenges of using biometrics for citizen empowerment. More broadly, these results will serve as a resource for ongoing deliberations on the extent to which Aadhaar may succeed or fail to mediate state-citizen relationships. In addition, by critically examining the claims of Aadhaar-enabled social inclusion of vulnerable communities, they may also contribute to the design of more inclusive and accountable systems of identification.Technical Summary In this study, the investigators will use a multi-sited study using multiple methods including ethnographic research on the constituencies involved and document analysis examining the technical, legal, and bureaucratic interventions in the deployment of Aadhaar. The investigators will document public engagement with the legitimacy of the government's promises to empower residents through registration in Aadhaar while downplaying concerns about surveillance, and they will document the differential ability to leverage Aadhaar for personal benefits. They will then articulate implications for state identification practices. Those implications will contribute to STS concerns regarding deployment of information infrastructures, the politics of numbers and metrics, and the anthropology of state governance. They will also contribute to the biopolitical turn in infrastructure studies by identifying forms of citizenship that emerge in using biometrics for citizen identification.