DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

Science and Technology Studies (STS), Expertise, Digitization and Computation, State-Making and Citizenship, Nation-building, Informal Economy, Sound Studies

Biography

Pariroo Rattan is a Weinberg College Postdoctoral Fellow in Science in Human Culture and the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. She will also be teaching at the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern. Pariroo is a recent PhD graduate from Harvard University, where she was a long-standing Fellow at the HKS Science, Technology and Society (STS) program and received a secondary field in Music. Her doctoral dissertation is titled “A Marketplace for Populism: The Moral Politics of Digitization in India’s Informal Economy” and studies the relationship of the digital economy with mediating state institutions and nation-building in India, through an ethnography of street vendors in New Delhi using digital biometric ID Aadhaar and payment system Unified Payments Interface. She also works comparatively on citizen resistance to legal data regulation regimes across the US, EU and China. Apart from digitization, Pariroo is writing about topics relating to the law such as the politics of evidence in the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit, and on the acoustic and sound politics of the urban economy. Her work has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society among others, and has recently been published by the Economic and Political Weekly.

Publications

Rattan Pariroo (2025). Digital Developmentalism and Street Vending: Redefining the Obligations between the State and the Informal Economy, Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 60, Issue No. 29, 19 July 2025.

Rattan Pariroo (Oct 2024) The Politics of Data-Based Policymaking, The Hindu Indian national daily newspaper.