Tarangini Sriraman
Wellcome Career Development Fellow
Tarangini is a mid-career Wellcome Trust-funded Career Development Award Fellow. She is moving into this role on the heels of a previous grant award (Fellowship in the Medical Humanities and Social Sciences) also funded by the Wellcome Trust. Her new role at King's will see her work with a team of PDRAs in a more contemporary and abundantly familiar field of Covid-19 history. Her collaborative grant project entails mapping the politics of digital labour in pandemic volunteer sites such as online vaccination, health surveillance (contact tracing), and relief communication in India (as a primary site) and Indonesia (as a secondary site). Drawing on oral history and Digital Humanities methods, this grant project has two lines of inquiry, the politics of (unequal) health work in a digital sphere, and the politics of time in such work. As a team, they will be interested in inquiring into the ways in which volunteers shaped temporal conceptions of disease transmission, vaccine procurement, and urgent medical aid. She has published work resulting from and after her volunteer work with migrant workers during the Covid-19 lockdown years.
Tarangini's first book titled, In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India published by OUP weaves together a novel history of making and verifying identification documents of subjects residing in the urban margins of Delhi such as refugees, slum residents, and rural migrants.
She is finishing her second manuscript that explores the role of caste and race stigma in shaping sociomedical conceptions of alcohol in twentieth century India. This book brings twentieth century (Telugu) vernacular health publics in conversation with nineteenth and twentieth century Anglo-American medical discourses of drinking.
BOOKS
Biography
Trained originally as a journalist, Tarangini has carried some of these narrative and investigative impulses into her training as a historian. She has robust interests in both the social history of medicine and socio-legal history in South Asia located in an expansive world of cross-cultural encounter. Her research interests have been shaped by her career teaching both history and politics courses in Delhi, Bangalore and London, and especially at Azim Premji University.
Public engagement
Tarangini served as a volunteer over two years in the Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN) which aided migrant workers along different axes of rations, travel, and other forms of relief during the pandemic. She has also served as a jury member of the People's Tribunal of Aadhaar. Her new grant role will see her work closely with several grassroots aid organizations, health organizations, digital rights, civil rights, and health activists in India.
Her work has appeared in several popular and policy-adjacent news forums such as The Wire, India Forum, The New Indian Express, The Print, and Buzzfeed.