Vidya Subramanian is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests lie at the intersection of technologies and societies. Her current research investigates the changing nature of citizenship in the technological society we now inhabit. Focusing on India, her research is loosely framed by two large issues: the first is of the colonization of the everyday so-called real world by the digital; and the second is how power permeates and is implicated in such technologies.
Her previous work has straddled the fields of Science, Technology, and Society (STS), Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), Sociology, Media Studies, and Sports Studies. In her doctoral work, she attempted to explore the influence of ICTs and television on the sport of cricket, the identities of the spectator (who is transformed into a consumer by these very technologies), and the transformation of cricket into a platform. In thus exploring the layered mediations between the IPL and ICTs, her thesis explored how the digital colonized the everyday through technologies of leisure and play.
Read a Q&A with Vidya from 2020 and an update on her journey since her Raghunathan fellowship from October 2024.
