India, water, political ecology, cultural politics, tech culture(s), development, philanthropy, sanitation, the politics of information, media reception, political ritual, ethnographic genre and form (particularly visual-tactile forms and practices of presenting anthropological information)

South Asia, India, Bengaluru

Lindsay Vogt is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. Her current research project, “New Water in New India,” is organized around the promise of high technology in national development in India. This research addresses the intersections of high technology and development holistically, taking account not only of devices and technologies but also the enormous flows of private wealth, through philanthropy and Corporate Social Responsibility, that are invoked to facilitate, orient, and condition national development, as well as the potent charismatic allure afforded to high technology that underwrites its authority within questions of national development. This project examines these processes through the lens of water, a substance that is at once vital for human wellbeing and survival, a political medium reflective of arrangements of power within society, a speculative good – and limitation – within geographies of high-tech industrial operation, and thus a site of active philanthropic investment by tech patrons. Lindsay is currently preparing a book-length manuscript on the basis of this research. Lindsay is extending her past work on the politics of development in India in a second research project that focuses on ontological collisions, conversions, and conjunctions within water and sanitation policy formation and implementation.

Lindsay holds a Certificate in College and University Teaching and has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Emory University in the departments of Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Asian and Asian American Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2019.

CV Lindsay Vogt (PDF, 287 KB)