Ishani Saraf is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at MIT. She studies technoscientific discards and their methodological potential for interpreting social life and political matter. Her current work focuses on the trade and transformation of discarded machines and metal scrap across South Asian and the Indian Ocean spaces, exploring their uncharted transnational routes of circulation, the social worlds they become embedded in, and the novel contexts they in turn generate.
Her book manuscript engages with the embodied labor, knowledge and material practices, and life-worlds of people who work with and structure value into metallic discards and the trans-local relational ecologies and urban forms that their interactions with these materials produce. The book is anchored by ethnographic, archival, and policy research on two sites: one of India’s largest scrap metal markets located in Delhi and an inland “dry port” that facilitates the transnational trade in scrap. The scrap market emerges as an experimental space and phenomenal site to engage with alternative histories of technological inquiry and experimentation and as a space of work and trade. At the same time, the market gathers various forces of harm that working with discards entails. These include exposure to dangerous materials and tools, the ecological precarity of lives and livelihoods, the devaluation of forms of work and knowledge, and a sense of dislocation in the face of urban transformation. The dry port provides a counterpoint to the waste market, shedding light on the infrastructures and techniques of transnational scrap trade as a system of transformation and trade in discards that has also become a site of state experiments in consolidating an emergent domain of economic, political, legislative, and material activity. Through the juxtaposition of these sites, the book provides an account of post-colonial urban capitalism centered around the specific material and temporal dynamics of the production and exchange of “scrap” as a unique commercial form and technological entity pressing for a reorganization of the usual categories of production and consumption, accumulation and waste. Through these themes, the book foregrounds how scrap refracts engagements with questions of postcolonial capitalism, urban worlds, inequality and belonging, work and technological experimentation, dangerous materials, and environmental governance in a differentially distributed Anthropocene.
She has published on the place-making capacities of scrap work and ideologies of manual labor, the dry port as an interfacial space that reconstitutes ideas of the “littoral,” and the infrastructures of agreement that underpin the standardization of scrap metal for long distance trade. Extending her interest in the methodological and theoretical affordances of scrap as a material, she is drawn to the rich variety of methodologies that scholars and practitioners of qualitative research formulate to elicit responses from the world. In her classes, she engages with these creative approaches to explore how a question is produced, refined, and evaluated and how this process affects how and what we understand about the world.
Ishani received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Davis, and her MA and MPhil in sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Prior to joining MIT, she was a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at the University of Virginia. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds Mellon Research Initiative at UC Davis, and other interdisciplinary grants at UC Davis and UVA.