Pariroo Rattan is a PhD candidate in the Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS) track in Public Policy program at Harvard, and is doing a secondary field in Music alongside her doctoral degree. She is a Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS). Her doctoral work studies the moral politics of the digital economy and the rise of populism in India, where she conducts ethnography on the adoption of digital biometrics and payment systems by street vendors. 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 the politics of evidence in the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit, and on the acoustics and sound politics of the urban economy.

Pariroo‘s work is supported by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Vicki Norberg-Bohm Fellowship, Harvard Fellowship for Students from India (in honour of Amartya Sen), Jens Aubrey Westengard Scholarship, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, Harvard University Asia Center, Lakshmi Mittal South Asian Institute at Harvard. Pariroo is also a co-founder of the Graduate Research in Science and Technology Studies (GRiSTS) network. Before starting her PhD at Harvard, Pariroo completed her Master’s degree in Development Economics at Yale University on the KC Mahindra Scholarship. She then spent a year conducting research to understand construction of macroeconomic ‘growth’ across Yale University, University of Oslo, London School of Economics and College De France. Pariroo holds a BA in Economics from the University of Delhi.