Vandana Chaudhry

Faculty Fellow

Vandana Chaudhry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work at the City University of New York – College of Staten Island. Dr. Chaudhry joined CSI in 2012 after completing her PhD in Social Work and Disability Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on disability in the Global South, digitalization, neoliberal governance, disability justice, and culturally competent practices. Her multi-year ethnographic work explores disability at the nexus of digitalization, development, globalization, and the politics of subject-formation in India, through the examination of digital disability pensions, microfinance and community-based approaches. Her scholarship offers analysis of how big data, algorithmic regimes, and biometric technologies are reshaping disability welfare systems, restricting access to government benefits, and in the process reconfiguring the category of disability.

Participating Years

2015–2016

Dialectics of Autonomy and Dependence

Self-determination had a heady run in the 20th century, instanced by both revolutionary assertion and homogenizing mimicry. But what is autonomy now? What is dependence? How are these conditions of existence necessarily related – as contradictory rather than contrasting ideologies, representations, relations, outcomes? What forms reveal the dialectic at work? What forms disguise or displace the dynamic?