Nafis Hasan is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and a 2023-24 Non-resident visiting fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the UvA, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2021, he was awarded a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

For several years, he has been following fevered bureaucrats, taciturn engineers, and hapless citizens, as they enact multiple assemblages of technologies and futures, often called ‘the digital’. Broadly, his research examines the technopolitics of digital media, material politics of public institutions, and technological policies for governance, with a regional focus on India. The core of this work stems out of his doctoral dissertation, which is both a historical and ethnographic study of an extremely timely subject, the impact of digital technologies on the state in India, and how digitization is transforming the relationship between the state and its voter citizens. His project, both the dissertation and the monograph that's growing out of it, look to detail the human and material investments needed to build the virtual state and the effect that this transformation is going to have on citizen relationships with state agencies. Drawing on this research, he is now formulating a new project that studies the cultural politics of the datafication of health in projects tackling infectious diseases.

Nafis' work has received a range of support, including grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Institute of Indian Studies and several grants from UCLA.

Book

Shah, Nishant, Ashish Rajadhyaskha, and Nafis Hasan. 2022. Overload, Creep, Excess – An Internet from India. Vol. 45. Institute of Network Cultures. doi:10.25969/mediarep/19266.

Peer-reviewed Articles and Book Chapters

Hasan, N (2022). “Bureaucratic Mediations for Biometric Governance – Aadhaar in India’s Northeast” in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2022.2035976

Hasan, N. (2020). ‘CAA and NRC Stoke the Wrong Problems in Meghalaya’, in the forum ‘India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)’ in Political Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR) Online (September 7).

Hasan, N., H. Spivey & K. Card (2019). “Frustrated Encounters in Leitner, H., Peck, J., & Sheppard, E. (Eds.). (2019). Urban Studies Inside/Out: Theory, Method, Practice. SAGE Publications Limited.

Hasan, N. (2019). ‘Smart Cities’ in Leitner, H., Peck, J., & Sheppard, E. (Eds.). (2019). Urban Studies Inside/Out: Theory, Method, Practice. SAGE Publications Limited.

Hasan, N. (2019). ‘Global Cities’ in Leitner, H., Peck, J., & Sheppard, E. (Eds.). (2019). Urban Studies Inside/Out: Theory, Method, Practice. SAGE Publications Limited.

Hasan, N. (2018). Meghalaya's' Anti-Railway Protests' Highlight Complexities of the Development Discourse. Economic and Political Weekly, 53 (3), 20 January.

Hasan, N. (2013). The Idea of Tripura: a case of digital governance in Rajadhyaksha, Ashish (2013) In the Wake of Aadhaar: the Digital Ecosystem of Governance in India. Center for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore.

Select Book Reviews

2021 The Many Lives of Data in India, a review of Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures From India, edited by Sandeep Mertia, Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, 2020), in The Wire.

2016 Review of The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India Joy LK Pachuau and Willem van Schendel. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 502 pp. American Anthropologist, 118(3), 635-637.

2015 Review of Corruption and Reform in India: Public Services in the Digital Age by Jennifer Bussell. New York: Cambridge University, 2012. 306 pp. Governance 28: 116–117.

2014 Review Essay What is Good Governance? Good Governance: Never on India’s Radar Madhav Godbole and India at Turning Point: The Road to Good Governance T.S.R. Subramanian. Delhi: Rainlight/Rupa Publications, 2014. 396&400pp. Biblio: A review of books, Vol. XIX Nos. 9&10, September- October.

Popular Writing

2020 ‘Iewduh – a very Shillong Film’ in the webzine Raiot (http://www.raiot.in/iewduh-a-very-shillong- film/)

2019 ‘Khasi Film 'Iewduh' Navigates the Politics of Difference With Deft Skill’ in The Wire (https://thewire.in/film/movie-review-iewduh-pradip-kurbah)

2019 ‘How Digitising Land Management Has Taken Away Its Socio-Physical Identity’ in The Wire (https://thewire.in/tech/how-digitising-land-management-has-taken-away-its-socio-physical- identity)

2019 ‘Et fingeraftryk til fremtiden (A Fingerprint for the Future)’. In PROSA (https://www.prosa.dk/artikel/et-fingeraftryk-til-fremtiden/)

2017 ‘Is Protesting Against Development Stupid’ in the webzine Raiot (http://www.raiot.in/is- protesting-against-development-stupid/)

2017 ‘Digital Governance in India’s Northeast – The Case Of Aadhaar In Tripura’
 in the webzine Raiot (http://www.raiot.in/digital-governance-in-indias-northeast-the-case-of-aadhaar-in-tripura/)

Policy Reports

Hasan, N. & Narayana A (2015). “A chapter on Human Resource Management for the report entitled Bangalore: Way Forward for the Expert Committee on Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagar Pallike (BBMP) Restructuring”. 01June. Bangalore

Hasan, N. (2014). “Institutional Arrangements & Policies”, a panel report for the World Bank’s Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) Karnataka - State Report. 15 August. Bangalore.

Hasan, N. (2012). “Report of the Workshop on Digital Deliberations: UID Project and its Focus on Homelessness”. National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS). 20 May. Bangalore

Hasan, N. (2023). “Government's Rate of Change”. Department of Anthropology, Leipzig University (Max Planck Institute). 26-27 April.

Hasan, N. (2022). “Correct your record – the material politics and public ethics of digitizing bureaucracy”. Department of Anthropology, York University. 14 March.

Hasan, N. (2022). “Correct your record – the material politics and public ethics of digitizing bureaucracy”. School of Information Sciences (iSchool), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 15 February.

Hasan, N. (2022). “Government of or by Apps?: Mobile Infrastructures in Digital India”. Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania. 3 February.

Hasan, N. (2019). “Digitizing Government”. School of Liberal Studies, Azim Premji University. 19 January.

Hasan, N. (2018) “Exploring the Legal Identity of Land in the Context of a Digital Disruption”. Oxford Department of International Development. 20 December.

Hasan, N. (2013). “Governance Reforms and Welfare – A study of Karnataka Guarantee of Services to Citizens Act”. Azim Premji University. 3 August.

Hasan, N. (2022). ‘Databasing India – Slow Violence in/of Digital Governance’. Cultures of Data and Datafication in India Workshop. Oxford Department of International Development. 7 July. Virtual

Hasan, N. (2022). ‘Cultivating Probity, Enacting Authority: App Based Orality in an Indian Office’. Digital India and State Making CASI Workshop. 28-29 June. Virtual

Hasan, N. (2021). ‘Rasterizing Land: Technological Transitions in Bureaucratic Representations of Land in India’. American Anthropological Association (AAA) Meetings Baltimore. 17 November.

Hasan, N. (2021). “‘Engineering Bureaucracy, Bureaucratizing Engineering’. Annual Conference on South Asia at Madison. 22 October. Virtual.

Hasan, N. (2021). “‘App Sarkar’: mobile apps and state effects”. American Association of Geographers Meetings. 7-11 April. Virtual.

Hasan, N. (2020). “Cultivating probity, enacting authority: app based orality in a south Indian bureaucracy”. 14th Annual Conference on Asian Studies, Palacký University. 20-21 November. Olomouc. Virtual.

Hasan, N. (2020). “Mutating Records: The Social Life of Land Record Keepers in Southern India”. Sixth Annual PhD workshop, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS). 13-15 January. Bangalore

Hasan, N. (2019). “Techno Politics and Techno Fetishism in Indian Bureaucracies – a case of digitizing land records”. American Anthropological Association (AAA) Meetings. 20-24 November. Vancouver, Canada.

Hasan, N. (2019). “Database Raj? Writing and scribes in a present-day bureaucracy”. Advanced PhD Workshop, Bangalore Research Network. 1 Aug. Bangalore.

Hasan, N. (2017). “Exposure and Concealment – Electronic Governance in The Making of Bangalore”. American Ethnological Association (AES) Meetings. Stanford University. March 31-April 1. Stanford

Hasan, N. (2016). “Re-imagining the State: the Unique Identity (UID) project and Northeast India”. First Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference on South Asia. UCLA. 12 May. Los Angeles

Hasan, N. (2015). “Securing Property Titles through Biometric Technology”. Land and Poverty Conference. World Bank. March 23-27. Washington DC

Hasan, N. (2014). “Bureaucracy in the era of E-Governance: Observations from Karnataka”. “International Conference on Technology, Accountability and Democracy in South Asia and Beyond”. Stanford University and the University of Mumbai. January 17-18. Mumbai

Hasan, N. (2012). “Digital Deliberations: Aadhaar Project and its Focus on Homelessness”. “A CSCS-NIAS Urban Research and Policy Programme Workshop”, National Institute of Advanced Studies, 16 July. Bangalore