Research interests
India, water, political ecology, cultural politics, tech culture(s), development, philanthropy, sanitation, the politics of information, ethnographic genre and form (particularly visual-tactile forms and practices of presenting anthropological information), photography, immersion, urbanism, the commons
Research areas
South Asia, India, Bengaluru, Switzerland (Zurich)
Short bio
Lindsay Vogt is a senior researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. Her first 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 extensively, 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 finalizing a book-length manuscript on the basis of this research.
Her second research project conducts anthropology at a more intimate range – within families in the context of bereavement, end of life, and chronic illness. This project, on one hand, takes the form of a mother-daughterly auto- and family-ethnography and examines issues of intercorporeality, material-temporal inheritances, and care across several generations of one matriline (book manuscript in preparation). On the other, it consists of applications of anthropology in service of memorialization of a deceased or dying loved one for communities of mourning and bereavement. For this work, Lindsay completed an End-of-Life Doula training program from the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont in 2022.
Finally, Lindsay is extending her past work on water and politics in a new research project that examines pursuits of immersion in water (e.g. swimming, bathing) as a condition of the urban commons across sites in South Asia, Europe, and the United States. This project funtions, furthermore, as a springboard to better theorize the mid-range concept of immersion cross-disciplinarily, including for digital contexts, and to experiment with digital and artistic modes of (immersive) presentation as a means to expand the modes of authorship and participation in immersion-based scholarship more generally.
Lindsay holds a Certificate in College and University Teaching and has also 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 December 2019.