Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper investigates how depersonalized and standardized procedures afforded by digital and databased infrastructures remain intimately dependent upon embodied, affective and gendered relations of care in Pakistan’s social protection program.

Paper long abstract

Digital and biometric infrastructures are supposed to work by abstracting identities out of immediate socio-political relational contexts to create standardized procedures that can be implemented on a scale. They do so by seeking to turn human subjects into disembodied, data doubles and digital analogs to be processed by, for example, automated inclusion and identity verification systems across various interfaces. However, as studies across multiple contexts demonstrate human bodies can’t be simply rescripted as seamlessly working passwords. Focusing on the everyday politics of digital and databased infrastructures employed by the Pakistani state’s flagship social protection scheme, the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP)/Ehsaas Kafalat [Compassionate Guardianship] Programme (EKP) addresses some of the contradictory and affective implications of (dis)embodied digitalities in practice. Arrogating itself the twin goals of poverty reduction and women empowerment BISP/EKP has substantially expanded under various governments: from less than 2 million families as beneficiaries in 2009 to around 9 million households receiving the cash grants today. Much of this expansion is credited to the improved transparency and the relative independence from the personalized relations of traditional political patronage thanks to the inclusion procedures structured by the standardized digitalized and databased infrastructures. Based on extensive ethnographic research in Lahore, however, this paper contends that Programme’s expansion, indeed its everyday functioning at a (depersonalized) scale, remains dependent upon the embodied, intimate, gendered and affective relations of (personalized) care at the critical contact zones where the women beneficiaries meet the state – or those working on its behalf.