Ontologies of Difference in Data Collection: Disability and the Indian Census

• In Event: Becoming “Data-Driven”: Burgeoning Data Cultures and Liminality in Civil Service - II

Abstract

This interdisciplinary project will examine efforts to categorize people with disabilities in India through the definitions employed during and the data collected by the census. Conducted every decade, the Indian census is one of the largest global efforts toward demographic data collection at the country level. In the measurement of disability, several claims have been forwarded by activists around the under-counting and subsequent invisibility of people with disabilities. This project will examine both the available statistics that are used to define measures of economic productivity and the ways in which these numbers are produced.
The paper will be centered on two primary questions: first, what classification systems inform the manner in which data around disabilities is collected? Second, how do the ideologies that inform these systems speak to specific sociopolitical contexts and beliefs about the ways in which the world around us is naturally ordered? By examining how notions of objectivity inform the processes of data collection and the subsequent reporting and use of data in policy making, the paper will complicate existing narratives around modes of knowledge production and the assumptions of objectivity that govern these endeavors. The paper will examine how large-scale data collection processes are shaped by ideological beliefs about the social location of different groups within a society, with a particular focus on the ways in which a range of beliefs about who or what is (or isn’t) normal contributes to how disability is defined and measured for the purposes of policy making and governance efforts.

Author

• Kim Fernandes, University of Pennsylvania