Shaunna Rodrigues

I am a Lecturer at Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, where I teach Contemporary Civilization, a year-long seminar on the history of political thought. My research examines how a new democracy like India redefined global languages of justification after independence from the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century. It traces how ideas of knowledge, progress, and self-respect were reshaped by India’s democratic experiment, and the impact of these transformations on nationalism, constitutionalism, and algorithmic governance in South Asia.

My first book, Justification After Empire: Knowledge, Self-Respect, and the Infrastructures of Progress (forthcoming), examines how post-imperial democracies in South Asia rebuilt the grounds of legitimacy between 1940 and 2020. Centered on India, it analyzes how new knowledges shaped by its democratic experiment rebuilt the conditions under which political authority could be justified. Drawing on the political thought of mid-20th-century Indians who were political opponents, but central to the consolidation of Indian democracy, the book traces how their rival ideas of knowledge, progress, and self-respect allowed for constitutionalism to become a pluralist language of politics, while also informing majoritarian conceptions of civilizationism and political membership. It concludes by reflecting on why and how new democratic knowledge systems underpin contemporary projects of classification, data collection, and algorithmic governance. Using justification as a theoretical hinge, the book shows how struggles over defining the right kind of democratic authority in India both reflect and reshape global political and epistemic trends.

Research for this project was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon International Travel Fellowship and Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

 My second book project, titled The Knowledge of Structures Problem, traces how democratic South Asia became central to legitimizing digital infrastructures that shape the global AI supply chain. It examines India’s deepening technological, security, and economic entanglements with East Asia, from semiconductor fabrication and nanotechnology to digital identification, as well as its role in advancing American and European social media and data regimes. Integrating these entanglements with democratic India’s earlier projects of training engineering experts whose labor is now crucial to the global technological economy, the book demonstrates why South Asia is shaping global political theory on data regimes, democracy, citizenship and migration, progress, and AI futures.

Since 2021, I have taught Contemporary Civilization (CC), one of Columbia’s most competitive teaching appointments in the History of Political Thought. I treat the ‘big books’ I teach as studies in how moral ideas reveal and constrain power. I have also designed and independently taught seminar courses on global political theory, modern empires, and contemporary politics, and a Global Core lecture course on Gandhi and His Interlocutors.