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, Progress, and Democratic Self-Respect in India (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 categories of social groups, like Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and minorities 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, like MK Gandhi, BR Ambedkar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and Abul Kalam Azad, who were central to the consolidation of Indian democracy in the mid-twentieth century, the book traces how their rival ideas of knowledge, progress, and self-respect shaped a reconstructive constitutionalism in India. The book outlines how their visions for democratic life under conditions of religious, linguistic, and ethnic difference, became institutionalized through constitutionalism. Assessing if this constitutionalism has met the vision of establishing a pluralist democracy in India in the postcolonial period, the book investigates how it can and does act as a check on majoritarian conceptions of civilizationism and political membership in India. The book concludes by reflecting on why and how new democratic knowledge systems underpin contemporary projects of public contestation by assessing the transformation in Indian democratic knowledge from the constituent moment in India to its current enchantment with 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 has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon International Travel Fellowship, the Columbia Core Curriculum, and Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

 My second book project, titled The Knowledge of Structures Solution, traces how democratic South Asia becomes central to legitimizing digital infrastructures that shape the global AI supply chain. It examines India’s deepening technological, security, and economic entanglements in the international terrain, from semiconductor fabrication and nanotechnology produced by East Asian countries, as well in data creation and data flows for American and European social media, data regimes, and democratic life. Integrating these entanglements with democratic India’s earlier projects of reconstructing knowledge for a democratic people, this book aims to show why South Asian modes of categorizing people and building digital public infrastructure impacts global political discourse on data regimes, democracy, citizenship and migration, and technological 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.