Speaker Series: Pariroo Rattan

After decades of mobilization by social movements in India, the Street Vendors Act 2014 marked a historic shift by legally recognizing the right to vend and protect livelihoods. Yet even after a decade, street vendors continue to face immense precarity and harassment. Why are progressive, bottom-up laws unable to secure the transformations they promise, and what forms of political order emerge through their limits? I argue that politics is refracted through the epistemic limits of law: the boundaries of what the law can know and render legible. Drawing on ethnography in Delhi, I show how political and historical conditions shape the standards of legal evidence, categorization, procedure, and closure that become authoritative. Simultaneously, the epistemic limits of the law configure power by redirecting authority in the market and shaping the political registers through which vendors engage the state. Politics does not operate outside the law but is refracted by its categorical grids and evidentiary demands. Law and politics are, therefore, inseparable from struggles over knowledge-making. Attending to the epistemic limits of the law illuminates where legal instruments are (in)effective, how politics is produced at the boundaries of legal procedure, and the relationship between democratic ends and its institutional means.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

Dr. Pariroo Rattan is a Weinberg College Postdoctoral Fellow in Science in Human Culture and the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. She will also be teaching at the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern. Pariroo is a recent PhD graduate from Harvard University, where she was a long-standing Fellow at the HKS Science, Technology and Society (STS) program and received a secondary field in Music. Her doctoral dissertation is titled “A Marketplace for Populism: The Moral Politics of Digitization in India’s Informal Economy” and studies the relationship of the digital economy with mediating state institutions and nation-building in India, through an ethnography of street vendors in New Delhi using digital biometric ID Aadhaar and payment system Unified Payments Interface.