Radhika Radhakrishnan

How do marginalized communities resist when the state’s gaze becomes digital? What happens when face-to-face policing becomes algorithmic surveillance? These questions hold particular urgency for sex workers in India, where surveillance technologies are reshaping historical dynamics between police and those they monitor. My research examines how digital surveillance transforms relationships between police and street-based sex workers in Mumbai, and how sex workers strategically contest systems intended for their control. While anthropologists have long studied police power over marginalized groups, the shift from physical encounters to CCTVs, facial recognition, and AI-driven surveillance fundamentally alters these relationships, and demands investigation. India’s criminalization of public solicitation makes sex workers especially vulnerable to these technologies, which may interpret the workers’ public presence as criminal activity. Yet sex workers demonstrate remarkable agency, strategically engaging with surveillance systems to access previously unavailable mechanisms of justice. Through a year’s ethnographic research with sex workers and police, I examine how surveillance technologies are transforming three classical anthropological concerns: the evolution of policing practices, reconfiguration of informal power networks, and capacity for marginalized groups to exercise agency within systems of control. Analyzing these interactions will illuminate how digital surveillance both reinforces and disrupts traditional power hierarchies in urban spaces.