International Institute of Information Technology Archives

Prof. Paromita Sanyal is a professor of sociology at Florida State University. She holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard University, an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a BA from Presidency College, Kolkata.

Prof. Sanyal’s research lies at the intersection of economic sociology, development, deliberative democracy, and gender, with a sustained focus on how people living under conditions of structural inequality pursue agency, mobility, and collective power. Her work spans the Global South and the United States, examining microfinance and women’s empowerment in rural India, self-help groups and gender justice in India, household debt and financial precarity among working-class households in urban India, and platform labor and its consequences in India and the U.S. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in India.

She is the author/co-author of several books with Cambridge University Press: Credit to Capabilities: A Sociological Study of Microcredit Groups in India (2014), which won the American Sociological Association’s Outstanding Book Award in the Sociology of Development category; Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies (2019); and Revolution by Stealth: How Women’s Groups Catalyzed a Cultural Transformation in Bihar. Another book, Rethinking Credit: Shaping Solutions to Social Problems, is currently under preparation.

Prof. Sanyal has held faculty positions at Cornell University and Wesleyan University, and has collaborated on research funded by the Social Science Research Council, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, and the Gates Foundation, among others. For over a decade, she was a research consultant to the World Bank’s Development Research Group. She has also presented her research at the United Nations, the World Bank, and major international scholarly venues.

Prof. Sanyal’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating how low-income communities in India are experiencing the digital transformation of finance, with the focus being on digital payment systems and AI-enabled credit. India, the world’s fastest-growing fintech market, offers a critical site for understanding the opportunities and challenges of technology-driven financial inclusion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, the study is examining how low-income publics adopt, adapt to, or resist digital financial tools, and how their responses are shaped by social, infrastructural, and moral–economic contexts. The research is bridging scholarship on financial practices and technological innovation, while informing policy by highlighting barriers to adoption, risks of exclusion, and strategies for ethical fintech design.

Lilith Saylor is interested in challenging the assumption that technology and rural spaces exist in contradiction and believes that rural spaces exist as integral, active contributors to the globalized world. An at-large scholar with a background in economics and development studies, as well as family ties in Kentucky’s Appalachian region, Lilith is both excited by and critical of technology’s role in rural development. She graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2020, with majors in economics, political science, and international relations. She went on to work in startups as one of the founding team members of BioSolution Designs, and also wrote critically on biometric technology and its political and socioeconomic entanglements in her paper, “Suspicion Encoded: Women of Color and Biometric Technology in the United States”, which was published by California Polytechnic State University’s sprinkle journal. She has also spoken on the importance of building technology by considering the right to privacy, in her workshop, “Built to Protect”, at Technica Hackathon 2021 and TechTogether Atlanta 2022.

Lilith’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the factors influencing active rural digital engagement by comparing the interests, needs, and values of smallholder family farms in Karnataka to the digital technologies they consume. Bengaluru’s digital agritech startups depend on their ability (and obligation) to engage with smallholders as decision-making consumers, thereby giving researchers an unprecedented chance to reevaluate existing frameworks for encouraging rural digital participation. While exploring the mutual influences between smallholder family farms and digital technology, Lilith’s project is also highlighting the ways that rural regions are shaping their own digital future with their unique concerns, interests, and economic decisions.