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Please join us on Wednesday, March 4, at 2pm, when Dr Vidya Pancholi will present “Algorithmic Coloniality and Vernacular Climate Politics: Contesting Digital Governance in Bihar’s Agricultural Adaptation”. The talk will be on MS Teams; please contact Brian Milstein (brian.milstein@ul.ie) for link information.
Digital climate adaptation interventions proliferate across Bihar, India, where over 35 agricultural applications circulate despite limited sustained farmer adoption. Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork with farmers (a majority of whom are women from marginalised caste backgrounds), extension workers, and digital service providers across Vaishali and Gaya districts, this article examines how algorithmic governance operates as agrarian coloniality while generating spaces for vernacular resistance.
The analysis demonstrates that Bihar’s digital adaptation infrastructure enacts ‘algorithmic coloniality’: extending colonial extraction patterns through computational systems that privilege certain knowledge forms, centralise decision-making, and produce strategic ignorance about caste-differentiated vulnerability. Yet women farmers organised through Self-Help Groups articulate counterpolitics rooted in collective action and embodied knowledge, while BAMCEF-affiliated Dalit farmers demonstrate sophisticated technological appropriation alongside radical political consciousness. This vernacular climate politics reveals that transformative adaptation requires fundamental restructuring of agrarian relations rather than algorithmic optimisation.
The article contributes empirically by documenting the first sustained application of algorithmic coloniality frameworks to agricultural adaptation contexts, theoretically by extending Mohamed et al.’s framework through specifying mechanisms of epistemic violence, temporal violence, and labour extraction, while demonstrating how caste hierarchies structure algorithmic governance in South Asian contexts, and politically by centring marginalised farmers’ organised resistance as generative of alternative climate futures.
Vidya Pancholi is a Senior Researcher at Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, currently working on the Leverhulme Trust-funded Digital Climate Futures Project. His research examines how digital technologies operate in climate adaptation governance across rural Bihar, India, using frameworks of political ecology, climate coloniality, and digital coloniality. By examining resistance practices against algorithmic exclusion, his research aims to centre marginalised voices in climate adaptation.