Research Areas

Social studies of algorithms, data, and AI; History and anthropology of computing; Science and technology studies; Social studies of work, labor, and expertise

Shreeharsh Kelkar is an interpretive social scientist interested in understanding how our new computing infrastructures of humans, algorithms, software, and data (or “AI”) are changing labor, work practices, and expertise. He is at work on a manuscript tentatively titled Reinventing Expertise: Technology Reformers and the Platformization of Higher Education. Building on his fieldwork in the world of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), it describes how and why the new practices of “data science” and “design thinking” are becoming more attractive to reformers of various sorts. He argues that these new regimes of knowledge production reconfigure our notions of what experts look like and what they do.

Kelkar is a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF), a division of UGIS (Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies). He is also affiliated with the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group.

For other publications, see his website: http://shreeharshkelkar.net.