School of Social and Political Science

Description

Tax data is usually imagined as the state’s instrument for knowing and extracting from its citizens. Yet in rural Bangladesh, citizens actively reshape the data itself—bending categories, withholding information, and redefining what counts as fact—turning fiscal infrastructures into arenas of negotiation and reinvention. Data practices here are not neutral technical processes but moments where power, value, and social relations are contested and reworked. Following the trajectory of fiscal data reveals otherwise hidden dimensions of citizen–state relations: refusals to share information speak to anxieties about redistribution, while visions of ‘pure’ data emerge from social ties rather than from technological systems. This talk draws on theories of fiscal sociality and data infrastructures to show how local actors, far from being passive data subjects, co-produce the very systems through which the state seeks to know and govern them.