Kinjal Dave

Kinjal Dave is an interdisciplinary, multimodal scholar whose research explores questions related to technology, labor, immigration, and gender. 

Kinjal Dave studies immigrant experiences of technical labor as an embodied, material, and affective experience. Her multimodal dissertation project, entitled “Gujarati Aunties on the Integrated Circuit: Manufacturing Domesticity in the U.S. Diaspora” is based primarily on oral histories with women workers in the circuit board manufacturing industry who immigrated from Gujarat to New Jersey in the 1980s. Drawing on Asian American Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), Kinjal challenges prevailing conceptualizations of (ethno)-state, nation, family, and technology to offer a novel account of global diasporic formation. Through the collective memory of technical labor, she reveals transnational technical expertise as a gendered, racialized, casted, and classed social phenomenon. 

The first independent short film stemming from Kinjal’s dissertation interviews is currently under review as an invited submission to the Philly Asian American Film Festival & 12Gates Arts Experimental Video Arts Exhibition. In addition, her academic publications have appeared or are forthcoming in ISIS: A Journal of the History of Science Society, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and the edited anthology Across Oceans and Waves: Asian Diasporic History, Politics, and Disinformation. Kinjal has also published in popular outlets including Hyperallergic Magazine, Slate, and Chalkbeat. Through her multimodal scholarship (CAMRA, CEE), reparations advocacy (Holmesburg, Penn Museum, P.O. Box 34), and research center memberships, Kinjal has contributed to organizing more than a dozen conferences and panels for both public-facing and academic audiences.

Kinjal was previously a researcher for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) of the United States Congress. Prior to graduate school, she was a research analyst at the nonprofit think tank Data & Society Research Institute and remains an affiliate there. Kinjal earned her bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Political Science from Villanova University, where was a Presidential Scholar of the Center for Multicultural Affairs, a comprehensive merit scholarship award.