Dr. Swati Srivastava receives NEH Award

Dr. Swati Srivastava Awarded NEH Summer Stipend

Swati Srivastava, Assistant Professor of Political Science, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for her work on the global politics of Big Tech. According to Srivastava, the project is guided by two questions: “What are the major political harms (e.g., mass surveillance and behavior modification) related to Big Tech?” and “How well does regulation (e.g., government law suits and public hearings) around the world remedy those harms?”

In order to answer these questions, Srivastava has worked with a research team of undergraduate students (labeled the “Big Tech and Political Responsibility” research group) to create “an original database of 4,315 major Facebook incidents using news data and track over 900 related global regulatory activities.” Her team’s work in constructing this database is particularly important because “scholars lack high quality and systematic data” to compare governmental regulations of tech giants.

Swati Srivastava’s focus on “corporate expressions of sovereign power,” what she calls “hybrid sovereignty,” has also included analyses of the English East India Company, founded in 1600, and more recent corporate entities such as the International Chamber of Commerce, and Blackwater.

Srivastava is preparing a book-length manuscript on the global politics of Big Tech. Her previous book manuscript on “hybrid sovereignty,” currently under review, was awarded the Northeast Scholar’s Circle Award for the most promising first book manuscript in International Relations.

Professor Srivastava teaches classes in Purdue’s Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts Program and in the Department of Political Science. Her classes in political science focus on international relations and global governance. She describes herself as “a scholar of global governance,” who mines a variety of “public, private and news sources” to develop “archives of corporate activity.”

Prior to her appointment at Purdue in 2018, Srivastava was Assistant Professor of Global Politics at Humboldt State University. She has published in International Studies Quarterly, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, International Studies Review, and the Journal of International Organizations. She has presented her work at such institutions as the University of Cambridge, the European Union Institute, and Virginia Tech.