Pathways to Higher Education

Archives and Access: Introduction

aparna — 2015-04-24T12:05:44Z

The members of this research project team are Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore and Abhijit Bhattacharya from the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Calcutta. This intial post tries to outline the concerns underlining this project which will attempt to critically examine archiving practices and policies in India in order to conceptualize ideas about ownership and use towards the goal of the greatest public good; reflect on issues of digitization and access; and facilitate public conversations and the articulation of a collective voice by historians and other users on possible interventions in these institutions.

This project argues that there is a pressing need to apply the questions and concerns that have arisen around the contemporary archives – of ownership, access and use – to the historical archive. The ‘conventional’ approach sees manuscript and paper archives solely as a source for researchers, or as a pedagogic appendage, or as a national legacy, held permanently in safekeeping either by privately held collections or particularly in tightly controlled state archives. In contrast, contemporary archives (often in a digitized format) allow users to catalogue, edit, comment and add their own data and thus poses some challenging questions to a conventional approach to the archives. Again, the potential access it offers to non-specialist users interrogates the idea of archival collections meant for academic consumption alone.

This project will consider the ways to conceptualize a move away from a relationship from both the state or knowledge economy driven models of archiving. Instead it will explore the possibilities that technology holds out to enhance control, centralization and exclusivity, or to dissipate it. It will also focus on questions of access; on who potential users are; on mutually recognized open access policies between institutions, and on finding interest groups and archive-related projects and other contexts for use of the archives.

Importantly, it will also discuss the embedding of the archive within the construct of a cultural legacy. It will attempt to compare the significance of the archive to that of the painting, or sculpture or architecture and the similarities and differences that can be cited inclusive of things that are not manuscripts and texts.
Towards this end, this project will focus on three sites: it will examine the National Archives of India; as well as consider Goa and Tamil Nadu as incidental territories which enable a view of distinct issues that emerge in the interface between technology and society in the context of archiving.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/archives-and-access-introduction

Launch of Public Juris (An Online Archive of Legal Resources)

aparna — 2015-04-24T12:07:59Z

Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijit Bhattacharya announce the launch of Public Juris, an online archive of legal resources.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Public Juris, an online archive of legal sources and would like to elicit the active participation of the scholarly community in conceptualizing and building Public Juris as a site where we are able to provide access to material needed for law and social science research in South Asia. We would very much appreciate feedback, support and collaboration as we develop this project.

Who we are: We are two historians (Rochelle Pinto and Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore) and an archivist (Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Kolkata) who are interested in issues of technology, users and access in relation to state and private archives in India (see blog).

The Project: We are soliciting contributions for an online digital archive of legal sources called “Public Juris” focusing on, but not limited to, South Asia. We hope this archive will be a useful and easily accessible resource for historians and other scholars interested in the study of different aspects of the law. We see this archive as particularly useful to students and teachers in South Asia and elsewhere who for logistical, economic or political reasons may not be able to travel to libraries and archives in order to access material of this kind. Eventually, we envisage that an online archive of this kind will allow students to broaden the thematic and regional range of their research.

How it will work: We do not have any strict definition of what constitute legal sources — they could range from acts and regulations to court cases, police records and petitions. For example, one set of records that has already been contributed to the archive centres on disputes over ceremonial privileges between the Valangi and Idangai castes in the city of Madras in the early nineteenth century. Documents that are not usually archived, such as leaflets, pamphlets, people’s enquiry reports, photographs, and advertisements, but which are critical to understanding the relationship between law and the public, can also find a space here. The material could be in any language.

As a community of scholars we are in possession of resources that can be harnessed usefully and inexpensively. All of us, for instance, have material collected from different locations that we have already used for our research or which is simply superfluous. This research could be shared. Since the archive inevitably leaves different traces for specific readings by different researchers, our research material could be put to other uses in other works. Hence, just as the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance has asked for your writings for their library, we would like to extend our request for collaborative energies within the LASS community to contribute to constructing a shared resource. Please do claim authorship of this archive by sharing with us material that you think should define and belongs in Public Juris.

Modalities: If you would like to contribute to this online archive, we request you to either bring the material with you when you attend the inaugural LASSNET conference in January, or if you prefer, send it by post to the Centre for Internet and Society (Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore, Karnataka 560052, India). We will undertake to scan the material and make it available on the Public Juris website which is in the process of being constructed and designed. We will acknowledge the contributor on the website, unless specifically asked not to do so. We will also make sure that once scanned, the material will be sent back to the contributor

If you have any questions about this initiative, please do contact aparna@cscs.res.in or rochelle@cscs.res.in. If you would like to contribute to the archive, please do contact us and let us know what kind of materials you would be willing to provide. We look forward to hearing from you.

Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
Rochelle Pinto, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for the Study of Social Sciences

In conversation with

Pratiksha Baxi, Anchor, LASS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/announcing-the-launch-of-public-juris

Pathways to Higher Education

nishant — 2015-03-30T14:52:54Z

The Pathways Project to Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in nine undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between Technologies, Higher Education and the new forms of social justice in India.

These colleges are the SIES College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Mumbai, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, UC College, Aluva, Newman College, Thodupuzha, Farook College, Kozhikode, Vidhyavardhaka College, Mysore, Dr. AV Baliga College, Kumta and St. Aloysius College, Mangalore from the states of Maharashtra, Kerala and Karnataka.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/learning-in-higher-education

Reclaiming the right to privacy: Researching the intersection of privacy and gender

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi — 2021-01-25T10:42:51Z

It was our privilege to be supported by Privacy International, UK, during 2019-2020, to undertake a research project focusing on reproductive health and data surveillance, and to engage on related topics with national civil society groups. Our partner organisations who led some of the research as part of this project are grassroots actors - Domestic Workers Rights Union, Migrant Workers Solidarity Network, Parichiti, Samabhabona, Rainbow Manipur, and Right to Food Campaign. Here we are compiling the various works supported by this project co-led by Ambika Tandon, Aayush Rathi, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay at the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Previous research conducted by CIS on the subject of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in India observes that there is a complex web of surveillance, or ‘dataveillance’, around each patient as they avail of SRH services from the state. [1] In this project on ‘researching the intersection of privacy and gender’, we aimed to map the ecosystem of surveillance around SRH services as their provision becomes increasingly ‘data-driven’, and explore its implications for patients and beneficiaries.

Through this project, we were interested in documenting the roles played by both the public and the private sector actors in this ecosystem of health surveillance. We understand the role of private sector actors as central to state provision of sexual and reproductive health services, especially through the institutionalisation of data-driven health insurance models, as well as through extensive privatisation of public health services.

We supported studies on a range of topics that constitute the experience of sexual and gender minorities and women when accessing public health and welfare systems, including the treatment of trans persons by law and welfare systems in India, access to abortion and maternity benefits for low income women, access to ART treatments by PLHIV, and so on.

We found that many respondents had no information about welfare schemes despite being eligible, while many others were excluded from them because they did not have Aadhaar cards and other ID documents, or because of errors and inconsistencies in the same. Direct benefit transfer schemes also required mobile phone linkage and active Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts, which added another layer of requirements and excluded vulnerable populations. We also found that respondents had very little information about the storage and sharing of their data, which raises questions about the possibility of implementing complex consent architectures for digitised health data as imagined by the Indian government through policies such as the Non Personal Data Governance Framework. We found that populations that carry stigma are most likely to be excluded from health and welfare access as a result of data collection, including trans groups, PLHIV, and single women or adolescent girls seeking abortion.

Please find below the various works undertaken as part of this project. We hope these works will be useful for civil society organisations, grassroots organisations, and reproductive rights organisations.

Article

Raina Roy. (July 18, 2020). Coronavirus: Kolkata’s trans community has been locked out of healthcare and livelihood. Scroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/968182/coronavirus-kolkatas-trans-community-has-been-locked-out-of-healthcare-and-livelihood

Rosamma Thomas. (November 02, 2020). Citizen data and freedom: The fears of people living with HIV in India. GenderIT. https://www.genderit.org/articles/citizen-data-and-freedom-fears-people-living-hiv-india

Sameet Panda. (November 25, 2020). One ration card, many left behind. Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/one-ration-card-many-left-behind/

Sameet Panda (January 11, 2020). One Nation One Ration Card in Odisha - Only Pain, No Gain. Sanchar, page 6. https://sancharodisha.com/

Santa Khurai. (June 18, 2020). 'I feel the pain of having nowhere to go': A Manipuri trans woman recounts her ongoing lockdown ordeal. Firstpost. https://www.firstpost.com/india/i-feel-the-pain-of-having-nowhere-to-go-a-manipuri-trans-woman-recounts-her-ongoing-lockdown-ordeal-8494321.html

Shreya Ila Anasuya. (December 21, 2020). How India’s Healthcare System Lets Down Trans Men. Go Mag. http://gomag.com/article/heres-what-its-like-to-be-a-trans-man-in-india/

Policy Response

Aayush Rathi, Aman Nair, Ambika Tandon, Pallavi Bedi, Sapni Krishna, and Shweta Mohandas. (September 13, 2020). Inputs to the Report on the Non-Personal Data Governance Framework. The Centre for Internet and Society. https://cis-india.org/raw/inputs-to-report-on-non-personal-data-governance-framework/

Report

Anchita Ghatak. (December 30, 2020). Domestic Workers’ Access to Secure Livelihoods in West Bengal. Parichiti. https://cis-india.org/raw/parichiti-domestic-workers-access-to-secure-livelihoods-west-bengal

Endnotes

[1] Aayush Rathi, Is India's Digital Health System Foolproof? (2019)
Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, Data Infrastructures and Inequities: Why Does Reproductive Health Surveillance in India Need Our Urgent Attention? (2019)
Ambika Tandon, Feminist Methodology in Technology Research: A Literature Review (2018)
Ambika Tandon, Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System (2019)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/reclaiming-the-right-to-privacy-researching-the-intersection-of-privacy-and-gender

Book 1: To Be, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-05-15T12:08:32Z

In this first book of the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Collection, we concentrate on what it means to be a Digital Native. Within popular scholarship and discourse, it is presumed that digital natives are born digital. Ranging from Mark Prensky’s original conception of the identity which marked all people born after 1980 as Digital Natives to John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s more nuanced understanding of specific young people in certain parts of the world as ‘Born Digital’, there remains a presumption that the young peoples’ relationship with technology is automatic and natural. In particular, the idea of being ‘born digital’ signifies that there are people who, at a visceral, unlearned level, respond to digital technologies. This idea of being born digital hides the complex mechanics of infrastructure, access, affordability, learning, education, language, gender, etc. that play a significant role in determining who gets to become a digital native and how s/he achieves it. In this book, we explore what it means to be a digital native in emerging information societies. The different contributions in this book posit what it means to be a digital native in different parts of the world. However, none of the contribution accepts the name ‘Digital Native’ as a given. Instead, the different authors demonstrate how there can be no one singular definition of a Digital Native. In fact, they show how, contextualised, historical, socially embedded, politically nuanced understanding of people’s interaction with technology provide a better insight into how one becomes a digital native.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook1

Digital Natives with a Cause? Report

praskrishna — 2015-04-17T11:04:51Z

Youth are often seen as potential agents of change for reshaping their own societies. By 2010, the global youth population is expected reach almost 1.2 billion of which 85% reside in developing countries. Unleashing the potential of even a part of this group in developing countries promises a substantially impact on societies. Especially now when youths thriving on digital technologies flood universities, work forces, and governments and could facilitate radical restructuring of the world we live in. So, it’s time we start listening to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/dn-report

Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Paper

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:22:29Z

The Digital Natives with a Cause? research inquiry seeks to look at the potentials of social change and political participation through technology practices of people in emerging ICT contexts. In particular it aims to address knowledge gaps that exist in the scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital and Internet technologies in social transformation processes. A conference called Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon was jointly organised by CIS and Hivos in the Hague in December 2010. The Thinkathon aimed to reflect on these innovations in social transformation processes and its effects on development, and in particular to understand how new processes of social transformation can be supported and sustained, how they can inform our existing practices, and provide avenues of collaboration between Digital Natives and "Analogue Activists".

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/position-paper