Pathways to Higher Education

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List, Jan 30 - Feb 1, Lamakaan

sneha-pp — 2019-01-31T06:41:38Z

Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions. IRC19 will be organised in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, during January 30 - February 1, 2019.

Venue: Lamakaan, Off Road 1, Near GVK Mall, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad 500034

Location: Google Maps

Conference Programme: Read (SlideShare) and Download (PDF)

Code of Conduct and Friendly Space Policy: Download (PDF)

Poster: Download (JPG)

Registration: Directly at the venue, it is a free and open conference

IRC19: #List

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.

Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo

#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti

#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose

#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh

Papers

Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature - Brindaalakshmi.K

De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods - Gayas Eapen

Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC - Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh

About the IRC Series

Researchers and practitioners across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, conceptualisations, and boundaries.

The researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) initiated the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) series to address these concerns, and to create an annual temporary space in India, for internet researchers to gather and share experiences.

The IRC series is driven by the following interests:

creating discussion spaces for researchers and practitioners studying internet in India and in other comparable regions,
foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India,
accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and
exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference series was held in February 2016. It was hosted by the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund. The second Internet Researchers' Conference was organised in partnership with the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus on March 03-05, 2017. The third Internet Researchers' Conference was organised at the Sambhaavnaa Institute, Kandbari (Himachal Pradesh) during February 22-24, 2018, and the theme of the conference was *offline*.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list

Welcome to r@w blog!

sneha-pp — 2019-01-02T11:48:04Z

We from the researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are delighted to announce the launch of our new blog, hosted on Medium. It will feature works by researchers and practitioners working in India and elsewhere at the intersections of internet, digital media, and society; and highlights and materials from ongoing research and events at the researchers@work programme.

r@w blog: Visit (Medium)

A space for reflections on internet and society, r@w blog is also an attempt to facilitate conversations around contemporary debates and foster creative engagement with research and practice through text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other media forms offered by the internet.

r@w blog opens with an essay on ‘Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance, and Activism in the Indian IT & ITES Industry’ by Rianka Roy - as part of an essay series exploring social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, and aesthetic dimensions of the "offline" - and audio recording from a session titled #ILoveYou by Dhiren Borisa and Dhrubo Jyoti, which was part of the Internet Researchers’ Conference 2018 - #Offline.

We will publish our (including commissioned/supported) writings and works on this blog, as well as submitted and compiled materials. Please write to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org to submit your works to be considered for publication. Copyright to all material published on this blog are owned by CIS and author(s) concerned, and they are shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/welcome-to-raw-blog

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Selected Sessions and Papers

sneha-pp — 2019-01-21T12:11:35Z

Here is the list of selected sessions and papers for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19) - #List. IRC19 will be held in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, from Jan 30 to Feb 1, 2019. The conference announcement, along with the final agenda, will be published on Monday, January 7.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Papers

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - List of Proposed Sessions

Selected Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty (9 votes)

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo (9 votes)

#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal (9 votes)

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain (9 votes)

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti (9 votes)

#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha (9 votes)

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince (7 votes)

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose (7 votes)

#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana (10 votes)

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh (11 votes)

Selected Papers

Brindaalakshmi.K

Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature

In July 2009, the Delhi High Court legalised homosexual acts among consenting adults. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court of India held that homosexuality between two consenting adults was illegal and reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This section was reinstated under the pretext of the LGBTIQA+ community being a minuscule minority. The Supreme Court saw this as insufficient for declaring that Section 377 as going against Article 14, 15 and 21. However, on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India passed the historic verdict reading down Section 377 to decriminalise homosexuality in India. In the time between 2013 and 2018, the LGBTIQA+ community struggled to their presence and rights. Different groups and organisations have worked on this.

One such collectives has been Orinam, an all-volunteer unregistered Chennai-based collective. Started in 2003, Orinam among other things, has also been recording queer experiences on its website since Dec 2005. These experiences of queer people and their families have been recorded in Tamil and English on Orinam’s blog, Our Voices as poetry, fiction, news, views, podcasts and reviews. The website also archives queer events in India through The Orinam Photo archives. Orinam has also been archiving the legal developments with respect to the rights of LGBTIQA+ community. This included legal documents, landmark verdicts, letters written by the family of queer individuals in multiple Indian languages to the Supreme Court to read down Section 377, among others [1]. These listings along with others, in turn also contributed to building the case for the legal battle to eventually read down Section 377.

This paper looks specifically at the functioning of Orinam based in Chennai that uses lists in a way to support a marginalised community acknowledging their realities and also keeping them alive in different ways. This is being done through its support resources, peer support, activism or archiving queer experiences in the form of literature and other media, both online and offline. This paper will trace Orinam’s work through the fifteen years of its existence as a listing and archiving platform supporting the LGBTIQA+ community.

[1] Orinam@15: talk delivered at 15th Anniversary Celebrations. Dec 23, 2018

Brindaalakshmi is a member/volunteer of the Chennai based queer collective, Orinam; and is currently working with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, on a study on 'Gendering of Development Data in India'.

Gayas Eapen

De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods

Natural disasters can be crucial time for making lists: of people in need of assistance, rescue, support, relief and other similar disaster-related operations. In lists concerning rescue, being on the list and not being on it could mean the difference of life and death. In which case it is important to consider: how do the processes which make such lists possible come about? How do they ensure that people are not left out of these lists? How they do they sort out redundancies? I study the lists made during the Kerala floods of 2018 to attempt to answer some of these questions.

As rescue requests started piling up on social media, a group of volunteers set up the web portal, keralarerscue.in, which later became the central database of all the rescue requests. The portal was unique in two fronts. First, the developers building the portal were volunteers from the community instead of being the state employees, but, nonetheless, worked in coordination with the the government and rescue agencies along with the feedback they were getting from people. Second, the rescue requests were being crowdsourced from people directly. This led to the duplication of requests, it wasn’t until much later that it was realized that crowdsourced information was not coming directly from the victims, but from people who were placing requests on their behalf.

In this paper I argue how feedback from the community, coupled with the personal investment of the programmers lead to improvements in the structuring and use of the database. I will delineate the concerns of de-duplication (process of removing redundancies) which posed a serious dilemma, of either deleting crucial information hence posing danger to people’s lives, or incurring loss of precious resources in chasing repeated rescue requests.

I argue that the streamlining of programming operations by developing methods such as ticketing system (of labelling the urgency or marking completion of rescue requests by telephonically confirming them) were made possible because of a participatory model of building lists. Those involved in the technical creation of the lists identified closely with the experiences of the people stuck in the flood. The solution, which involved not deleting names of people but instead undertaking another painstaking scrutinizing operation even in a time sensitive environment, can be placed in stark contrast to how lists have been created by state or corporate agencies in similar crucial situations.

Gayas is an assistant professor of English and Journalism (as part of the Resident Expert Panel, 2018-19) at Dayapuram Arts and Science College, Kozhikode, University of Calicut.

Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh

Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC

This paper focuses on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as a case study to discuss legal and administrative challenges in categorizing Assamese residents as citizens of India. At a fundamental level, lists manifest a binary of categories: people who are on the list and others who are not. However, the process of achieving this binary distinction, especially in the exercise of updating NRC, has required bureaucratic accounting of a wide variety of Assameseresidents who neither are completely on the list nor completely off it. This paper specifically focuses on instances of inclusion and exclusion of three categories of Assamese residents in the process of updating the NRC: (i) Original Inhabitants (OI), (ii) Doubtful Voters (D-Voters), and (ii) Women applicants who have been excluded from the list because of the lack of appropriate bureaucratic documents. As an administrative exercise, the NRC as a citizen identification project is a moment where temporalities of NRC as a classification system does not map onto the individual biographies of a variety of Assamese residents as outlined above. In such moments of ‘torque’ (Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting things out: Classifications and its consequences, 2000), listing (or the process of making a list) is not simply bureaucratic accounting; it is also a lived experience of mismatch and the struggle that follows in efforts to secure representation through listing. We show that while the NRC update in Assam may itself be driven by anxieties around illegal immigration, the attempts to technologically, legally, and politically categorize the ‘other’ using the information infrastructure of NRC have profound consequences on the ‘self’ of India as a nation state.

Monish is a Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, India; and Ranjit is a PhD candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Notes

The sessions have been selected based on the votes submitted by all the session teams (that proposed a session for IRC19). Please find details of this process in the Call for Sessions page. The papers have been selected by the researchers@work team.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers

December 2018 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-01-08T16:15:38Z

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wish you all a great year ahead and welcome you to the twelfth issue of its newsletter (December) for the year 2018:

Highlights

CIS signed a MoU with Odia Virtual Academy to work on drafting an open content policy for the state, to promote use of Wikimedia projects by various user types and to ensure sustainability of Wikimedia projects, and to facilitate development of relevant free and open source software projects. This partnership between OVA and CIS will be carried out from December 2018 to November 2019.
Natalia Khaniejo, in a four-part report has attempted to document the various approaches that are being adopted by different stakeholders towards incentivizing cybersecurity and the economic challenges of implementing the same. The literature review was edited by Amber Sinha.
Arindrajit Basu, Karan Saini, Aayush Rathi and Swaraj Barooah created an infographic which has mapped the key stakeholder, areas of focus and threat vectors that impact cybersecurity policy in India. The authors have stated that broadly policy-makers should concentrate on establishing a framework where individuals feel secure and trust the growing digital ecosystem.
In April 2018 European Union issued the proposal for a new regime dealing with cross border sharing of data and information by issuing two draft instruments, an E-evidence Regulation (“Regulation”) and an E-evidence Directive (“Directive”), (together the “E-evidence Proposal”). Vipul Kharbanda has analysed how service providers based in India whose services are also available in Europe would be affected by these proposals.
Feminist research methodology is a vast body of knowledge, spanning across multiple disciplines including sociology, media studies, and critical legal studies. A literature review by Ambika Tandon aims to understand key aspects of feminist methodology across these disciplines, with a particular focus on research on technology and its interaction with society.
CIS and design collective Design Beku came together for a workshop on Illustrations and Visual Representations of Cybersecurity. The authors Paromita Bathija, Padmini Ray Murray, and Saumyaa Naidu have stated that images play a vital role in the public’s perception of cybercrime and cybersecurity.
A list of selected sessions and papers for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19) has been published. IRC19 will be held in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, from Jan 30 to Feb 1, 2019.

Articles

Private-public partnership for cyber security (Arindrajit Basu; Hindu Businessline; December 24, 2018).
Is the new ‘interception’ order old wine in a new bottle? (Elonnai Hickok, Vipul Kharbanda, Shweta Mohandas and Pranav M. Bidare; Newslaundry.com; December 27, 2018).
Digital Native: System Needs a Reboot (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; December 30, 2018).

Media Coverage

Many sites bypass porn ban (Rajitha Menon; Deccan Herald; December 6, 2018).
How data privacy and governance issues have battered Facebook ahead of 2019 polls (Rahul Sachitanand; Economic Times; December 6, 2018).
Is Aadhaar Essential To Achieve Error-Free Electoral Rolls? (Bloomberg Quint; December 16, 2018).
Centre’s order on computer surveillance threatens right to privacy, experts say (Abhishek Dey; Scroll.in; December 22, 2018).
Centre’s order on computer surveillance is backed by law – but the law lacks adequate safeguards (Nehaa Chaudhari and Tuhina Joshi; Scroll.in; December 23, 2018).
Ten Indian government agencies can now snoop on people’s internet data (David Spenser; VPN Compare; December 24, 2018).
Big Brother is here: Amid snooping row, govt report says monitoring system 'practically complete' (Keerthana Sankaran; New Indian Express; December 26, 2018).
MHA snoop order & bid to amend IT rules: China-like clampdown or tracking unlawful content? (Fatima Khan; The Print December 28, 2018).
The dark side of future tech: Where are we headed on privacy, security, truth? (Dipanjan Sinha; Hindustan Times; December 29, 2018).
The constitutionality of MHA surveillance order (Nehaa Chaudhari; Asian Age; December 30, 2018).

Access to Knowledge

Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

Punjabi Wikisource Training Workshop, Patiala (Jayanta Nath; December 6, 2018).
Indic Wikisource Community Consultation 2018 (Jayanta Nath; December 8, 2019).
CIS Signs MoU with Odia Virtual Academy (Sailesh Patnaik; December 19, 2018).

Openness

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Guest Lecture

Lecture on Open Access and Open Content Licensing at ICAR (short course) (Organized by ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR) a constituent establishment of Indian Council of Agricultural Research; November 13 - 22, 2018). Anubha Sinha delivered a lecture.

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

Privacy

Guest Lecture

Teaching at Shristi Interlude (Organised by Shristi; Bangalore; December 7, 2018). Shweta Mohandas participated as a mentor.

Gender

Research Paper

Feminist Methodology in Technology Research: A Literature Review (Ambika Tandon with contributions from Mukta Joshi; research assistance by by Kumarjeet Ray and Navya Sharma; design by Saumyaa Naidu; December 23, 2018).

Blog Entry

Event Report on Intermediary Liability and Gender Based Violence (Akriti Bopanna; edited by Ambika Tandon; December 20, 2018).

Participation in Event

International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 2018 (Co-organized by Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and Sama; St. John's Medical College; Bangalore; December 3 - 5, 2018). Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon were speakers at the event.

Cyber Security

Research Papers

European E-Evidence Proposal and Indian Law (Vipul Kharbanda; December 23, 2018).
Economics of Cybersecurity: Literature Review Compendium (Natalia Khaniejo; edited by Amber Sinha; December 31, 2018).

Infographic

Mapping cybersecurity in India: An infographic (information contributed by Arindrajit Basu, Karan Saini, Aayush Rathi and Swaraj Barooah; designed by Saumyaa Naidu; December 23, 2018).

Blog Entry

A Critical Look at the Visual Representation of Cybersecurity (Paromita Bathija, Padmini Ray Murray, and Saumyaa Naidu; December 11, 2018).

Participation in Event

India-China Tech Forum 2018 (Organised by ORF and Peking University at the Ji Xianlin Centre for India-China Studies; Mumbai; December 11 - 12, 2018). Arindrajit Basu was a speaker.

Artificial Intelligence

Participation in Event

Future Tech and Future Law (Organised by Dept. of IT & BT, Government of Karnataka; Palace Grounds; Bangalore; November 29 - December 1, 2018). Arindrajit Basu was a speaker.
AI for Social Good Summit (Co-organised by Google AI and United Nations ESCAP; Bangkok; December 13, 2018).

Researchers at Work

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Selected Papers

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Selected Sessions and Papers (P.P. Sneha; January 2, 2019).

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

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► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2018-newsletter

Digital Native: System Needs a Reboot

nishant — 2018-12-31T02:06:02Z

It’s time to replace the schizophrenic need for variety with ingenuity — the truthiness of the information.

The article was published in Indian Express on December 30, 2018.

On the internet, we produce information to be forgotten. The life of digital information is shaped by conditions of volume, velocity and variety (the three Vs). The scale of our collective digital content production has now reached massive proportions. We produce more information in a day than we have produced over entire centuries. So trying to make human sense of this information is futile. We can be assured that almost everything we write will be forgotten and archived before it is consumed and remembered. The large volume also means that in order for information to stand out, it needs velocity. The trend of today will be replaced in a few clicks by something else. Fomo, the fear of missing out, is not just a millennial anxiety, it is the new natural. It is because information is continually being forgotten, transferred from memory to storage, it needs to have variety. It needs to be new but familiar, expected but exciting. Let’s call it, same same, but different.

Renewal is the default of all our digital transactions. Our data streams need constant renewal, our platforms demand updating, our habits of social media engagement need maintenance, and we find new ways of doing the same things over and over again. Our devices light up, with frantic energy, with seductive beeps and sounds, reminding us of the need to renew and update. The poetics of hope and regeneration have long since given way to the politics of manipulation and transactions.

It is the state of continual renewal that perpetuates the fake news economies, as people share without verifying, and consume without reflection. It enables lynch mobs and vigilante violence. It is at the heart of why outrageous claims, provocative politics and a state of extreme apathy make their way into our digital conversations and responses. This is why, hate speech has now become acceptable, and actions without consequences is the new ethos online. It perhaps accounts for why we seem to care more about our gadgets and services than the people behind them. This is why, when we see a food-delivery person stealing some food from our expensive orders, we ask for them to be sacked, rather than being shocked by the deep irony of getting food that costs more than anything the person can ever afford. It puts our attention on to things that have more engagement value than things that matter — which perhaps explains why three weddings with their obscene displays of wealth and power had more social media engagement than conversations about #MeToo in the country.

This renewal has been naturalised as our new mode of being and becoming, making us hypermobile drones that are always on the go, always working, always interacting. The state of perpetual renewal is here to stay, and we will have to figure out ways by which to live with these three Vs. As we approach that time of the year, when we make new resolutions, I want to offer the three Is which perhaps need to be brought back into consideration in our unthinking digital actions: intensity, intimacy, ingenuity.

The volume imperative of digital information favours scale. It wants more clicks, more eyeballs, more users. We get passionately invested for a brief period of time and then are moved on to the next thing. Instead of continually looking for volume, let us focus on intensity. We don’t need a thousand likes, we just need people who we care for, to like things that we do. Something doesn’t become important only when it circulates and goes viral — it becomes so because of the people who are involved in it.

Similarly, the velocity of digital networks demands high speed. We click before we think, and we share before we verify. Our relationship with information has been reduced to sharing as opposed to processing. Maybe it is time to replace velocity with intimacy. When we encounter information, let us take a small pause, process and analyse, and instead of just blindly sharing, maybe respond and critique it, so that it is a relationship of value.

The expectations of variety provoke information that is often untrue or removed from reality. Our filter bubble echo chambers often establish this information as true through repetition rather than verification. We need to get out of the schizophrenic need for variety and concentrate instead on ingenuity — the truthiness of the information and our capacity to stand behind things that we say and share.

The three Vs of digital information are machine protocols. They put the computational in the centre and dictate how human behaviour will be shaped. Maybe it is time we think of the three Is instead, to focus on human needs and aspirations, and demand that our technologies measure up to what we can expect from each other.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-30-2018-digital-native-system-needs-a-robot

Silicon Plateau: Volume Two

sneha-pp — 2019-03-13T01:01:27Z

Silicon Plateau is an art project and publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in the Indian city of Bangalore. Each volume of the series is a themed repository for research, artworks, essays and interviews that observe the ways technology permeates the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants. This project is an attempt at creating collaborative research into art and technology, beginning by inviting an interdisciplinary group of contributors (from artists, designers and writers, to researchers, anthropologists and entrepreneurs) to participate in the making of each volume.

Download the book: Epub and PDF

Silicon Plateau Volume 2 explores the ecosystem of mobile apps and their on-demand services. The book investigates how apps and their infrastructure are impacting our relationship with the urban environment; the way we relate and communicate with each other; and the way labour is changing. It also explores our trust in these technologies, and their supposed capacity to organise things for us and make them straightforward—while, in exchange, we relentlessly feed global corporations with our GPS data and online behaviours.

The sixteen book contributors responded to a main question: what does it mean to be an app user today—as a worker, a client, or simply an observer?

The result is a collection of stories about contemporary life in Bangalore; of conversations and deliberations on how we behave, what we sense, and what we might think about when we use the services that are offered to us on demand, through just a tap on our mobile screens.

Website: siliconplateau.info

Contributors

Sunil Abraham and Aasavri Rai, Yogesh Barve, Deepa Bhasthi, Carla Duffett, Furqan Jawed, Vir Kashyap, Saudha Kasim, Qusai Kathawala, Clay Kelton, Tara Kelton, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Sruthi Krishnan, Vandana Menon, Lucy Pawlak, Nicole Rigillo, Yashas Shetty, Mariam Suhail

Editors

Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

Publisher

Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, 2018. ISBN: 978-94-92302-29-8

Book and Cover Design

Furqan Jawed and Tara Kelton

Copyediting

Aditya Pandya

Supported by

Jitu Pasricha, Bangalore; Aarti Sonawala, Singapore; and the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Cross-posted from Institute of Network Cultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-volume-two

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Call for Papers

sneha-pp — 2018-12-06T07:00:30Z

Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list*.

Call for Papers

For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the list - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.

Paper abstracts (of not more than 500 words) are to be submitted by Sunday, December 23 via email sent to raw@cis-india.org.

Authors of selected paper abstracts will be informed by Monday, December 31, and will be expected to present the full paper (either in person, or remotely) at the IRC19 - #List, to be held in Hyderabad during Jan 31 - Feb 2, 2019.

Selected paper authors, who are unemployed or underemployed, will be offered support to cover travel expenses fully/partially.

The only eligibility criteria for submitting papers is that they must engage with the thematic of the conference - *list*.

IRC19: List

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers

November 2018 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-12-19T02:41:01Z

Our newsletter for the month of November.

Highlights

CIS has published a statement on its website in response to the serious allegations against CIS members and the CIS workplace on social media. CIS has taken note of the concern raised on a social platform, and its Internal Committee (IC), constituted as per the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, has taken some critical steps. CIS has engaged POSH at Work to review the case and make recommendations to the Executive Director of CIS.
Anubha Sinha attended the 37th meeting of WIPO SCCR held in Geneva in the month of November 2018. During the week she made two statements on behalf of CIS and participated in a panel discussion and a closed door meeting to brief government delegates from the Asia pacific region on the WIPO limitations and exceptions agenda. CIS made statements on limitations and exceptions and the proposed treaty for the protection of broadcasting organizations. Transcript of her talk can be accessed here.
A memorandum outlining India's strategy to global cyber norms formulation processes authored by Elonnai Hickok and Arindrajit Basu and edited by Aayush Rathi and Shruti Trikanad. The memorandum seeks to summarise the state of the global debate in cyberspace; outline how India can craft it’s global strategic vision and finally, provides a set of recommendations for the Ministry of External Affairs as they craft their cyber diplomacy strategy.
The institution of open standards is as a formidable regulatory regime governing the Internet while facilitating its growth as a network of networks. As a nation digitising rapidly and facing concerns in cybersecurity and Internet governance, there is a need for the Government of India to meaningfully participate at standards development organisations to represent the interests of the Indian populace and become a voice for the global South. Authors Aayush Rathi, Gurshabad Grover and Sunil Abraham examine this in a policy brief.
The Convention on Cybercrime adopted in Budapest (“Convention”) is the first and one of the most important multilateral treaties addressing the issue of internet and computer crimes. Vipul Kharbanda has analyzed this in his research paper titled Budapest Convention and the Information Technology Act.
Amber Sinha was one of the stakeholders who provided inputs to the Danish Expert Group on Data Ethics in June 2018 during their visit to New Delhi. The Expert Group has prepared and submitted its final report.
For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), CIS invited sessions that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list*. The list of proposed sessions are finalized and posted on this page.

Articles

Lessons from US response to cyber attacks (Arindrajit Basu; edited by Elonnai Hickok; Hindu Businessline; October 30, 2018). Mirrored on CIS website on November 1.
Digital Native: One Selfie Does a Tragedy Make (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; November 11, 2018).

CIS in the Media

Open Street Maps help tackle disasters: Experts (Deccan Chronicle; November 21, 2018).
Are connected tech toys too smart for their own good? (Abhijit Ahaskar; Livemint; November 22, 2018).
Girls' schools, women's PGs: The shocking results when you Google 'bitches near me' (News Minute; November 26, 2018).
Amazon launches Machine Learning-based platform for healthcare space (Kul Bhushan; Hindustan Times; November 28, 2018).
Report: From Oppression to Liberation: Reclaiming the Right to Privacy (Privacy International; November 28, 2018).
Are Chinese video apps violating the Indian law? (Nilesh Christopher; Economic Times; November 30, 2018).

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Copyright and Patent

Blog Entries

37th SCCR: CIS Statement on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Anubha Sinha; November 29, 2018).
37th SCCR: CIS Statement on the Agenda on Limitations and Exceptions (Anubha Sinha; November 29, 2018).
Views on on the proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations at side-event organised by Knowledge Ecology International (Anubha Sinha; November 29, 2018).

►Wikipedia

Blog Entry

Aditya 365 (Pavan Santhosh; November 7, 2018).

►Openness

Lecture on Open Access and Open Content Licensing at ICAR (short course) (ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research; Bangalore; November 13 - 22, 2018). Anubha Sinha delivered a lecture.

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Internet Governance
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►Cyber Security

Research Papers

Budapest Convention and the Information Technology Act (Vipul Kharbanda; November 20, 2018).
Cyberspace and External Affairs:A Memorandum for India Summary (Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok; edited by Aayush Rathi and Shruti Trikanad; November 30, 2018).
Regulating the Internet: The Government of India & Standards Development at the IETF (Aayush Rathi, Gurshabad Grover and Sunil Abraham; November 30, 2018).

Event Co-organized

Workshop on Cybersecurity Illustrations (CIS, Bangalore; November 15, 2018).

Participation in Events

Connections 2018 (Organized by Internet Engineering Task Force; Bangalore; October 31 - November 1, 2018). Gurshabad Grover attended the event.
IETF103 (Organized by Internet Engineering Task Force; Bangkok; November 3 - 9, 2018). Gurshabad Grover attended the event.

►Free Speech and Expression

Research Paper

ICANN Workstream 2 Recommendations on Accountability (Akriti Bopanna; November 23, 2018).

Blog Entry

DIDP #32 On ICANN's Fellowship Program (Akriti Bopanna; November 12, 2018).

Participation in Event

Internet Freedom at Crossroads - Common Paths towards Strengthening Human Rights Online (Organized by Freedom Online; Berlin; November 28 - 30, 2018). Elonnai Hickok was a speaker.

►Privacy

Blog Entry

Clarification on the Information Security Practices of Aadhaar Report (Amber Sinha and Srinivas Kodali; November 5, 2018).

Participation in Events

Building a Community of Practice: Reflections from 2nd All Partners (Organized by Partnership on AI; San Francisco, California; November 14 - 15, 2018). Elonnai Hickok spoke on the panel on the PAI working groups and co-lead the AI Labor and Economy working group meeting as co-chair of the group.
Briefing on BBC News pan-India research on how 'fake news' / digital misinformation spreads (Organized by BBC; New Delhi; November 16, 2018).
DSCI Bangalore Chapter meet (Organized by Data Security Council of India; 10K NASSCOM Startup Warehouse; Bangalore; November 22, 2018). Gurshabad Grover and Karan Saini attended the DSCI Bangalore Chapter meet.
Informational Privacy in India: An Emerging Discourse (Organized by Centre for Policy Research and supported by Omidyar Network; New Delhi; November 29, 2018). Amber Sinha was a speaker on the first panel on privacy and its tradeoffs.
Facebook Privacy Design Sprint (Organized by Facebook and Quicksand; WeWork, Bangalore; November 30, 2018). Pranav Bidare and Saumyaa Naidu participated in the event.

►Miscellaneous

Event Co-organized

SOTM Asia 2018 (Co-organized by CIS and Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore; November 17-18, 2018). Saumyaa Naidu, Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon participated in the event.

Participation in Events

Speculative Futures Lab on Artificial Intelligence in Media, Entertainment, and Gaming (Organized by Quicksand; Bangalore; November 16 - 18, 2018). Pranav Bidare was a panelist.
Future Tech and Future Law (Organized by Dept. of IT & BT, Government of Karnataka as part of Bengaluru Tech Summit; November 29 - December 1, 2018). Aayush Rathi was a speaker.

►Gender

Statement

Statement on Serious Allegations against CIS Members and the CIS Workplace on Social Media (Sunil Abraham; November 24, 2018).

Participation in Events

Roundtable on Intermediary Liability and Gender Based Violence at the Digital Citizen Summit, 2018 (Organized by Digital Empowerment Foundation; India International Centre, New Delhi; November 1, 2018).
International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 2018 (Co-organized by Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and Sama - A Resource Centre for Women and Health; St. John's Medical College; Bangalore; December 3 - 5, 2018). Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon participated in the event as speakers. Aayush presented a paper 'Sexual Surveillance and Data Regimes: Development in the Data Economy' co-authored by himself and Ambika.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Article

A great start on Wi-Fi reforms (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; November 1, 2018 and Organizing India Blogspot; November 1, 2018).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

IRC19

List of proposed sessions:

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty
#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo
#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal
#DigitalPlatformAttributes - Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar
#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain
#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti
#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha
#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince
#ListsAsDatabase - Ria De and Samata Biswas
#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose
#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana
#SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice - Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan
#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/november-2018-newsletter

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals

sumandro — 2018-11-28T15:55:24Z

Details of a session proposed by Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

All our tangible history can be attributed to our records-making going back to when the records were literally set in stone, so to say, archived using human digits (digital heritage!). Oral traditions such as songs, stories and recitals, performative traditions, arts and other cultural expressions that reaffirm of our collective experiences remain intangible. Stories create Legends, Rituals physically embody the legends through performances, Records attempt to freeze time at a moment. Thereby characterizing culture and memories of a community. Our effort here is to visit and discuss who creates the records, discuss the affordance of lists as an information artefact for exchange, facilitating dialogue and collective meaning-making. We peek at the traditional community of Helavaru as map and genealogy tellers, their legends, rituals / performances and the cultural economy involved in making and circulating the archives of cultural memories in contrast with the technology driven formulation of lists that are founding the Internet culture. Allegorically, if the memory of stone as a medium of a message is still alive in us, how are people included and who all are excluded from our “memories”.

Our session would be a performative through experimental list artefacts that intend to make visible the interplay between the form of the information artefact and the content. How do we perceive information when the form of the list changes. The implicit structure of lists is suggestive of a certain order, priority and disconnected connections. We intend to play with those structures, breaking them and making new ones in the process. What do we call a list? and what does it do?

Priyanka and Aditya will bring "poetic" list artefacts that juxtapose traditional aspects of list making and lists as a dynamic phenomenon on the internet (ex. #Metoo).
Bhanu will introduce the traditional storytelling community of Helavaru as list performers.
Aishwarya will bring in the current context of social auditing and the stories from the ground today, from a rural context.
Dinesh will illustrate 3 ways list are formulated today mathematically, socially and technologically.

Session Team

Priyanka is a new media artist-researcher, currently engaged with Microsoft as an interaction designer. While at Microsoft she solves design problems for the browser, her personal inquiries run deep into understanding people’s lives on the internet, nature of the digital-materiality and its affordances for expression and exchange in networked societies.

Aditya is a designer and an entrepreneur always thinking of ways to display information beautifully. Lately he has been working on interfaces for lists to provide a clear stream of reason to anyone through simple model(s) of visualisation of information and, therefore attempt to make knowledge more accessible.

Priyanka and Aditya intends to play with the form of lists to investigate its effect on narrative construction. They will bring in “poetic-lists” - experimental list artefacts that probe into the implicit order and biases that lists bring to the act of meaning making, especially in the context of a collective audience.

Bhanu Prakash GS - As Web application developer at Servelots(.com), he contributes to the open and free software, and has been working on developing tools for delivering visual stories from archives. He has worked with the NCBS@25 project titled “13 Ways” where stories from the history of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Democracy Archives for University of Gottingen, and also on methods to render the folk stories of Vijayadashami rituals into visual stories on the Web.

Bhanu introduces the ways the Helavaru community, in the pre-internet era, created, “circulated” and mutated Lists of names, facts and events forming the information networks of communities, castes, jaatis, clans, tribes. The Helavas are a nomadic community visible around Karnataka and Andhra who deck up their bullocks and carts, set out to the villages of their patrons to sing praises of great deeds of their forefathers and the genealogy of the families with great detail, and end their performance with a ritual Harike - a wish for the well being of their patrons. In return they are paid for their services with grains, clothes, goat, sheep, cow, bullocks and money as much as one can afford.

Their story is an indicator of the cultural economy, of interweaving a web of communities, their systems of socio-political-cultural organisation by developing competence in data indexing, backups and restores, dealing with identity and authentication, conflicts and negotiations and more from generation to generation. The Helavaru claim that each family recorded genealogy of at least 3 lakh families, and passing it on, and also losing in some cases is fascinating.

Aishwarya is a Communication Strategist at the Society for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT) - Andhra Pradesh, Department of Rural Development, Government of Telangana. SSAAT has been set-up with a vision to uphold the concept of eternal vigilance by the people, facilitated by social activists and Government acting in conjunction.

A social audit is a standardised way of facilitating people to critique the implementation of a welfare scheme, and demand accountability from the government. It is a powerful tool which enables people to come forward, demand information, question officials, and fight for their rightful deliverables of a government scheme. This mechanism ensures transparency in the way a government functions, and has helped recover a lot of money lost to corruption.

In India, a Supreme Court mandate made the social audits of MGNREGS compulsory in all states. However, Social Audit units have been successful in empowering the people only in a few states. While the SAU facilitates an audit, it is conducted by people from the families of the beneficiaries. One social audit is a 15-day process of record verifications, door-to-door verifications, awareness rallies, a Gram Sabha and a Public Hearing. While a social audit ensures accountability, it lacks the guarantee of enforcement. The different layers of bureaucracy often swallows the essence of public participation and grievance redressal does not have follow-ups.

All grievances are recorded in the form of paras in the social audit database. While our on-ground social auditors may be socially and politically aware enough to observe and call out patterns in caste and gender discrimination, the results remain, but in a list on the MIS.

Dinesh is part of Janastu team - a non-profit group. The team is eager to help address Web content accessibility for the low-literate using social semantic web concepts and are also looking at 3D methods for spatial navigation, location interpretation and storytelling. Janastu engages with software commons by developing and supporting open source social platforms.

Dinesh, with a Computer Science background, will bring list comprehension to this platform using map/reduce, monads, and blockchain as the technical formalisms that make the Internet work and how people are made to toe these invisible lines. Then initiate discussions on Machine Learning within the history of page ranking and how the who, where, what of lists manifest. This will be contextualized with the traditional, the social and the new media social networks and processes that nurture community memory by tuning the semantic distance needed for privacy and by making room for forgetting in ways that communities heal from trauma.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals

IRC19 - List of Proposed Sessions

sumandro — 2018-11-28T15:40:58Z

Here is the list of sessions proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo

#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal

#DigitalPlatformAttributes - Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti

#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince

#ListsAsDatabase - Ria De and Samata Biswas

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose

#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana

#SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice - Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:22:52Z

Details of a session proposed by Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

2017 saw the sudden emergence of the hashtag #metoo, both in India and across the world. This has impacted not just the general public of the internet, but also the global movement women's rights movement and feminist discourse around sexual assault, gender and consent. #MeToo allowed (female) survivors of harassment to resort to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as a tool to accuse powerful men of sexual harassment. In 2017, we saw this with Rose McGowan who tweeted about Harvey Weinstein or Raya Sarkar who released #LoSHA, which further erupted in late 2018 into a larger wave of ‘outing’ of Indian perpetrators in media, politics, and other areas of work.

With #LoSHA and the 2018 wave of #metoo in India, there have been a gamut of responses, even some amount of polarisation, especially among Indian civil society. During #LoSHA, we observed resistance from traditional legal and Human Rights activists and practitioners against acknowledging the unique impact of ‘survivors’ testimonies on social media’ for fear of validating a method that lies outside of ‘due process’ and ‘fair trial’. They reason that due to the ungoverned nature of social media, its platforms are without checks and balances and therefore cannot regulate arbitrary misuse. However, one can argue that social media platforms are indeed regulated by the service providers who have the ultimate power to censor complainants by simply suspending or expelling them from the platform altogether. This became evident when Twitter silenced Rose McGowan and Facebook, Raya Sarkar, promptly after their testimonies began to gather accelerated traction. Thus, the accused may always appeal to the ultimate gatekeepers, the platform providers themselves. It is precisely due to the above stated reasons, that the 2017-2018 wave of social media testimonies has garnered considerable support from a typically contemporary civil society, who recognise the disruption as powerful despite the gaps in the methodology.

Our Proposal

The tentative proposal is for our team of 2 researchers to carry out a 15-20 minute lightning talk (a conversation or debate) providing a landscape analysis of #metoo, raising specific points of discussion and interest. Following this, we will open up the discussion with the audience in the form of multiple roundtable conversations, which will seek to address the following 2 questions:

If survivors of sexual harassment are resorting to social media as a ‘means’, or their choice of instrument, what does this imply about the existing fora for due process?
New and emergent imaginaries/perspectives around the end of ‘justice’ that may lie outside the contours of conventional legal frameworks i.e. to what ‘end’ are these survivors disposed?

Our session aims at working towards the following outcomes:

A comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of phenomenon of social media - mediation of justice
A current and expanded understanding of 'justice' that is not bound by legal recourse

Session Team

Esther Anne Victoria Moraes (Communications Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist and researcher who is passionate about expanding the discourse on the evolving forms of rights-based movements. At TYPF, Esther works on building feminist leadership through on-ground programming and on research on youth movements. Esther also works with on communication and public advocacy around issues of health, rights and youth leadership with a focus on young girls and adolescents. She coordinates online and on-ground public advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and rights and access to information through TYPF's national-level campaign, Know Your Body, Know Your Rights.

Manasa Priya Vasudevan (Programme Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist researcher who is passionate about the theory and praxis of social justice in an increasingly internet-mediated world, especially in the context of urbanization and datafication. She has undertaken research and advocacy on issues at the intersections of information communication technologies and social justice, primarily in the area of internet governance. She has actively engaged with international multi-sectoral movement building and strategy, both online and offline. At TYPF, she manages the Know your body know your rights programme. Prior to this, she worked at IT for Change in Bengaluru.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #PowerListing

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:22:03Z

Details of a session proposed by Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

#PowerListing: Approaches towards an understanding of power dynamics of knowledge creation and agency behind ‘listing’ as exercised by the State, Individuals and Corporations

‘Lists’ come with an ontological mandate of organising information in a structured and hierarchical manner. This has a deliberate aspect with respect to the question of power. Our panel attempt to investigate the question of power in terms of who wields it and what implications, philosophically and materially, this lands on the stakeholders thereof. The questions of power have different insinuation when the agency of the ‘listing’ rests with the state, the individual or if it is folded within the operational matrix of a corporate service.

Our panel attempts to bring all these myriad conversations together to try and unpack the various nuances of this discussion on power around ‘lists’. Listed below is the detailed breakdown of this plan:

Paper 1: Digital Lists and List-making in Post-disaster Contexts [Prof. Shubhda Arora]

Looking at crowd sourcing of lists for humanitarian and relief purposes, this paper explores list making and circulation in a post-disaster context, specifically looking at aspects of public list making and its challenges of credibility and duplicity. The paper further examines the interaction between these ‘unofficial’ lists and intervention agencies namely the Government, Army and NGOs, which prepare their own ‘official’ lists for purposes of relief and rehabilitation. Lists of missing people, of people being marked safe, of relief material and centres, of monetary aid, of loss in terms of human life, land and money are the different kinds of lists prepared and circulated through media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram among others. The constant revision of lists based on localized information and on-ground data, the compilation of master list from various sources of lists and the problem of ‘fake lists’ need further inquiry to understand digital list making after a disaster.

Paper 2: Identity frameworks and #MeToo in India [Prof. Nidhi Kalra]

When Lawrence Grossberg argued that "Cultural studies needs to move towards a model of articulation as 'transformative practice', as a singular becoming of a community", he likely did not anticipate what became the #MeToo movement. Concerns of identity-transformation, community creation, and activism spread over social has been termed as arm-chair slactivism. Yet, we are witness and participant in a movement whose terrains and possibilities are forming as we read and write. Just a few hours before writing this piece news came of Tarana Burke, the founder of #MeToo claims that she is wary that the movement will need "to shift the narrative that it’s a gender war, that it’s anti-male, that it’s men against women, that it’s only for a certain type of person — that it’s for white, cisgender, heterosexual, famous women. That has to shift."

In the Indian context, #MeToo has been the vehicle of a movement with many identities linked to it--from scholars, politicians, celebrities, to Dalit female students, to women and men in the Media industry. Considering it is such a historic moment in internet history, it is important for us to use the lens of cultural studies to ask what this wave of activism does vis-a-vis identity production/transformation? What the sites of contestation around the concern of identity as it used in the #MeToo movement in India? This talk will hope to open dialogue about recording, transcribing and understand this moment and it's frameworks of identity.

Paper 3: “Making” the (ethnic) citizen: NRC list as State power and anxiety [Prof. Smitana Saikia]

In borderland regions of modern nation states, the ontological status of legal subjects is often fraught with competing assertions. In India’s northeastern state of Assam, this is particularly true due to a historical movement of peoples from Bangladesh (then East Bengal/Pakistan). Assam’s own nativist movement against “illegal” immigrants in 1980s (both popular and an armed resistance) catapulted the issue into national prominence thereby reiterating the anxiety that nation-states feel while defining and interpellating its citizens, in an Althusserian sense. In this context, the NRC emerges as a tool to affect order in what remains a contested terrain of citizenship. This paper thus situates the NRC in the interacting landscape of the Indian nation-state’s attempt to “identify” (and hence create) citizens on one hand, and on the other, the Assamese elite’s attempt to create the ethnic “other” to consolidate and preserve political power. The paper argues that the state’s need to create a register (list) of citizens is at once a display of its hegemonic power, as it is also reflective of an acute anxiety inherent to projects of constructing (nation-) states.

Paper 4: ‘Congratulations you got a match’-- The embedded listing within the dating app ‘Tinder’ & its implications thereof [Prof. Ravikant Kisana]

The process of ‘listing’ involves the act of segregating and organising data. This involves questions of power. Who makes the lists and to what end— the state or the subversive, with what motivations, are important points of investigation and discussion. However, such an operational understanding of a ‘list’ assumes a mechanical agency in the ‘listing’ process. This paper looks to investigate the digital apps and services which are based on automated listing and hierarchical segregation of its subscribers. Google, Facebook, Uber, etc— all contain within the folds of their operational code, an algorithmic listing of data. The researcher will seek to explore this nuance in the context of dating app ‘Tinder’, which now offers three levels possible dating matches that have been ‘listed’ and curated automatically. This paper will seek to interview users of the app and try to map the ideas and anxieties around such a digital listing of their very identity profiles.

Session Team

Dr. Shubhda Arora is currently working as assistant professor of media and communication at FLAME University, Pune after having completed her doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad . Her doctoral thesis is in the area of Environmental and Disaster Risk Communication.

Dr. Smitana Saikia is an assistant professor of Politics at FLAME University, Pune. She has received her PhD from King’s College London and her thesis studied long term state and identity formation processes to explain conflict in India’s northeast. Her research interests include ethnic conflicts, borderlands, federalism, and caste and electoral politics in India.

Prof. Nidhi Kalra has been a learning facilitator since 2008. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at FLAME University, Pune. Prior to that, she has taught at the English Department in Savitribai Phule Pune University and Gargi College in the University of Delhi. Nidhi has received her MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi, for which she worked on problematizing Holocaust memoirs. Her research interests include Memory Studies, Trauma Studies, Oral History, Digital Humanities, and Children’s/Young Adult Literature.

Prof. Ravikant Kisana is currently the Co-Chair of Humanities & Languages at Flame University, Pune. He has previously completed his doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad. His doctoral research focused on the oral histories of Bollywood cinema in Kashmir, and its intersections with Kashmiri nationalism and resistance. His areas of research focus on the sociology of cinema, gender & sexuality intersections with films & new media platforms, as well as investigations into the structural mores of cybercultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #LoSHAandWhatFollowed

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:21:01Z

Details of a session proposed by Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

In an attempt to initiate a conversation around #LoSHA, a group of more than twenty students of Ambedkar University, Delhi, organised a series of events in April 2018, under the campaign ‘Questioning The Silence’. While the primary focus of the initiative was to point to the cultures of sexual harassment in academia, concerns were also raised around the immediate reception of the LoSHA. What the crowdsourced LoSHA by Raya Sarkar, a law student and an Ambedkarite feminist, triggered were a series of responses, including the Kafila statement; the second list which was made public on Facebook under the pseudonym Malati Kumari, and later deleted; followed by other lists and sexual harassment accusations in different workspaces; institutional backlash, as the LoSHA accused ‘trusted’ men in positions of power in academic spaces. Many also questioned the credentials of the list or chose to remain silent altogether.

Coming from an experience of institutionally engaging with the #LoSHA through the #questionthesilence campaign, we propose to conduct a session that seeks to theorize the ‘list’ as a document, the particularity of its form, and list as a medium and a message. What goes into the making of a list, and what are the kind of subjectivities produced through it? How does social media as an internet platform, in the preparation and circulation of the list, determine the discourses that emerge from it? Further, we want to explore the various possibilities of solidarity networks and feminist practices that have emerged post-LoSHA. Given the possibilities of new intimacies and relationships that liberal spaces open up, how have the debates around the LoSHA questioned the contemporary feminist understanding of sexual harassment and violation in these spaces? How has the existing imagination of gender justice been challenged by the LoSHA?

In an attempt to address these questions, we propose a session with three components. The first part will be a paper presentation which will theoretically engage with the concept of a list. It will explore whether ‘list’ as a medium can define the message, and perhaps mark its limits. It will critically engage with the LoSHA in the larger background of #MeToo with respect to questions around scope for subjectivity in list-making, its potential in questioning power and the ‘due process’ in place, politics around its making, and some of its limitations in addressing the issue of sexual harassment. The second part entails a curated panel discussion with the session organizers as panelists, wherein we will thematically engage with the responses to the #LoSHA, as crowdsourced through our social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter in the month of December. Speaking about the shortcomings of our past engagement, we see a need to approach the LoSHA from different vantage points. The third part of the session will be a poster exhibition, partly curated during the campaign itself, that seeks to demonstrate the kind of problematic remarks normalised under the garb of progressive pedagogy in liberal academic spaces.

Session Team

Anannya Chatterjee is a trained Bharatnatyam dancer, a Hindustani classical singer and a theatre artist. She is a part of Sar-e-raahguzar, an endeavour to talk about love, resistance, hate crimes and freedom on the streets by employing the art forms she practices. She holds a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and has written her Masters’ dissertation titled Love, Passion, Peril: A Feminist Understanding of Abuse in Heterosexual Romantic relationships in India. She has also been a member of Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks, and believes in bringing together her art with her feminist politics.

Arunima Singh holds a Bachelors deree in History form Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has worked as a freelance writer, model, game show host, and is currently working with Swiggy in Sales and Accounts Management. She is a member of Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks. She also plans to one day follow her dream of becoming the Jon Stewart of India. She worked on the figure of Bharat Mata for her MA thesis titled: Clothing Womanhood - meanings of modesty and tradition: from colonial modernity to the contemporary, and wishes to work on studying and deconstructing the discourses around oppression and modesty in her future studies.

Bhanu Priya Gupta is an M.Phil. student in Women and Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), who has been invested in issues of gender, sexuality and mental health. She has previously worked with Indian Social Institute on social conflict among dalit women in rural Haryana. She is a freelance facilitator on gender, violence and identity formation, with People for Parity, and has conducted gender and capacity building workshops in urban and rural Rajasthan with adolescent school children, middle-aged women and village stakeholders. She has also attended training programmes on gender, sexuality and rights, at Crea and TARSHI. She is currently working on physical disability, sexuality and the emergence of disability life writing in India.

Renu Singh is a doctoral candidate in Women and Gender Studies Program at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Study (CWDS). She holds an M.Phil. degree in Public Health from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her interdisciplinary training has allowed her to work in the development sector for eight years, while she has also been associated with sexual harassment complaints committees at some of the academic institutions she has been a part of. She is involved with the women’s movement for almost 15 years, especially in Delhi, on issues around social reproduction, affect and care, gender & sexuality, intimacy, love and interpersonal lives. She has also been involved in student politics and is an active member of New Socialist Initiative (NSI) and Stree Mukti Sangathan. She is currently working on higher education, young women’s aspirations and interpersonal ties in the backdrop of liberalization.

Rhea Bose did her Bachelors in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and holds a Masters’ degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Until recently, she was working at Centre for Social Research, Delhi. Her interest in the field of gender has manifested in different ways, including participation in the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS) where she presented a paper on women in global politics, conducting workshops on gender sensitization in schools as a part of an initiative called Khalbali.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListsAsDatabase

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:20:14Z

Details of a session proposed by Ria De and Samata Biswas for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

The internet-based List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA), initiated by Dalit feminist and lawyer activist Raya Sarkar in 2017 anonymously crowd-sourced names of academics and activists who were accused of harassing women colleagues and students. While a large number of women in the academia rallied in support of the list and its motivations, it also unleashed anxieties about how the list was put together, and the kind of impact it was feared to have. Variously, it has been equated to Khap Panchayats, vigilantism, mob lynchings etc. Last month, the government of India launched an online National Database on Sexual Offenders (NDSO), which will contain the details—names, photographs, residential address, fingerprints, DNA samples, PAN and Aadhar numbers—of individuals convicted on charges of sexual offences against women and children. An associated portal, the Cyber Crime Prevention Against Women and Children (CCPWC) was also launched where citizens can enter complaints against child pornography and other sexually explicit material. Both are modes of digital enlisting through the use of new media technologies, one that is open access and therefore available for modification, co-option and critique, while the other is to be accessible only to law personnel. This two-member panel locates the list in the context of ongoing debates about the conversion of social justice and rights issues in to data repositories. We take in to account the debates on the Right to be Forgotten or the right to delist from the internet, as a specific concern raised in the Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 submitted by the Justice B.N. Krishna Committee. The Bill recognises data principals (or the individuals to whom personal data belongs) as a central component of the legal framework, and subjects data fiduciaries (or agencies seeking to collect, use and process personal data) to the free, informed and explicit consent of the data principals. Right to be Forgotten has clearly emerged as a logical extension of the demands for one’s Right to Privacy. Given that a number of logics, that of ‘naming and shaming’ of offenders, a digital list (database) as a means of communication, dissemination of information and surveillance etc. underscore both the #LoSHA and the NDSO, how do we navigate the messy terrain of human rights concerns about the freedom of speech and expression on the one hand, and the rights to privacy on the other hand? We also think about this vis-a-vis the larger issues related to the data economy and those of data ownership. We refer to studies on state-generated data on crime in India and elsewhere to understand how such data artefacts can be monopolised and processed by private and non-governmental agencies, and how they co-opt contemporary feminist politics and articulations?

We, Samata Biswas and Ria De, will present a collaborative study, organised across two 30 minute long papers, plus a 15 minute discussion time for each totalling to the mandated 90 minute session. The first paper will study the form and scope of the list as a digital artefact through a detailed analysis of the #LoSHA and the NDSO. The second paper will configure the two lists in terms of their status within the data economy.

Session Team

Ria De is pursuing her PhD in Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research was about stardom and intermediality. She is interested in popular culture, network and media studies and gender. Currently, she is interested in the women’s movements in the Indian film industries.

Samata Biswas teaches English Literature at Bethune College, Kolkata, India. Her doctoral research was about body cultures in contemporary India, analysing fitness, weight loss, and diet discourses as present in popular media as well as through narratives of participants. She is interested in visual culture, gender studies, and literature and migration. At present, she is trying to map Kolkata as a sanitary city, focusing on access to clean sanitation or the lack thereof. She runs the blog ‘Refugee Watch Online’. Her latest publication is on “Haldia: Logistics and Its Other(s)” in Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Ranabir Samaddar (Edited) Logistical Asia: The Labour of Making a World Region. (Palgrave Mcmillan, 2018)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #EnlistingPrivacy

sumandro — 2019-01-08T09:56:31Z

Details of a session proposed by Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

This session offers a provocation to advance the conversation on privacy in India. Privacy is at once a legal right, a technological/design feature and an everyday practice of managing our social and personal lives. What do we mean when we invoke privacy in our everyday conversations? Privacy conjoins opposing impulses to engage in online public sociality and expressing a desire for limits on data sharing. We trade privacy for convenience. When we skip lengthy terms and conditions of apps, websites and other online agreements we enter into an agreement without much concern for what we are agreeing to when we tick the box at the bottom of the contract. Privacy is a right we cannot not want. As much as privacy remains a subject of, and subject to impassioned speech, it becomes a cognitive burden when we are called upon to read the privacy policies before signing up for an online service.

In this session, we invite participants to tell stories on privacy based on their life experiences. The session aims to employ the concept of a list liberally to understand how privacy continues to be on a to-do list of sorts for lawmakers, technologists and users who are constantly being informed to manage their online account settings, to constantly make certain things private and to care about privacy. Even as privacy has finally joined the list of fundamental rights in India, its meaning continues to be contested. What may be the politics of privacy at play in the circulation of the #MeToo list? Privacy itself may be spoken of as a list of values and affordances: as dignity and bodily integrity of rights subjects, as confidentiality of certain information, the integrity of data flows, self-determination and individual autonomy. The list of all things privacy will evolve with new, privacy-by-design technologies in a rapidly evolving information technology global landscape.

The objective of the session is to bring the examples of potential and actual privacy violations from our daily life in the public domain. We plan to invite three to five participants to engage in a small roundtable-format discussion on privacy and the metaphor of list. Pawan Singh (New Generation Network Fellow, Deakin University) and Pranjal Jain (Masters student of Design, Srishti School of Design) will facilitate the session. We plan to invite participants from our academic and professional networks at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, NUMA co-working space and Digital Identity Research Initiative (DIRI) at the Indian School of Business (ISB).

We plan to contact interested participants through email in December 2018. In order for this roundtable-format session to be productive, we plan to invite participants from diverse backgrounds who can share their perspectives.

The intent of the session is to make a repository of examples from daily life on privacy at the intersection of online space and social life. The repository of examples can be a dynamic list that grows as participants, attendees and others add to the conversation on privacy. It may be maintained as a digital artefact or an online resource.

We are looking for participants who questions what is privacy to them and still in the process of figuring out what is privacy? We also welcome the participants who do not know what is privacy but curious to discover it.

Session Team

Pawan Singh: New Generation Network Scholar at Deakin University. Works on issues of identity, representation, privacy and the costs of social justice in India and globally. Current project on Aadhaar, data privacy and social media in India.

Pranjal Jain: Human-Centered Designer from Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology. Currently in the 2nd year of Master in Design and research assistant at Digital Identity Research Initiative, Indian School of Business. Believe in Ethical Data Practices. Works on designing for online privacy through speculative and critical design.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy