Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Knowledge - Posts

sumandro — 2019-03-16T05:24:24Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-knowledge-posts

Digital Knowledge

sumandro — 2019-03-16T06:31:14Z

In this cluster, we study the digital conditions of production, circulation, consumption, appropriation, storage, and re-usage of various forms of knowledge in India. It brings together our interests in digital literacy, education and pedagogy; technological infrastructures and devices of digital learning; open access, open educational resources, open data, and open knowledge practices in general and their ecosystems; Internet and the emerging authorities, modes, and platforms of knowledge and education; computational methods in arts, humanities, social science, and natural science research; and software and hardware innovations towards knowledge infrastructures and practices.

Digital Knowledge: All Posts

Previous Projects

Data Systems

sumandro — 2019-03-16T06:29:37Z

The systems and economies of data has emerged as a key concern of the contemporary 'information'/'informatising' societies. In this cluster we explore the various manifestations and implications of digital data in the context of the Indian society and government – supply, demand, and usages of government data; electronic government and data-driven delivery of services; Internet of things, locative media, and smart cities; infrastructures, systems, and circuits of data collection, storage, sharing, and re-usage; and concerns of ownership and privacy around personal data.

Data Systems: All Posts

Ongoing Projects

Urban Data Justice (2019)

Life of a Tuple: National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Reform of Citizen Identification Infrastructure in Assam (2018-2019)

In a relational database, a tuple is an ordered set of data constituting a record. Imagine a relational database as a table with pre-defined columns that define the scope of information required for each row. A tuple is a row in this table. Ultimately, in any database designed to ease practices of governance, the life story of a citizen becomes a tuple after the process of data collection, verification, and curation. This tuple has its own life and this project is designed around documenting its life story, which may or may not map seamlessly onto the life of the citizen that it aims to capture, encode, represent, and ultimately, alter.

Our research investigates the process of updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam as a case study to focus on one of the core problems of governance: the unique identification of citizens by the state. The NRC, as a part of the National Population Register (NPR), is a list of only Indian citizens, and is presently in the process of being updated only in Assam [1]. Our effort is geared towards tracing the process of updating the NRC from its conceptualization and design to its current deployment, while also closely attending to current on-the-ground reactions to its implementation.

Project outputs: https://cis-india.org/raw/life-of-a-tuple/

Big Data for Development Network

Big Data for Development (BD4D) Research Network is a Southern-led partnership with the objective of developing policy relevant research on big data for development that is conceptualized and implemented by Southern organizations. The network acts to develop capacity amongst researchers from the Global South, focusing on activities linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to those that address gender related issues. The work encompasses both big data analyses as well as capacity development, while innovating on data partnerships and collaborations with private sector companies and policy makers. The network is supported by a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.

As part of the BD4D Network, we at the CIS are studying BD4D innovations, policy, practices, and discourse with a focus on the research methods involved; and offering research and pedagogic support towards other hubs of the Network.

Network website: http://bd4d.net/

Network blog: https://medium.com/bd4dnet

Project outputs: https://cis-india.org/raw/bd4d/

Previous Projects

Big Data and Development - Field Studies

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/data-systems

Big Data for Development Network

sumandro — 2019-05-22T11:04:26Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/bd4d

Data Systems - Posts

sumandro — 2019-03-16T04:35:55Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/data-systems-posts

Web Cultures - Posts

sumandro — 2019-03-13T01:08:17Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/web-cultures-posts

JNU - Young Scholars International Conference - Margins and Connections - 2019

sumandro — 2019-02-05T10:51:27Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/jnu-young-scholars-international-conference-margins-and-connections-2019

IRC19 - Code of Conduct and Friendly Space Policy

sumandro — 2019-01-28T14:32:31Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-code-of-conduct-and-friendly-space-policy

IRC19: #List - Conference Programme

sumandro — 2019-01-31T06:33:28Z

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

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 - #FOMO

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:17:11Z

Details of a session proposed by Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

The broad basis of the discussion would be the lists that address and invoke aspirations to know, particularly what has come to be known as 'listicle'. The focus would also be on social media and other digital platforms, including blogs and fan clubs, which list out cultural objects like books, films, music, etc. that one must not miss. On one hand, many of such listicle-s are essentially advertising devices and, in that way, descendants of the bestseller list and such that one used to encounter on the pages of The Hindu and so on. On the other, we have similar lists made by fans and culture enthusiasts, and the consumers. Both of these play on a specific type of aspiration and the attendant anxiety, expressed in common parlance as FoMo, i.e. Fear of Missing Out, in this specific case the fear of missing out on knowing/knowing about something. But FoMo, as a dominant structure of feeling in contemporary society, in the context of listicle-s, begs many more questions: what is one afraid to miss out and how intense can that fear be? Who is afraid to miss out and what does missing out represent to them? Who decides what can be missed and what not? What is deemed to be the proper content of listicle-s and what is not; and what are the repercussions of the list form on the overall repository of knowledge from which the listicle-s are culled? What is the difference and continuity between lists meant as content that leads to commercial advertisement and lists made by the consumers? What happens when one begins to increasingly learn everything from the list form? Is there a 'list knowledge', the way there is a 'bookish knowledge'? What are the political repercussions of such 'list knowledge'?

The sessions will begin with two presentations/short papers (15 minutes each), mainly to provide an initial guide map for the discussion. The next 45 minutes will be devoted to discussion with the audience, so as to list out the complex factors and facets the conjugation of listicle and FoMo has produced, which will be moderated by both the presenters. The final 15 minutes will be assigned to the summarization of the points discussed by the speakers.

Session Team

Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti is an Assistant Professor at the Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication, Pune. Besides receiving his doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from EFL University, Hyderabad, he has also worked in the publishing industry as well as a content editor in the corporate sector. His doctoral dissertation maps the ideological terrain of contemporary Bollywood against the rise of neoliberalism in India. His areas of interests include contemporary film cultures, digital modernity, particularly digital cinephilia, comparative cultural studies, etc.

Pritha Chakrabarti is an independent researcher based out of Hyderabad. She has recently submitted her doctoral dissertation titled Politics of Screen Dance in Indian Cinema in the department of Cultural Studies at EFL University, Hyderabad. A recipient of the ICSSR-CSDS doctoral fellowship, she has worked on the ideology of on-screen choreographic construction and dissemination and reception of film dance as popular culture. Professionally a Content Manager, she has nearly a decade-long experience in marketing content generation, both offline and online.

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

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 - #DigitalPlatformAttributes

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:15:04Z

Details of a session proposed by Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

Digital platforms have been in the news for quite a few years now in India. Some of the most prominent sectors which has seen platforms flourish are transportation, e-commerce, education and social media. But platforms are taking root in other sectors as well, with the potential to disrupt existing businesses.

The session proposes to examine the attributes of digital platforms, particularly with reference to the quality and regulatory aspects of platforms. Quality influences regulation and vice versa. Depending on the context and type of platform, both of these aspects need to be comprehensively listed and defined to enable platform stakeholders like platform and service providers, users, and regulatory authorities ensure proper and successful conduct of businesses so as to benefit all the stakeholders.

The session hence deals with the "list" as a taxonomy of attributes. The session is envisaged to consist of two parts. The first part will draw from previous research work by the team on quality attributes of digital platforms and will illustrate the methodological reasoning and some of the challenges faced in the endeavour. This part leans towards an academic contribution to the conference. The second part will focus on the platform attributes important from regulatory perspectives, and will seek to crystallise the emergent attributes in juxtaposition to the quality attributes identified already, with the ultimate goal of identifying a checklist of regulatory attributes for digital platforms which will be of interest to policy planners. The entire exercise is also a step towards establishing a comprehensive taxonomy of platform attributes as a superset of attributes from different perspectives.

Session Team

Nandakishore K N is a Master of Science by Research student in the IT and Society domain at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B). His recently completed thesis was on design of a Quality of Service framework for digital platforms. Nandakishore joined IIIT-B with an experience of 20+ years in the IT industry, the last decade of which was in project and quality management roles, and includes an 18-year stint with TCS.

Dr. V. Sridhar is Professor at the Centre for IT and Public Policy at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B). He is a prolific writer on matters related to telecom regulation and policy in India, with two books and contributions to peer-reviewed leading telecom and information systems journals and prominent business newspapers and magazines. He is a member of GoI committees on Telecom and IT. Dr. Sridhar has taught at many Institutions in the USA, Finland, New Zealand and India, and was the recipient of Nokia Visiting Fellowship. Prior to joining IIIT-B Dr. Sridhar was a Research Fellow at Sasken Communication Technologies. Dr. Sridhar has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, U.S.A., Masters in Industrial Engineering from NITIE, Mumbai, and B.E. from the University of Madras, India. His work can be accessed at: http://www.vsridhar.info

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

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

Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Knowledge - Posts

Digital Knowledge

Digital Knowledge: All Posts

Previous Projects

Indian Newspapers' Digital Transition (2016)

Mapping Digital Humanities in India (2014-2016)

Pathways to Higher Education

The Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia (2012)

Data Systems

Data Systems: All Posts

Ongoing Projects

Urban Data Justice (2019)

Life of a Tuple: National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Reform of Citizen Identification Infrastructure in Assam (2018-2019)

Big Data for Development Network

Previous Projects

Big Data and Development - Field Studies

Big Data for Development Network

Data Systems - Posts

Web Cultures - Posts

JNU - Young Scholars International Conference - Margins and Connections - 2019

IRC19 - Code of Conduct and Friendly Space Policy

IRC19: #List - Conference Programme

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals

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

Session Plan

Session Team

IRC19 - List of Proposed Sessions

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #FOMO

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

Session Plan

Session Team

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #PowerListing

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

Session Plan

Session Team

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #DigitalPlatformAttributes

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

Session Plan

Session Team

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice

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

Session Plan

Session Team