Centre for Internet and Society

Sarah Zia - Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi

Sarah Zia — 2020-05-19T06:35:21Z

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Sarah Zia is the second among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project.

Originally published by the Platypus blog of CASTAC on July 18, 2019.

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (YouTube) and Transcript (text)

Ride-hailing [1] platforms such as Olacabs and Uber have “disrupted” public transport in India since their arrival. It has been almost seven years since app-based ride-hailing became a permanent feature of urban and peri-urban India with these aggregators operating in over a 100 Indian cities now. Akin to the global story, much has happened – there was a period of boom and novelty for passengers and drivers, then incentives fell. Ride-hailing work has become increasingly demanding with reduced payouts. But what hasn’t received enough attention (especially outside the US) is how these platforms create a deliberate regime of information invisibility and control to keep the drivers constantly on their toes which works to the companies’ advantage. What then are the implications of this uncertainty, which is fueled by app design as well as by the companies’ decision that drivers need little or no information about users? How does service delivery operate in a context where those actually delivering it have little or no idea about the workings of the system?

When algorithms make us not know

Algorithmic interactions form the core of the technology in ride-hailing apps through which service seekers and providers interact. As Lee et al. (2015) describe, “Algorithmic management allows companies to oversee myriads of workers in an optimized manner at a large scale, but its impact on human workers and work practices has been largely unexplored… Algorithmic management is one of the core innovations that enables these (cab-riding) services.”

Algorithms are procedural logics that produce different effects depending on the data they receive and the outputs they are optimized for (Wilson, 2016). Moreover, platform companies are not transparent about how their business logics contribute to these “optimizations”, which makes it difficult for all the stakeholders (passengers, drivers, police personnel, etc.) to make an accurate assessment of their functioning. This essay, then, explores how the lack of transparency around algorithmic structures not only prohibits drivers from knowing completely and surely about their work (“why did I get this ride?”, “why did my ratings drop?”) but also how they build tactics of coping and earning from a place of unknowing. Algorithms act as a regulator of work and their inherent structure constrains drivers from knowing fully about their work. Unknowing thus has two aspects: first, drivers do not have access or means to gather information; second, it is difficult to be sure of the existence of the said information in the first place.

In my research on ridehailing in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR), there were three things that I asked drivers about which led to ambiguous and inconsistent replies: how rides were allocated, how fares were determined and how ratings worked. While some drivers told me upfront they did not know how these systems worked, others offered explanations that they had devised or heard from somewhere else. For instance, not knowing what they will make per trip means that drivers plan their day in terms of target earnings instead of number of trips. Nearly all drivers I spoke to said they aimed to make Rs 1500-2000 (approx USD 20-25) per day in order to break even, irrespective of whether that goal requires 10 or 15 trips in a day. Yet not knowing what the next trip will earn them means they can’t refuse rides easily. Many drivers expressed discomfort about this fact, especially when compared to other means such as auto-rickshaws and traditional cabs where drop destination is known beforehand and fares can also be pre-negotiated, Unlike ride-hailing drivers, auto rickshaw drivers have the right to refuse passengers.

Many drivers now call passengers after accepting their booking to find out the destination. According to some drivers, this call also helped them understand the kind of passengers they were about to get and sometimes even allowed re-negotiation of the drop location to a mutually convenient spot if it was originally in a congested area. They also felt that assessing passengers before a trip was important so that they could act as mediators in the information gatekeeping process, because the passengers would have seen the fare already. For a driver, the lack of information added many layers of constant negotiation in a single trip—starting from the call to find out the destination to conversations during the trip to gauge potential earnings to finally suggesting alternative drop locations if there are any constraints in accessing the original destination—before they can claim their rightful earnings.

Ridehailing drivers only get the user’s name and pickup location as details about an upcoming trip. Photo by Noopur Raval.

Knowing the terms of work—such as when work ends and begins, how the good jobs are being allocated and to whom, and an explanation of one’s income—is a foundation of formal and informal work. Such information is crucial because it allows us to separate our work and personal lives. Knowledge of these obviously quantifiable parameters can help drivers plan their earnings and investments and, crucially, when they can take a break based on much more or less work they have to do in order to meet their income targets.

Furthermore, as drivers showed me, ride-hailing companies spontaneously change the revenue model for “driver-partners” (as they are called) by sending them an SMS right before the change happens, thereby altering trip and mileage targets frequently to keep a degree of unknowability in drivers’ work. This unknowability disincentivizes drivers from going off the road as per their will and helps maintain a steady supply of cabs on the road. As Alex Rosenblat has demonstrated in her study of US Uber and Lyft drivers, they are compelled to accept rides without knowing their profitability. While the app design gives them an option to “choose” to accept or reject a ride, drivers are constrained by lack of adequate information pertaining to the trip as well as the rider in making this choice. The ‘information asymmetry’, as Rosenblat calls it, also feeds into drivers’ mistrust of the companies and their policies (Rosenblat, 2018). Moreover, these feelings and the uncertainty fed by unknowing were not limited to drivers. Passengers also noticed that a ride between two points could cost different prices at different times of day and they were not sure why or how this cost was calculated.

Unknowability as a form of knowing: A pedagogy of coping

As I observed in my interactions with drivers online and offline, new drivers often struggled with the degree of uncertainty and unknowability while more experienced drivers had accepted ‘not knowing’ and the opacity of the system as features of their work.

Not knowing enough about how much will a ride earn them means drivers are forced to be on the roads, often without a break. Photo by author.

Similar to what Rosenblat, Gray et al. and others have observed in the US, in India drivers were constantly engaged in meaning-making through communicative labor, i.e., sharing their experiences with other local drivers online and offline. Agreeing, reassuring, and repeating that drivers actually do not know enough through these discussions also gave them shared confidence in their own abilities and how they were approaching work despite being firmly rooted in unknowing. For instance, when I asked one Uber driver about how ratings worked, they said that all 5-star drivers were matched with 5-star passengers. Another Uber driver said that the higher a passenger’s ratings, the less time they would have to wait for pick-up.

Other forms in which this kind of unknowing manifested was the lack of a fare chart or any minimum or uniform rating system, leaving drivers to offer their own interpretations and coping strategies. For instance, a driver pointed out how very few rides are likely to be available in a specific suburb during hot afternoons and therefore he avoided dropping passengers to that location after 2PM.

How, then, does one learn to cope with such unknowable systems as a worker? And what values does such a pedagogy of coping with algorithmic opacity imbibe? In my fieldwork, apart from answering my questions, drivers were extremely interested in talking about the companies, including news about companies’ stock value, their futures, profits, etc. A persistent rumour in the field was that Reliance, the country’s largest telecom provider, was soon coming up with a competitor ride-hailing app, suggesting that there could be an incentive boom again. In online Facebook groups, drivers often discussed company CEOs’ salaries, comparing them to their own. On the flipside, when videos of ride-hailing and food-delivery drivers getting beaten up or arrested or cheated surfaced, drivers would comment with advice on how to safeguard oneself, how to deal with errant customers and so on. I interpret these practices of making sense of long and short-term work, framed as responses to constant ambiguity and uncertainty, as the development of an “algorithmic gut”.

This gut responds to the anxieties produced by platform infrastructure through a keen awareness of the shifts, the tweaks, the changes and the errors. And it orients how drivers approach and cope with their work by acknowledging that there is a lot unknown (and unknowable) in this kind of daily work. It also guides how drivers focus on the short-term (daily) goal of making profit, such as by tuning into peer groups both online and offline where grievances are discussed, collective action planned, and floating rumours assessed. This gut is an affective, sensorial attunement to how platforms are allocating and shifting power among drivers and plays a generative role in guiding drivers’ work decisions.

Conclusion

Uncertainty is an embedded part of a ride-hailing cab’s model of service delivery. For ride-hailing drivers, this ambiguity translates into less control over everyday negotiation of work as well as planning of financial assets for the future.

In my interactions, I discovered that drivers are certain that they will never know more than the company. What this has led to is a driver who is cynical but not entirely pessimistic. Drivers acknowledge that while companies and their structures may be problematic, what will keep them employed is passengers’ appetite for a service like this. They would like to imagine the future of their work but are cognizant of the dual challenge of the present: making money while struggling for self-preservation in order to perform immediate activities. Drivers are cognizant of an ambiguous future and even hesitant to engage in long-term planning. For now, they would prefer better earnings and greater control over how they perform labour. Hence, their focus is on devising specific strategies for known, short-term challenges instead of running after an unknown future.

Endnotes

[1] Uber and homegrown Ola both started operations in India as ride-hailing services with the sharing options being added in 2015. Hence, the term ride-hailing has been used to describe these services which also includes ride sharing.

References

Davis, Jenny L. 2014. “Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era.” Symbolic Interaction 37 (4): 500-523.

Dodge, Martin and Kitchin, Rob. 2005. “Codes of life: identification codes and the machine-readable world.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2005 (23): 851-881

Gray, Mary L., et al. 2016. “The Crowd is a Collaborative Network.” Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing. ACM, 2016.

Kitchin, Rob. 2017. “Thinking critically about and researching algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (1): 14-29.

Lee, Min Kyung, et al. 2015. “Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Rosenblat, Alex & Stark, Luke. 2016. “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers.” International Journal of Communication 10: 3758–3784.

Ruckenstein, Minna and Mika Pantzar. 2017. “Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm.” New Media & Society 19(3): 401-418.

Willson, Michele. 2016. “Algorithms (and the) everyday”. Information, Communication & Society 10.1080/1369118X.2016.1200645

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/sarah-zia-not-knowing-as-pedagogy-ride-hailing-drivers-in-delhi

Digital Humanities and New Contexts of Digital Archival Practice in India

sneha-pp — 2019-12-18T10:32:07Z

Puthiya Purayil Sneha attended and presented at a conference on 'The Arts, Knowledge, and Critique in the Digital Age in India: Addressing Challenges in the Digital Humanities' organised by Sahapedia and Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad on November 28-29, 2019.

Conference: Website (external)

Digital humanities and new contexts of digital archival practice in India

This is the abstract of Sneha's presentation on digital humanities in India and transitions in digitization and cultural archival practices in the postcolonial context. The presentation was part of a session titled 'Community and Knowledge.'

The last few decades have seen several large-scale efforts in digitalization across various sectors in India. In space of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) in particular, there have been several initiatives undertaken by state institutions, along with individual and collaborative efforts to digitize and make cultural heritage and educational content available online. The growth of new areas of research and creative practice like digital humanities has also brought to the fore the need for digital corpora, including new technologies and methods of research as ways to engage with cultural content through the development of digital pedagogies and creative practice.

Many of these questions are located in long-spanning efforts in digitization and digital literacy more broadly, which are still fraught with challenges of access, usage and context. While digitization and archival practice form a significant aspect of the discourse on digital humanities, there still exist a number of anxieties around its practice. Especially in the case of community-led efforts, such as archiving oral histories or GLAM initiatives with collaborative knowledge platforms like Wikimedia, challenges of the digital divide are persistent, reflecting also a larger politics around the growth and sustenance of cultural heritage projects and the humanities and arts more broadly. Drawing upon excerpts from work on mapping the field of DH in India, and ongoing conversations on the digital transition in cultural archives, this presentation seeks to understand the practices and politics of digitization and archival work today, and how it continues to inform the growth of fields like digital humanities in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-and-new-contexts-of-digital-archival-practice-in-india

Making Voices Heard: Privacy, Inclusivity, and Accessibility of Voice Interfaces in India

shweta — 2019-12-18T12:10:05Z

We believe that voice interfaces have the potential to democratise the use of internet by addressing barriers such as accessibility concerns, lack of abilities of reading and writing on digital text interfaces, and lack of options for people to interact with digital devices in their own languages. Through the Making Voice Heard Project supported by Mozilla Corporation, we will examine the current landscape of voice interfaces in India.

Download the project announcement cards (shown above): Card 01, Card 02, and Card 03

Making Voices Heard: Project Announcement

Although voice enabled interfaces are being deployed there is a need to understand how they are beneficial, and what have been important knowledge gaps and challenges in their development, adoption, use, and regulation. Through the Making Voice Heard Project supported by Mozilla Corporation, we will be examining the current landscape of voice interfaces in India, and seek to address the following questions:

What is the broad (sectoral and functional) typology of available voice interfaces in Indian languages? How widely are these voice interfaces (in Indian languages) used, and what barriers prevent their further adoption and use?
What are concerns related to privacy and data protection that emerge with the growth of voice interfaces? What kind of protocols for data processing may need to be built into the design of these interfaces?
How accessible are these interfaces for persons with disabilities (PWDs)? What kinds of accessibility features, especially for Indian languages, may need to be developed to ensure effective use of voice technologies by PWDs?
Where do challenges in these three areas intersect? For instance, is compromising on users’ privacy, including weak or missing data protection regulations, required to create comprehensive speech datasets that may help develop better accessibility features, and address linguistic barriers?

In order to approach these questions we have begun mapping the various developers and users of voice interfaces in India. In the next stage of the process we will be looking at these interfaces through the lens of privacy, language, accessibility, and design. In order to add to the mapping and questions, we will be conducting interviews and workshops with users, developers, designers and researchers of voice interfaces in India, including the Common Voice team at Mozilla.

We hereby invite researchers, developers and designers of voice interfaces to speak to us and help inform the study. You may contact Shweta Mohandas at shweta@cis-india.org.

- Shweta Mohandas, Saumyaa Naidu, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay (project team)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/making-voices-heard-project-announcement

Simiran Lalvani - Workers’ Fictive Kinship Relations in Mumbai App-based Food Delivery

Simiran Lalvani — 2020-05-19T06:25:54Z

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Simiran Lalvani is the first among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project concerned.

Originally published by the Platypus blog of CASTAC on July 4, 2019.

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (mp3) and Transcript (docx)

Anthropologists have studied the role of kinship relations at the workplace in terms of how employers (De Neve, 2008) and workers use them (Parry, 2001). By contrast, digital labour scholars focus more on economic wellbeing and questions of fair work. But we know from the work of Mauss, Hart (Hart, 2000; Mauss, 2002) and others that all economic exchanges are also social relations. Additionally, economic and moral logics are different manifestations of the same ‘kernel of human relationships’ (Kofti, 2016). In the context of app-based food delivery work in Mumbai, workers’ actions and decisions were guided by them putting themselves in another’s shoes. Such moral acts of understanding and having understood were, as I will demonstrate, instances of Max Weber’s conception of verstehen or interpretative understanding which was important to understanding individuals’ participation in social relationships. This led me to explore gig-workers’ kinship relations at work, and their role in the existence and reproduction of these workers and this ‘new’ work.

This essay unpacks the values and expectations from the kinship term bhai (brother) in order to understand the morality invoked through its usage by app-based food delivery workers in Mumbai. In doing so, it considers the implications of such kinship sedimentations on the experience of workers in the gig economy, their negotiation with the discipline imposed by the employer and the experience of women workers who operate out of these kinship ties. I was compelled to notice the figure of the bhai – a male friend or acquaintance who would not only recruit but also provide various kinds of support on the job, helping app-based platforms maintain their workforce. I also interviewed female delivery workers in Mumbai and noticed that this brotherhood did not extend to them in the same way.

Bhai is a Hindi word for ‘brother’ but in Bambaiyya Hindi (a non-canonical form of Hindi spoken in Mumbai) it signifies an influential or respected male figure who offers support and is trustworthy due to relatedness. Bhai and variations like bhaiyya lubricate daily transactions between auto-rickshaw drivers, grocers, watchmen or any unrelated man and woman with a sociality of kinship.

The role and functions of understanding by bhais in gig work

Acts of brotherly help and disciplining reveal that material actions are intertwined with an ethic of care, thereby illustrating the role of kinship as central to the economic work in the gig economy. Historically, the informal work of food delivery in Mumbai has been organised along the lines of caste, region (Quien, 1997) and familial networks. Within gig work, belonging to the city is a requirement as bhais recruit, advice and protect new joinees from their neighbourhood or communities as older brothers. Team leaders who occupy a position between the worker and the middle management at these companies are bhais that discipline, control and maintain the workforce for the company.

Prior to joining, newbies would ask friends about their experience and even make deliveries with their friends to understand the work. Bhais offer support by riding pillion, arriving at ‘unsafe’ delivery locations at night or assisting a worker if the customer was drunk or unwilling to pay for their order.

Like other gig work communities that network to produce tacit knowledge about work (Gray, Suri, Ali, & Kulkarni, 2016) the relationships of brotherhood in food delivery help workers gain knowledge about the rules of the company, while also helping them find a way around the rules. A bhai might offer to make an ID on behalf of those who were unable to do so due to lack of documents or offer an existing ID to those who may have been disabled or blocked by the company.

Bhais, on the basis of relatedness due to experience of gig work, understand the needs of other gig workers. I suggest that this is verstehen and not simply a reflexive understanding since they, much like sociologists, also understood the nature of the situation (Tucker, 1965) that creates this relationship of relatedness and the importance of such a relationship in sustaining their future in this work as well as the future of this work.

Leaning on brotherhood to ‘safely’ deliver food as gig workers

Companies push a narrative of how working-class, male food delivery workers are safe to interact with because this work leads to working class men now arriving at the doorstep of the protected middle-class domestic sphere. Discourses of safety and trustworthiness are crucial to companies due to the middle-class, Indian anxiety around the separation of working-class men, considered dangerous and potential perpetrators of crime, from middle-class women, the victims of such crimes (Phadke, 2007).

In India, leaving one’s footwear outside before entering ‘sacred’ spaces like homes and temples is considered respectful. A notice outside an Uber Dost office in suburban Mumbai reads jootey-chhapal baahar nikaley or please leave your footwear outside – revealing an extension of the sacredness associated with familial spaces to the work place. (Image credit: author)

Since working class men are considered dangerous occupants of public space, how do workers feel safe and carefree in the everyday? The bhai who understands offers material support, protects and guides workers but is also understood as enabling a carefreeness in workers that makes this work and working-class men’s navigation of the public possible. Consider the case of Adarsh, an 18-year-old app-based worker who makes deliveries using a bicycle. Workers started helping him by offering to drop him to the delivery location on their motorcycles if they were headed in the same direction. As he described to me, he felt at ease knowing someone had his back: Abhi ye log support ke liye rehte hai toh apne ko tension nahi rehta hai chalo bhai support ke liye apne peeche khada hai. (One does not feel tense if one knows that there is a brother backing one up).

Exclusions from brotherhood in the gig economy

App-based food delivery has opened up the historically male-dominated line of work to women in India but that has not insulated it from patriarchal norms.

Food delivery work in Mumbai has historically been male dominated work – be it the ubiquitous dabbawallas (carriers of home-cooked meals) or those working as delivery ‘boys’ in udupis, restaurants, fast food companies and with hawkers. (Image credit: author)

One married woman worker expressed her discomfort with male riders referring to women workers as bacchi (Bambaiyya slang for younger brother) since it collapsed a sense of formality and familiarity that could be acceptable to young, unmarried girls. Women workers were aware that women have a high attrition in food delivery. They cannot afford to reject kinship constructions because such relations make work possible and tolerable in the everyday so they modulate the correct amount of kinship ties with a ‘respectable distance.’

The brotherhood of workers is not uniform or homogeneous since men’s ability to participate in this fictive kinship can be constrained either due to their identities or inability to support strikes.

Brotherhood absorbs risks for workers and allows workers to be bindaas, presenting an opportunity for tactical resistance. Leveraging brotherhood as a platform (Gillespie Tarleton, 2010), workers would strike and companies having understood the role of brotherhood too, would offer the position of 'team leader' to leaders of such strikes. Most bhais chose moral and affective bonds of brotherhood over such a 'promotion.'

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities, however there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. Such a display of verstehen by the delivery workers is a response to engaging with a world of work that continuously measures one’s credibility and ties it to material rewards. It can be read as an attempt to secure an income and guard one’s sense of self.

References

De Neve, G. (2008). ‘We are all sondukarar (relatives)!’: Kinship and its morality in an urban industry of Tamilnadu, South India. Modern Asian Studies, 42(1), 211–246. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X0700282X

Gillespie Tarleton. (2010). Politics of Platforms. New Media and Society, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738

Gray, M. L., Suri, S., Ali, S. S., & Kulkarni, D. (2016). The Crowd is a Collaborative Network. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing – CSCW ’16, 134–147. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819942

Hart, K. (2000). Kinship, Contract and Trust: The Economic Organization of Migrants in an African City Slum. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (pp. 176–193). University of Oxford.

Kofti, D. (2016). Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household. Anthropological Theory, 16(4), 433–453. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616679538

Mauss, M. (2002). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.

Parry, J. P. (2001). Ankalu’s Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh. Modern Asian Studies, 35(4), 783–820. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X01004024

Phadke, S. (2007). Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17), 1510–1518.

Quien, A. (1997). Mumbai’s Dabbawalla: Omnipresent Worker and Absent City-Dweller. Economic and Political Weekly, 32(13), 637–640.

Tucker, W. T. (1965). Max Weber’s Verstehen. The Sociological Quarterly, 6(2), 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1965.tb01649.x

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/simiran-lalvani-workers-fictive-kinship-relations-app-based-food-delivery-mumbai

Domestic Work in the ‘Gig Economy’

aayush — 2019-12-06T04:52:11Z

The CIS and Domestic Workers’ Rights Union (DWRU) are hosting a discussion on the ‘gig economy’ and domestic work on Saturday, November 16 at Student Christian Movement of India, Mission Road, Bangalore. This event is a part of a project supported by the Feminist Internet Research Network led by Association for Progressive Communication (APC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.

Presentation: Download (PDF)

Concept Note: Download (PDF)

Venue: Student Christian Movement of India (29, 2nd Cross, CSI Compound, Mission Road, Sampangi Rama Nagara)

Date and Time: Saturday, November 16, 3:00-5:30 pm

Location: URL (Google Maps)

Feminist Internet Research Network: URL

Over the last few months, the Centre for Internet and Society, India (CIS) and the Domestic Workers’ Rights Union (DWRU) have been doing research on the platformisation of domestic work in India. In the first phase of the research, we gathered data through interviews with several stakeholders. More information about the project can be found here: https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement.

We now find ourselves in the second phase of the research in which we have prepared a preliminary report and are seeking feedback and inputs from experts. For this, we invite you to a roundtable discussion on domestic workers in the ‘gig economy’.

The participants at the roundtable will comprise of representatives from key stakeholder groups including platform workers (i.e. domestic workers sourcing jobs through platforms), platform companies, domestic workers organisations, civil society researchers and the state labour department.

The event will begin with a presentation of the project and our initial findings. The rest of the time is set aside for a semi-moderated discussion between all participants. To ensure a focused discussion, we are also limiting participation to 30, and are hoping to have a good mix across stakeholder groups.

If you will be joining us, please RSVP to Aayush Rathi at aayush@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116

State of the Internet's Languages 2020: Announcing selected contributions!

sneha-pp — 2019-11-01T18:12:49Z

In response to our call for contributions and reflections on ‘Decolonising the Internet’s Languages’ in August, we are delighted to announce that we received 50 submissions, in over 38 languages! We are so overwhelmed and grateful for the interest and support of our many communities around the world; it demonstrates how critical this effort is for all of us. From all these extraordinary offerings, we have selected nine that we will invite and support the contributors to expand further.

Cross-posted from the Whose Knowledge? website: URL

Call for Contributions and Reflections: URL

Thank you to all of you who wrote in: we would publish every one of your contributions if we could! Each of you highlighted unique aspects of the problem and possibility of the multilingual internet, and it was extremely difficult to select a few to include in the ‘State of the Internet’s Languages Report’. Whether your submission was selected or not, we hope you will continue to be part of this work with us, and that the report will reflect your thoughtful concerns and interests in a multi-lingual internet.

The nine selected contributions will be a significant aspect of the openly licensed State of the Internet’s Languages report to be published mid-2020. In different formats and languages, they span many kinds of language contexts across the world, from many different communities and perspectives. They will form part of a broader narrative combining data and experience, highlighting how limited the current language capacities of the internet are, and how much opportunity there is for making our knowledges available in our many languages.

A special thank you to the final contributors – we’ll be in touch shortly with more details. We’re looking forward to working with you as you develop your contributions and share your experiences!

The selected contributions are from:

Caddie Brain, Joel Liddle, Leigh Harris, Graham Wilfred

As part of a broader movement to increase inclusion and diversity in emojis, Aboriginal people in Central Australia are creating Indigemoji, the first set of Australian Indigenous emojis delivered via a free app. Caddie, Joel, Leigh and Graham aim to describe how to reflect Aboriginal experiences online, to increase the accessibility of Arrernte language in the broader Australian lexicon, to position Arrernte knowledge on digital platforms for future generations of Arrentre speakers and learners, and to contribute more broadly to the decolonisation of the internet.
Claudia Soria

Claudia will describe “The Digital Language Diversity Project” funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme. The project has surveyed the digital use and usability of four European minority languages: Basque, Breton, Karelian and Sardinian. It has also developed a number of instruments that can help speakers’ communities drive the digital life of their languages, in the form of a methodology named “digital language planning”.
Donald Flywell Malanga

Donald will share his experiences conducting two panel discussions with elderly and ten young Ndali People in Chisitu Village based in Misuku Hills, Malawi. He aims to hear their stories and make sense of them relating to how Chindali could be spoken/expressed online, examine the barriers they face in sharing/expressing their language online, and unearth possible solutions to address such barriers.
Emna Mizouni

Emna will interview African and Arab content creators and consumers to share their experiences in posting content in their own language and expose their cultures. She will reach out to different ethnicities from Africa to gather data on the reasons they use the “colonial languages” on the internet and the burdens they face, whether technical such as internet connectivity and accessibility, lack of devices, social or cultural barriers, etc.
Ishan Chakraborty

Ishan will explore the experiences of individuals who identify themselves as both disabled and queer, and who are not visible online in Bengali. Online research papers and academic works in Bengali are significantly limited, and even more so in the case of works on marginalities and intersections. One of the most effective ways of making online material accessible to persons with visual disability is through audio material, and Ishan will explore some of these possibilities.
Joaquín Yescas Martínez

Joaquin will be describing the free software, open technology initiatives and the sharing philosophy of “compartencia” in his community of Mixe and Zapotec peoples in Mexico. He will explore initiatives such as Xhidza Penguin School, an app to learn the language online, and learning workshops to look at new methodologies for sharing and using the language. It is not only a means of communication but it also encompasses a different way of understanding the world.
Kelly Foster

Kelly will draw attention to the work being done to revitalise indigenous languages and the struggles to represent the Nation Languages of the Caribbean and its diasporas in structured data and on Wikipedia. She aims to have the native names of the islands, locations and indigenous peoples on Wikidata, labelled with their own language so she can generate a map of the Caribbean with as many native names as possible. But the language of the Taino people of the islands that are now called Jamaican, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Haiti has been labelled as extinct, as are the people, by European researchers. Though a victim of the first European genocide of the Caribbean, they live on in the tongues and blood of people who are more often racialised as Black and Latinx.
Paska Darmawan

As a first-generation college student who did not understand English, Paska had difficulties in finding educational, inspiring content about LGBTQIA issues in their native language, let alone positive content about the local LGBTQIA community. They plan to share a mapping of available Indonesian digital LGBTQIA content, whether it be in the form of Wikipedia articles, websites, social media accounts, or any other online media.
Uda Deshpriya

Uda will explore the lack of feminist content on the internet in Sinhala and Tamil. Mainstream human rights discussions take place in English and leaves out the majority of Sri Lankans. Women’s rights discourse remains even more centralized. Despite the fact that all primary criminal and civil courts work in local languages, statutes and decided cases are not available in Sinhala and Tamil, including Sri Lanka’s Constitution and its amendments. This extends to content creation through both text and art, with significant barriers of keyboard and input methods.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/stil-2020-selected-contributions

Comments to the United Nations Human Rights Commission Report on Gender and Privacy

Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon and Pallavi Bedi — 2019-12-30T17:40:20Z

This submission to UNHRC presents a response by researchers at the CIS to ‘gender issues arising in the digital era and their impacts on women, men and individuals of diverse sexual orientations gender identities, gender expressions and sex characteristics’. It was prepared by Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, and Pallavi Bedi in response to a report of consultation by a thematic taskforce established by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy on ‘Privacy and Personality’ (hereafter, HRC Gender Report).

HRC Gender Report - Consultation version: Read (PDF)

Submitted comments: Read (PDF)

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India, is an 11-year old non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. Through its diverse initiatives, CIS explores, intervenes in, and advances contemporary discourse and regulatory practices around internet, technology, and society in India,and elsewhere. Current focus areas include cybersecurity, privacy, freedom of speech, labour and artificial intelligence. CIS has been taking efforts to mainstream gender across its programmes, as well as develop specifically gender-focused research using a feminist approach.

CIS appreciates the efforts of Dr. Elizabeth Coombs, Chair, Thematic Action Stream Taskforce on “A better understanding of privacy”, and those of Professor Joseph Cannataci, Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy. We are also grateful for the opportunity to put forth our views and comment on the HRC Gender Report.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-to-the-unhrc-report-on-gender-and-privacy

Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages 2019 - From Conversations to Actions

sneha-pp — 2019-11-01T17:53:40Z

Whose Knowledge? is organising the Decolonizing the Internet's Languages 2019 gathering in London on October 23-24 — with a specific focus on building an agenda for action to decolonize the internet’s languages. Puthiya Purayil Sneha is participating in this meeting with scholars, linguists, archivists, technologists and community activists, to share the initial findings towards the State of the Internet’s Language Report (to be published in 2020) being developed by Whose Knowledge?, Oxford Internet Institute, and the CIS.

Event page: URL

Agenda: Download (PDF)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/dtil-2019-from-conversations-to-actions

The Mother and Child Tracking System - understanding data trail in the Indian healthcare systems

ambika — 2019-12-30T17:18:05Z

This article was first published by Privacy International, on October 17, 2019

Case study of MCTS: Read

On October 17th 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, released his thematic report on digital technology, social protection and human rights. Understanding the impact of technology on the provision of social protection – and, by extent, its impact on people in vulnerable situations – has been part of the work the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Privacy International (PI) have been doing.

Earlier this year, PI responded to the UNSR's consultation on this topic. We highlighted what we perceived as some of the most pressing issues we had observed around the world when it comes to the use of technology for the delivery of social protection and its impact on the right to privacy and dignity of benefit claimants.

Among them, automation and the increasing reliance on AI is a topic of particular concern - countries including Australia, India, the UK and the US have already started to adopt these technologies in digital welfare programmes. This adoption raises significant concerns about a quickly approaching future, in which computers decide whether or not we get access to the services that allow us to survive. There's an even more pressing problem. More than a few stories have emerged revealing the extent of the bias in many AI systems, biases that create serious issues for people in vulnerable situations, who are already exposed to discrimination, and made worse by increasing reliance on automation.

Beyond the issue of AI, we think it is important to look at welfare and automation with a wider lens. In order for an AI to function it needs to be trained on a dataset, so that it can understand what it is looking for. That requires the collection large quantities of data. That data would then be used to train and AI to recognise what fraudulent use of public benefits would look like. That means we need to think about every data point being collected as one that, in the long run, will likely be used for automation purposes.

These systems incentivise the mass collection of people's data, across a huge range of government services, from welfare to health - where women and gender-diverse people are uniquely impacted. CIS have been looking specifically at reproductive health programmes in India, work which offers a unique insight into the ways in which mass data collection in systems like these can enable abuse.

Reproductive health programmes in India have been digitising extensive data about pregnant women for over a decade, as part of multiple health information systems. These can be seen as precursors to current conceptions of big data systems within health informatics. India’s health programme instituted such an information system in 2009, the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS), which is aimed at collecting data on maternal and child health. The Centre for Internet and Society, India, undertook a case study of the MCTS as an example of public data-driven initiatives in reproductive health. The case study was supported by the Big Data for Development network supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada. The objective of the case study was to focus on the data flows and architecture of the system, and identify areas of concern as newer systems of health informatics are introduced on top of existing ones. The case study is also relevant from the perspective of Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to rectify the tendency of global development initiatives to ignore national HIS and create purpose-specific monitoring systems.

After being launched in 2011, 120 million (12 crore) pregnant women and 111 million (11 crore) children have been registered on the MCTS as of 2018. The central database collects data on each visit of the woman from conception to 42 days postpartum, including details of direct benefit transfer of maternity benefit schemes. While data-driven monitoring is a critical exercise to improve health care provision, publicly available documents on the MCTS reflect the complete absence of robust data protection measures. The risk associated with data leaks are amplified due to the stigma associated with abortion, especially for unmarried women or survivors of rape.

The historical landscape of reproductive healthcare provision and family planning in India has been dominated by a target-based approach. Geared at population control, this approach sought to maximise family planning targets without protecting decisional autonomy and bodily privacy for women. At the policy level, this approach was shifted in favour of a rights-based approach to family planning in 1994. However, targets continue to be set for women’s sterilisation on the ground. Surveillance practices in reproductive healthcare are then used to monitor under-performing regions and meet sterilisation targets for women, this continues to be the primary mode of contraception offered by public family planning initiatives.

More recently, this database - among others collecting data about reproductive health - is adding biometric information through linkage with the Aadhaar infrastructure. This data adds to the sensitive information being collected and stored without adhering to any publicly available data protection practices. Biometric linkage is aimed to fulfill multiple functions - primarily authentication of welfare beneficiaries of the national maternal benefits scheme. Making Aadhaar details mandatory could directly contribute to the denial of service to legitimate patients and beneficiaries - as has already been seen in some cases.

The added layer of biometric surveillance also has the potential to enable other forms of abuse of privacy for pregnant women. In 2016, the union minister for Women and Child Development under the previous government suggested the use of strict biometric-based monitoring to discourage gender-biased sex selection. Activists critiqued the policy for its paternalistic approach to reduce the rampant practice of gender-biased sex selection, rather than addressing the root causes of gender inequality in the country.

There is an urgent need to rethink the objectives and practices of data collection in public reproductive health provision in India. Rather than continued focus on meeting high-level targets, monitoring systems should enable local usage and protect the decisional autonomy of patients. In addition, the data protection legislation in India - expected to be tabled in the next session in parliament - should place free and informed consent, and informational privacy at the centre of data-driven practices in reproductive health provision.

This is why the systematic mass collection of data in health services is all the more worrying. When the collection of our data becomes a condition for accessing health services, it is not only a threat to our right to health that should not be conditional on data sharing but also it raises questions as to how this data will be used in the age of automation.

This is why understanding what data is collected and how it is collected in the context of health and social protection programmes is so important.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-international-ambika-tandon-october-17-2019-mother-and-child-tracking-system-understanding-data-trail-indian-healthcare

Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System

ambika — 2019-12-06T04:57:55Z

In this case study undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development (BD4D) network, Ambika Tandon evaluates the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level in India. The study also assesses the potential of MCTS to contribute towards the big data landscape on reproductive health in the country, as the Indian state’s imagination of health informatics moves towards big data.

Case study: Download (PDF)

Introduction

The reproductive health information ecosystem in India comprises of a range of different databases across state and national levels. These collect data through a combination of manual and digital tools. Two national-level databases have been launched by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare - the Health Management Information System (HMIS) in 2008, and the MCTS in 2009. 4 The MCTS focuses on collecting data on maternal and child health. It was instituted due to reported gaps in the HMIS, which records monthly data across health programmes including reproductive health. There are several other state-level initiatives on reproductive health data that have either been subsumed into, or run in parallel with, the MCTS.

With this case study, we aim to evaluate the MCTS as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level. It will also assess its potential to contribute towards the big data landscape on reproductive health in the country, as the Indian state’s imagination of health informatics moves towards big data. The methodology for the case study involved a desk-based review of existing literature on the use of health information systems globally, as well as analysis of government reports, journal articles, media coverage, policy documents, and other material on the MCTS.

The first section of this report details the theoretical framing of the case study, drawing on the feminist critique of reproductive data systems. The second section maps the current landscape of reproductive health data produced by the state in India, with a focus on data flows, and barriers to data collection and analysis at the local and national level. The case of abortion data is used to further the argument of flawed data collection systems at the national level. Section three briefly discusses the state’s imagination of reproductive health policy and the role of data systems through a discussion on the National Health Policy, 2017 and the National Health Stack, 2018. Finally, we make some policy recommendations and identify directions for future research, taking into account the ongoing shift towards big data globally to democratise reproductive healthcare.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/big-data-reproductive-health-india-mcts

Doing Standpoint Theory

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi — 2019-12-06T04:59:35Z

Cross-posted from GenderIT, September 1, 2019

Image description: Three speech bubbles on different textures. Artist: Catalina Alzate

Feminist research methodology has evolved from different epistemologies, with several different schools of thought. Some of the more popular ones are feminist standpoint theory, feminist empiricism, and feminist relativism. Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power [2]. Feminist empiricism does not eschew traditional modes of knowledge production, but emphasises diversity of research participants for feminist (and therefore also rigorous) knowledge production [3]. Relativists have critiqued standpoint theory for its tendency to essentialise the experience of marginalised groups, and subsume them into one homogenous voice to achieve the goal of ‘emancipatory’ research [4]. Relativists instead focus on multiple standpoints, which could be Dalit women, lesbian women, or women with disabilities [5]. We will be discussing the practical applicability of these epistemologies to research practices in the field of technology and gender.

Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power.

As part of the Feminist Internet Research Network, the Centre for Internet and Society is undertaking research on the digital mediation of domestic and care work in India. The project aims to assess shifts in the sector, including conditions of work, brought on by the entry of digital platforms. Our starting point for designing a methodology for the research was standpoint theory, which we thought to be the best fit as the goal of the project was to disrupt dominant narratives of women’s labour in relation to platformisation. In the context of dalit feminis, Rege warns that standpoint research risks producing a narrow frame of identity politics, although it is critical to pay attention to lived experience and the “naming of difference” between dalit women and savarna women [6]. She asserts that neither ‘women’ nor ‘dalit women’ is a homogenous category. While feminist researchers from outside these categories cannot claim to “speak for” those within, they can “reinvent” themselves as dalit feminists and ally themselves with their politics.

In order to address this risk of appropriating the voices of domestic workers (“speaking for”), we chose to directly work with a domestic workers’ union in Bengaluru called Stree Jagruti Smiti. Bengaluru is one of the two cities we are conducting research in (the other being Delhi, with very few registered unions). This is meant to radically destabilise power hierarchies and material relations within the research process, as benefits of participatory research tend to accumulate with the researchers rather than participants [7].

Along with amplifying the voices of workers, a central objective of our project is to question the techno-solutionism that has accompanied the entry of digital platforms into the domestic work sector, which is unorganised and unregulated. To do so, we included companies and state labour departments as participants whose standpoint is to be interrogated. By juxtaposing the standpoints of stakeholders that have differential access to power and resources, the researcher is able to surface various conflicts and intersections in dominant and alternative narratives. This form of research also brings with it unique challenges, as researchers could find themselves mediating between the different stakeholders, while constantly choosing to privilege the standpoint of the least powerful - in this case the workers. Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors. This can also be done by ensuring that workers have agency to shape the agenda of researchers, thereby producing research which is instrumental in supporting grassroots campaigns and movements.

Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors.

Feminist participatory research itself, despite its many promises, is not a linear pathway to empowerment for participants [8]. At the very outset of the project, we were constantly asked the question by domestic workers and unions – why should we participate in this project? Researchers, in their experience, acquire information from the community throughout the process of data collection by positioning themselves as allies. However, as all such engagements are bound to limited timelines and budgets, researchers are then often absent at critical junctures where the community may need external support. We were also told that all too often, the output of the research itself does not make its way back to the participants, making it a one-way process of knowledge extraction. Being mindful of these experiences, we have integrated a feedback loop into our research design, which will allow us to design outputs that are accessible and useful to collectives of domestic workers.

Not only domestic workers and their organisations, many corporations operating these online portals and platforms often questioned the benefits of participating in the project. However, the manner of articulation differed. While attempting to reject the hierarchical nature of the researcher/participant relationship, we increasingly became aware that the underlying power equation was not a monolith. Rather, it varied across stakeholder groups and was explicitly contingent on the socially constructed positionalities already existing outside of the space of the interview. Companies, governments and workers all exemplified varying degrees of engagement with, knowledge of, and contributions to research. Interviews with workers and unions, and even some bootstrapped (i.e. without much external funding) , socially-minded companies, were often cathartic with an expectation of some benefits in return for opening themselves up to researchers. This was quite different for governments and larger companies, as conversations typically adhered to the patriarchal and classed notions of professionalism in sanitised, formal spaces [9] and the strict dichotomy between public and personal spaces. Their contribution seemingly required lesser affective engagement from the interviewee, thereby resulting in lesser investment in the outcome of the research itself.

The cathartic nature of interviews also speak to the impossibility of the distanced, Platonic, school of research. We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought. Workers and representatives from platform companies alike would question our motivations with the research and challenge us by inquiring about the benefits accruing to us. Again, both set of stakeholders would often ask differently about how other platforms were; workers already registered on a platform would wonder if another platform would be ‘better’ and representatives of platform companies would be curious about competition. This is perhaps a consequence of attempting to design a study that is of use and of interest to the workers we have been reaching out to [10]. At times, we found ourselves at a place in the conversation where we were compelled to respond to political positions for the conversation to continue. There were interviews where notions of caste hierarchies (within oppressed classes) as a justification/complaint for engaging/having to engage in certain tasks would surface. Despite being beholden to a feminist consciousness that disregards the idea of the interviewer as neutral, we often found ourselves only hesitantly forthcoming. At times, it was to keep the interview broadly focused around the research subject, at others it was due to our own ignorance about the research artefact (in this instance, platforms mediating domestic work services). This underscores the challenges of seeing the interview as a value ridden space, where the contradictions between the interview as a data collection method and as a consciousness raising emerged - how could we share information about the artefact we were in the process of collecting data about?

We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought.

The fostering of ‘rapport’ [11] has made its may into method, almost unknowingly. Often, respondents across stakeholder groups started from an initial place of hesitation, sometimes even suspicion. Several structural issues could be at work here - our inability in being able to accurately describe research itself, the class differences and at times, ideological ones as well. While with most participants, rapport was eventually established, its establishment was a laboured process. Especially given that we were using one-off, in-depth interviews as our method, securing an interview was contingent on the establishment of rapport. This isn’t to suggest that feminist research mandatorily requires the ‘doing of rapport’ [12], but that when it does, it’s a fortunate outcome and that feminist researchers engage with it more critically.

Building rapport creates an impression of having minimised the exploitation of the participant, however the underlying politics and pressures of building rapport need to be interrogated. Rapport, like research itself, is at times a performance; rapport is often not naturally occuring. Rather, rapport may also be built to conceal the very structural factors preventing it. For instance, during instances of ideological differences during the interview, we were at times complicit through our silence. This may have been to further a certain notion of ‘objectivity’ itself whereby the building and maintenance of rapport is essential to surfacing a participant’s real views. This then raises the questions: What are the ethical questions that the suppression of certain viewpoints and reactions pose? How does the building, maintenance and continuance of rapport inform the research findings? Rapport, then, comes in all shapes and sizes and its manifold forms implicate the research process differently. Another critical question to be addressed is - why does some rapport take less work than others? With platform companies, building rapport came by easier than it did with workers both on and off platforms. If understood as removing degrees of distance between the researcher and participants, several factors could play into the effort required to build rapport. For instance, language was a critical determinant of the ease of relationship-building. Being more fluent in English than in colloquial Hindi enabled clearer articulation of the research. Further, familiarity with the research process was, as expected, mediated along class lines. This influenced the manner in which we articulated research outcomes and objectives to workers with complete unfamiliarity with the meaning of research. Among workers, this unfamiliarity often resulted in distrust, which required the underlying politics of the research to be more critically articulated.

By and large, the feminist engagement with research methods has been quite successful in its resistance and transformation of traditional forms. Since Oakley’s conception of the interview as a deeply subjective space [13] and Harding’s dialectical conception of masculinist science through its history [14], the application of feminist critical theory has increasingly subverted assumptions around the averseness of research to political motivations. At the same time, it has made knowledge-production occur in a more equitable space. It is in this context that standpoint theory has had wide purchase, but challenges persist in its application. As the foregoing discussion outlines, we have been able to achieve some of the goals of feminist standpoint research while missing out on others. We also found the ‘multiple standpoints’ approach of relativists to be useful in a project involving multiple stakeholders - thereby also avoiding the risk of essentialisation of the identities of domestic workers. However, unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses. Through this hybrid theoretical framework, we are seeking to make knowledge production more equitable. At the same time, the discussion around rapport shows that this may nevertheless happen in a limited fashion. Feminist research may never be fully non-extractive. The reflexivity exercised and choices made during the course of the research are key.

Unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses.

Endnotes

[1] The names of the authors are in alphabetical order.

[2] Harding, S. (2003) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, Routledge.

[3] M. Wickramasinghe, Feminist Research Methodology: Making meaning out of meaning-making, Zubaan, 2014

[4] Pease, D. (2000) Researching profeminist men's narratives: participatory methodologies in a postmodern frame. In B. Fawcett, D. Featherstone, J. Fook ll)'ld A. Rossiter (eds) Restarching and Practising in Social Work: Postmodern Feminist Perspectives (London: Routledge).

[5] Stanley, L. and Wise, S. (1983) Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

[6] Rege, S. 1998. ” Dalit Women Talk Differently: A critique of ‘Difference’ and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, No.44, pp 39-48.

[7] Heeks, R. and Shekhar, S. (2018) An Applied Data Justice Framework: Analysing Datafication and Marginalised Communities in Cities of the Global South. Working Paper Series, Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester.

[8] Stone, E. and Priestley, M. (1996) Parasites, pawn and partners: disability research and the role of nondisabled researchers. British Journal of Sociology, 47(4), 699-716.

[9] Evans, L. (2010). Professionalism, professionality and the development of education professionals. Br. J. Educ. Stud. 56, 20–38. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00392.x

[10] Webb C. Feminist methodology in nursing research. J Adv Nurs. 1984 May;9(3):249-56.

[11] Berger, R. (2015). Now I see it, now I don’t: researcher’s position and reflexivity in qualitative research. Qual. Res. 15, 219–234. doi:10.1177/1468794112468475; Pitts, M. J., and Miller-Day, M. (2007). Upward turning points and positive rapport development across time in researcher-participant relationships. Qual. Res. 7, 177–201. doi:10.1177/1468794107071409

[12] Dunscombe, J., and Jessop, J. (2002). “Doing rapport, and the ethics of ’faking friendship’,” in Ethics in Qualitative Research, eds T. Miller, M. Birch, M. Mauthner, and J. Jessop (London: SAGE), 108–121.

[13] Oakley, A. (1981). “Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms?” in Doing Feminist Research, ed. H. Roberts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 30–61.

[14] Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory

Digital mediation of domestic and care work in India: Project Announcement

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi — 2019-10-10T08:09:34Z

It is our great pleasure to announce that we are undertaking a study on digital mediation of domestic and care work in India, as part of and supported by the Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The study is exploring the ways in which structural inequalities, such as those of gender and class, are being reproduced or challenged by digital platforms. The project sites are Delhi and Bangalore, where we are conducting interviews with workers, companies, and unions. In Bangalore, we are collaborating with Stree Jagruti Samiti to collect qualitative data from different stakeholders. The outputs of the research will include a report, policy brief, and other communication materials in English, Hindi, and Kannada. This study is being led by Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi, along with Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Feminist Internet Research Network: apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network

Introduction to the Project

This project seeks to investigate the mediation of domestic and care work through digital platforms in India. These forms of labour fall within the informal economy, which employs the largest share of non-agricultural workers in the global South [1]. Workers and economic units in the informal economy differ widely in terms of all metrics, including income levels, size and type of enterprise, and status of worker. According to the International Labour Organisation’s Resolution on decent work and the informal economy, it refers to “all economic activities by workers and economic units that are - in law of practice - not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements” [2]. What this implies in practice for workers in the informal economy is greater vulnerability to poor work conditions, poverty, and violation of labour rights [3].

Women, particularly those with intersectional marginalities, including that of caste and class, are overrepresented in the informal economy globally and in India. Domestic work in particular has been stratified along the lines of caste and gender historically. Further, class has become more salient in producing stratifications in labour relations following urbanisation and gentrification. These intersections have shaped employment relations in the sector in different ways, which range from feudal to contractual models. Digital platforms are increasingly becoming intermediaries in this space, mediating between so called ‘semi-skilled’ or ‘low-skilled’ workers from lower classes, and millions of middle and upper class employers in tier I cities. This is expected to shift the stratification of workers and employment relations in key ways.

Through a feminist approach to digital labour, our project aims to examine platforms offering domestic or reproductive care work. This will be situated within larger feminist critiques around the devaluation and invisibilisation of women’s labour within patriarchal-capitalist economic discourse. The project further seeks to unpack technocratic imaginaries of the platform economy by looking at access and meaningful use of technology and qualifying narratives around labour market optimisation, empowerment, and agency. We will include within this scope two kinds of platforms: marketplaces for workers to post their profiles; and on-demand platforms with algorithmic matching of workers and employers.

Research Questions

Our hypothesis is that platforms are reconfiguring labour conditions, which would empower and/or exploit workers in ways qualitatively different than non-standard work off the platform. In order to interrogate this further, we will study wages, conditions of work, social security, skill levels, and worker surveillance off platforms. This will be used to develop contextual knowledge around the conditions of work among (a) domestic workers on and off platforms in particular, and (b) informal sector workers joining the web-based gig economy in general.

The overarching question that the research will address is, what are the ways in which structural inequalities are challenged or reproduced through the growth of digital platforms in reproductive and care work?

How are relations of social inequality, including along the axes of caste and gender, reworked through digital platforms, especially in a context where domestic and care work remains historically undervalued and dominated by women workers with intersectional marginalities?
How do workers on platforms envision the role of the state, market, and informal networks of kinship in intervening in employment relations?
How is inequality and exploitation in informal labour reconfigured through platforms, with specific reference to work conditions (including hours of work, and physical and mental demands of the workplace), wages, social security, and surveillance?
What strategies of negotiation are being and have been adopted by care workers on and off platforms?
Is collectivisation an aspiration for care workers across different models of employment?
How can negotiation and collectivisation strategies inform the ongoing challenges faced by both care workers and platform workers?

Endnotes

[1] International Labour Office, (2018). Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture. Third Edition. International labour Organisation. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/docu- ments/publication/wcms_626831.pdf

[2] International Labour Organisation, (2002). 2002 ILC Resolution and Conclusions on Decent Work and the Informal Economy. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/employment-promotion/informal-economy/lang--en/index.htm

[3] Ibid.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement

Kashmir’s digital blackout marks a period darker than the dark side of the moon

nishant — 2019-09-26T16:26:16Z

While we mourn the loss of connection with the moon, remembering a digital blackout closer home.

The article by Dr. Nishant Shah was published in Indian Express on September 15, 2019.

When the news came, I was struck with a profound sense of loss. The iced coffee on my desk wept condensed tears as social media started flooding with the news that we have lost contact. There is a complete communication blackout. The last minutes which were the most critical, are now shrouded in mystery. We are doing all we can to reach out, to ping, to find a way to get some information — any information — that tells us that things are all right. People are waiting with bated breath to see if a connection will be made. There is widespread anxiety that comes from knowing that something historic has happened but there is a complete lack of knowledge about it.

At this point, all attempts at trying to get more information are proving to be futile. The devices that we have pinned our optimism to — seldom remembering that hardware fails — and the streams of communication that have become our digital default have let us down. At this point, in the absence of any clean data, we will be clinging to straws. Maybe one solitary ping will tell us that things are all right. We have given up on long stories, but just a cough, a sneeze, a chortle, a hiccup — anything right now, that tells us there is hope, there is a future, there is a tomorrow where we might be able to take back control, would be welcome. Scientists, journalists, politicians, and the common person on the street, all wait to hear more. But as of now, all we get, as we persistently update our screens and push at buttons, is silence.

That silence breaks us. To reach out and get nothing back. To have the entire infrastructure of digital and satellite communication and see it turn to nothing but technojunk in the split of a second. To depend, now, on the unknown — not sure what happens to those who cannot be heard and also those who wait to hear — is unnerving. We fill up the silences with many things — assurances from the Prime Minister about how this is a temporary glitch and we will do better; analysis from media about what could and would have gone wrong in this mission; opinions from people questioning the validity of this move and also bemoaning the validity of our expertise and knowhow; the viral cries of triumph from those who see this as a step in the right direction.

However, it is undeniable that the silence fills us up with sense of grief and loss, making us wonder what the future will hold. And this is not just an individual future but a collective one, where we start realising how technological control and regulation can define and determine our conditions of speech, silence, and connection. It is the moment where we question our brute optimism in science and technology and our soaring ambitions of impossible sounding futures, of singularity and connectivity.

Oh, and while I was trying to process the silence of stifled speech and throttled thoughts in Kashmir, which has been under an information and digital blackout for more than a month now, the news of the Chandrayaan-2’s possible failure and the last minute non-responsiveness from the Vikram lander also trickled in. When the lunar mission news unfolded, I earnestly thought that people were talking about Kashmir — so emotional, passionate, and human, was their interest in the well-being of the exploring robot. Had it landed safely? Was it still chugging along? Was it hurt? Did it get a lunar pellet stuck in its skin?

It took me a while to process that the outpourings of grief and optimism were about the loss of the robotic vehicle’s data stream and not about the loss of voices from Kashmir. I had to reorient my thoughts to figure out that the disconnection from moon was more urgent than the disconnection from people who have been silenced through digital tyrannies. It did give me a pause to realise that the fate of a hurt robot on the moon seemed to generate more concern than the fate of hurt generations of people in the paradise on earth that we have sequestered from the external world.

I had to figure out why the Chandrayaan, made in India and a triumph of our space programme, was a global event, whereas the violation of universal human rights through a technological blackout was still internal matters. This technological silence, which will hopefully be a temporary disruption, and, at the most, an expensive lesson for future space missions, refuses to take my attention. I will go back to listening for a sign of voice, of hope, of dignity, and of respect from Kashmir, where the digital blackout continues to mark a period darker than the dark side of the moon.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-15-2019-kashmirs-digital-blackout-marks-a-period-darker-than-the-dark-side-of-the-moon

Essays on #List — Selected Abstracts

sneha-pp — 2019-09-03T13:38:12Z

In response to a recent call for essays that social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the #List, we received 11 abstracts. Out of these, we have selected 4 pieces to be published as part of a series titled #List on the r@w blog. Please find below the details of the selected abstracts. The call for essays on #List remains open, and we are accepting and assessing the incoming abstracts on a rolling basis.

1. Manisha Chachra

2. Meghna Yadav

3. Sarita Bose

4. Shambhavi Madan

Manisha Chachra

MeToo in Indian journalism: Questioning access to internet among intersectional women and idea of rehabilitative justice in digital spaces

The advent of LoSHA and MeToo era witnessed an intriguing intersection of technology, politics and gender. The list and name-shame culture of social media has not only displayed changing power dynamics in digital space but an increasing movement towards engendering of internet spaces. The social, political and economic matrix defined by power relationships -- a patriarchy reflected in internet spaces, percolating in our interactions confronted a major challenge when women rose up to claim the same space. Internet space cannot be called a virtual reality as it is a sharp mirror into what is going in the power dynamics of society and politics. My paper broadly seeks to examine this engendering of spatial reality of digital space by looking at various conversations that took place on Twitter around MeToo in Indian journalism. MeToo has been widely understood as narration of one’s tale and how that experiential reality is connected with other women. However, a universalisation of such an experience often neglects intersectional reality attached to women’s experiences -- belonging to different caste, class, ethnicity and other kinds of differences. My paper attempts to question how far MeToo in digital space accommodated the differential aspects of woman as a heterogeneous category. The spatial realities of technological spaces function like a double edged sword-- liberating as well as mobility paralysing. I use the term mobility paralysis to denote a contradiction in digital space-- which might be equally available to all sections of women but not fairly accessible. The accessibility is often a reflection of deep rooted patriarchies and kinship relationships that bind women in same voiceless zone. MeToo in Indian journalism is a case study of how women of different backgrounds access digital spaces in questioning this mobility paralysis and inch towards a certain kind of emancipatory politics. Examining MeToo from the perspective of a social movement emerging on Twitter and Facebook, I aim to scrutinise scope of rehabilitative justice for the accused. The emergence of lists, and claiming of spaces is attached to the question of justice and being guilty or innocent of allegations. Online spaces in the recent times have also emerged as platforms of e-khaps (online khap panchayats with certain gatekeepers of the movement) where screenshot circulation, photoshop technology could be used to garner a public response against a particular person. It is interesting how after MeToo the question was not whether the person is guilty or accused rather how they should abandon their social media accounts and probably go absent virtually. In such a context, it is crucial to question the relationship between justice, one’s digital identity and who owns this identity. If rehabilitative justice is not an option, and apology-seeking is not available, what are we hoping from MeToo? The aim of any name-shame movement must be to reclaim digital space, narrate experiences and also to leave scope for others to respond, and seek justice. The question of justice is also closely linked with how women from intersectional backgrounds access internet, and emancipate themselves.

Meghna Yadav

For most people, the Internet is now synonymous with social media. Likewise, consumption of content on the Internet has shifted. We’ve moved from an earlier design of explicitly going to content-specific websites, to now, simply “logging in” and being presented with curated content spanning multiple areas. The infrastructure for consuming this content, however, remains predominantly screen based, implying a space constraint. Websites must, hence, decide what content users are to be presented with and in what order. In other words, social media must generate itself as a ranked list of content.

In the classical theory of social choice, a set of voters is called to rank a set of alternatives and a social ranking of the alternatives is generated. In this essay, I propose to look at ranking of content as a social choice problem. Ranking rules of different social media platforms can be studied as social welfare functions for how they aggregate the preferences of their voters (i.e. users). Current listings of content could be modelled as the results of previously held rounds of voting. Taking examples, Reddit is built on a structure of outward voting, visceral through ‘upvotes’ and ‘downvotes’, constantly displaying to users the choice they have to alter content ranks on the website. TikTok, on the other hand, relies on taking away most of the voting power of its users.

As the Internet tends towards centralisation, studying how different list ranking rules aggregate our choices and in turn, alter the choices presented to us, becomes important to design a more democratic Internet.

Sarita Bose

Mapping goes local: A study of how Google Maps tracks user’s footprints and creates a ‘For You’ list

The ‘Explore Nearby’ feature in Google Maps has three sections – Explore, Commute and For You. Of this, ‘For You’ section contains ‘Lists based on your local history’ as mentioned by Google itself. The Google Maps auto tracks a user’s movements and creates a digital footprint map and lists up events, programmes, restaurants, shops etc for the user. This research will focus on the ‘For You’ feature of Google Maps and its cultural and social dimensions. The work will focus on how the mapping is done and the logic behind drawing up the list. It will try to find out how the economy of Google Maps works. Why some lists shows up while some doesn’t. What kind of ‘algorithm – economy – user’ matrix is used to make up the list? The work will also try to understand cultural dimensions based on mind mapping techniques of Google. This research will follow three dimensions. The first is the mapping of user’s footprints itself and how the distance covered by a user becomes the user’s own digital existence. The Google Maps automatically asks for reviews of places the user might have visited or passed. The question is what algorithm is Google using to ask for the review? Is it pre-pointed or post-pointed? Thus, we come to the second part. Is Google only listing places that paid it or is it trying to digitally map a user’s area of geographical reach in general. If so, why? This brings us to the third dimension of the research work. What kind of cultural mapping is done of the user? The list the user gets is based on his own history and as more data is added, the more mapping is done. These three dimensions are intricately woven with each other and the work will try to establish this relationship.

Shambhavi Madan

List of lists of lists: Technologies of power, infrastructures of memory

Lists make infinities comprehensible, and thus controllable. By virtue of the ubiquity of cyberspace and the digitized information infrastructures curating reality within these infinities, we are increasingly subjected to curatorial efforts of individuals as well as codes – algorithmic and architectural.

Statistical lists are Foucauldian technologies of power in modern societies; tools for the functioning of governmentality – not just in terms of state control over population phenomena but the governmentality of groups or individuals over themselves. The framework of biopolitics identifies a bureaucracy imposed by determining social classifications through listing and categorizing, within which people must situate themselves and their actions (Foucault, 2008). Thus, the authorship of lists is often reflective of power that allows for the perpetuation of hegemonic constructions of social reality, making the lists themselves sites of struggle.

This paper seeks to contextualize (public-oriented) lists as forms of biopolitical curation that often lie at points of intersection between collective consciousness and social order, through an approach that problematizes the socio-technics of agency and the subjective objectivity of authorship. Although list-making acts such as the National Population Register, NRC, #LoSHA, the electoral roll, the census, and Vivek Agnihotri’s call for a list of “Urban Naxals” all differ in terms of content, intent, and impact, and contain different asymmetries of power, the lowest common denominator lies in their role as producers of public knowledge and consequently, infrastructures of public memory. This approach allows for a reinterpretation of the fundamental duality of lists of and within publics: the functionality of enforcing/maintaining social order, and the phenomenological practise of publicly self-presenting with a (semi-material) manifestation of a collective identity. The former sees the use of lists as tools of population management, enacting citizenship and belonging through forms of inclusion and exclusion; the latter is reflective of the workings of self-autonomy – redefining the authorship of justice and punishment – in networked societies. Thus, a secondary theme in this paper would be to question the change and significance in the role of authorship through a phenomenological comparative of lists that are institutionalised practice versus those that are open and collaborative.

Both the act of list-making and the lists themselves are framed as coalescences of material and imaginary, by juxtaposing the idea of infrastructures as primarily relationalities – i.e. they can’t be theorized in terms of the object alone (Larkin, 2013) – with Latour’s relational ontology of human and non-human actors. The list itself is a non-human object/actant that after emerging as a product of co-construction, takes on an agential role of its own (Latour, 2005). Each of these lists can be considered as a quasi-object, a complex convergence of the technological and the social. Both #LoSHA and the NRC are not mere placeholders being ‘acted upon’, but real and meaningful actors acting as cultural mediators and not intermediaries. The integration of a socio-technical, infrastructural approach with one that emphasizes upon the aesthetics of authorship and public memory allows the subject to be seen as constitutive of an embodied, relational experience as opposed to just existing as a dissociative (re)presentation.

References:

Foucault, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Larkin, B. 2013. "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructural." Annual Review of Anthropology. 42:327-343.

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts

Workshop on Archival Standards and Digitisation Workflow

Admin — 2019-08-22T02:04:42Z

P.P. Sneha attended a workshop on Archival Standards and Digitization Workflow organised by the British Library at NCBS, Bangalore, on August 19 - 20, 2019.

The workshop largely focused on the BL's various archival projects and broader digitization strategy, and included some interesting discussions on management of collections, and access and reuse of archival data. We also had a short practical session on OCR; please see attached documents and the previous email for guides on the same. Click to view the programme schedule.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/workshop-on-archival-standards-and-digitisation-workflow

Centre for Internet and Society

Sarah Zia - Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (YouTube) and Transcript (text)

When algorithms make us not know

Ridehailing drivers only get the user’s name and pickup location as details about an upcoming trip. Photo by Noopur Raval.

Unknowability as a form of knowing: A pedagogy of coping

Not knowing enough about how much will a ride earn them means drivers are forced to be on the roads, often without a break. Photo by author.

Conclusion

Endnotes

References

Digital Humanities and New Contexts of Digital Archival Practice in India

Conference: Website (external)

Digital humanities and new contexts of digital archival practice in India

Making Voices Heard: Privacy, Inclusivity, and Accessibility of Voice Interfaces in India

Download the project announcement cards (shown above): Card 01, Card 02, and Card 03

Making Voices Heard: Project Announcement

Simiran Lalvani - Workers’ Fictive Kinship Relations in Mumbai App-based Food Delivery

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (mp3) and Transcript (docx)

The role and functions of understanding by bhais in gig work

Leaning on brotherhood to ‘safely’ deliver food as gig workers

Exclusions from brotherhood in the gig economy

Food delivery work in Mumbai has historically been male dominated work – be it the ubiquitous dabbawallas (carriers of home-cooked meals) or those working as delivery ‘boys’ in udupis, restaurants, fast food companies and with hawkers. (Image credit: author)

References

Domestic Work in the ‘Gig Economy’

Presentation: Download (PDF)

Concept Note: Download (PDF)

Venue: Student Christian Movement of India (29, 2nd Cross, CSI Compound, Mission Road, Sampangi Rama Nagara)

Date and Time: Saturday, November 16, 3:00-5:30 pm

Location: URL (Google Maps)

Feminist Internet Research Network: URL

If you will be joining us, please RSVP to Aayush Rathi at aayush@cis-india.org.

State of the Internet's Languages 2020: Announcing selected contributions!

Cross-posted from the Whose Knowledge? website: URL

Caddie Brain, Joel Liddle, Leigh Harris, Graham Wilfred

Claudia Soria

Donald Flywell Malanga

Emna Mizouni

Ishan Chakraborty

Joaquín Yescas Martínez

Kelly Foster

Paska Darmawan

Uda Deshpriya

Comments to the United Nations Human Rights Commission Report on Gender and Privacy

HRC Gender Report - Consultation version: Read (PDF)

Submitted comments: Read (PDF)

Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages 2019 - From Conversations to Actions

Event page: URL

Agenda: Download (PDF)

The Mother and Child Tracking System - understanding data trail in the Indian healthcare systems

This article was first published by Privacy International, on October 17, 2019

Case study of MCTS: Read

Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System

Case study: Download (PDF)

Introduction

Doing Standpoint Theory

Cross-posted from GenderIT, September 1, 2019

Image description: Three speech bubbles on different textures. Artist: Catalina Alzate

Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power.

Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors.

We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought.

Unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses.

Endnotes

Digital mediation of domestic and care work in India: Project Announcement

Feminist Internet Research Network: apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network

Introduction to the Project

Research Questions

Endnotes

Kashmir’s digital blackout marks a period darker than the dark side of the moon

Essays on #List — Selected Abstracts

1. Manisha Chachra

2. Meghna Yadav

3. Sarita Bose

4. Shambhavi Madan

Manisha Chachra

MeToo in Indian journalism: Questioning access to internet among intersectional women and idea of rehabilitative justice in digital spaces

Meghna Yadav

Sarita Bose

Mapping goes local: A study of how Google Maps tracks user’s footprints and creates a ‘For You’ list

Shambhavi Madan

List of lists of lists: Technologies of power, infrastructures of memory