Centre for Internet and Society

Call for participation: Conference @ Bangalore - 'WikiWars'

nishant — 2011-04-02T15:43:41Z

Call for Participation: Conferences and Reader on critical insights and experiences on the Wikipedia

CPOV - Critical Point Of View : WikiWars

Call for Participation: Conference and Reader

CPOV (Critical Point of View) Context: The Wikipedia has emerged as the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. Different stakeholders – Wikipedians, users, academics, researchers, gurus of Web 2.0, publishing houses and governments have entered into fierce debates and discussions about what the rise of Wikipedia and Wiki cultures means and how they influence the information societies we live in. The Wikipedia itself has been at the centre of much controversy, pivoted around questions of accuracy, anonymity, vandalism, expertise and authority.

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) are working together to produce a critical Reader on Wikipedia and to build a Wikipedia Knowledge Network. Under the rubric CPOV, we propose two events that bring together different perspectives, approaches, experiences and stories that critically explore different questions and concerns around Wikipedia. The proceeds from these two events will result in a Reader that consolidates critical points of view about Wikipedia.

WikiWars Conference: The first conference to be held in Bangalore, called WikiWars, invites participation from users, scholars, academics, practitioners, artists and other cultural workers, to share their experiences, ideas, experiments, innovations, applications and stories about Wikipedia. The WikiWars conference embodies the spirit that guides an open encyclopaedia like the Wikipedia, by referring to the edit battles that users enter into over topics that have many points of view. WikiWars also refers to the contradictory positions adopted by different stakeholders on the various issues of credibility, authority, verifiability and truth-telling, on the Wikipedia. This conference calls for diverse and varied knowledges to come together in a critical dialogic space that informs and augments our understanding of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: The possible themes and areas for presentations (projects, experiences, experiments, stories or documentation) can include but are not limited to:

Wiki Theory: Endorse, question/contest or delineate the theoretical approaches and view points on the Wikipedia
Wikipedia and Critique of Western Knowledge Production: The predominance of textual or linguistic cultures, post-western knowledge production systems, and indigenous knowledge systems
Wiki Art: Art that uses Wikipedia models, structures or data to explore and expand the practice of Wikipedia project; and accounts that document Wikipedia based art practices or debates
Designing Debate: Suggestions, innovations, critiques and ideas that focus on the design and form of the Wikipedia, to explore the claims of neutrality, objectivity, emergent hierarchy, control and authenticity on the Wikipedia
Critique of Free and Open: Areas like Wikipedia governance, economic practices of and around Wikipedia, and the nature of freedom in usage, production and participation on the Wikipedia
Global Politics of Exclusion: Exploring questions of non-western material inclusion, language, connectedness, oral histories, women, non-geeks, and alternative material that cannot be documented on Wikipedia etc.
The Place of Resistance: Space of resistance and dissent in the Wikipedia, structures that allow for alternative voices, experiences and ideas
Wikipedia and Education: Wikipedia usage in classrooms as a teaching resource, and its effect on pedagogy, the role of Wikipedia in the knowledge production sector, and mobilisation of academic communities around the Wikipedia

For detailed information on each theme, please go to http://cis-india.org/publications/workshops/conference-blogs/Wikiwars

Who Should Apply: The conference in Bangalore aims to bring together an interesting mix of diverse voices from different cultures, geo-political spaces, and context-based practices from around the world, to start consolidating the approaches, experiences, and impact of the Wikipedia:

Students and Wikipedia users who belong to different local chapters or have editorial/contribution experiences on the Wikipedia,
Academics and publishers who are exploring the changes caused by Wikipedia, both in classroom pedagogy and in knowledge production systems,
Researchers and theoreticians, practitioners and proponents, artists and social activists, who are interested in Wikipedia cultures and their socio-political conditions, should be attending this conference.

How To Apply: To apply for the conference, please send the following information by email to infowiki@cis-india.org by the 15th of October, 2009. 1. A note of interest (450 - 700 words) detailing your ideas and possible contribution 2. Your updated resume 3. A sample of your work (term papers, published articles, peer-reviewed papers, books, art-projects, social intervention projects etc.)

Conference time-line:

Announcement of short-listed proposals – 21^st October, 2009.

Sharing of Detailed Proposals with all participants – 15^th December, 2009

Announcement of Conference Schedule and Logistics – 30^th December 2009

Online Registration for non-presenting participants – 3^rd January 2010

Conference Dates – 12^th, 13^th January 2010

Travel support: Travel support is available for some of the conference participants (national and international). The selected participants will be provided with the basic travel and accommodation costs for the duration of the conference from their home-countries/cities to travel to Bangalore for the conference. If you are applying for travel support, please indicate clearly in your “Note of Interest” any of these three options: 1. Full travel support required. 2. Partial travel support required with estimate. 3. Travel support not required. Travel support will be provided by the conference organisers on a case-by-case basis.

Conference Organisers: Sunil Abraham (Sunil@cis-india.org) and Nishant Shah (Nishant@cis-india.org ), Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. If there are any queries regarding the WikiWars conference please write to us.

Research and Editorial Team: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah (Bangalore).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikiwars

Art and Augmented Reality

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:33:55Z

Talk by Jose David Cuartas Correa

The Centre for Internet and Society and the Free Software Users' Group, Bangalore, invite you to a talk by Jose David Cuartas Correa on his project on Augmented Reality (with Sologico Libre Foundation, with the support of Caldas University, CEMA (Center of Experimental Media Arts) and Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology). In this presentation, Jose David will discuss the concept of Augmented Reality (fusion of the real world with the virtual objects and data), and demonstrate how it can be used as an alternative model of manipulation, integration and interaction for media and information. This new technology gives us new ways to create and think; Graphical Interfaces and options for the construction of new worlds, environments and alternative spaces. Augmented Reality is thus a useful tool that can be used by artists, designers and expert users.

The presentation will also analyse the metaphors used in the development of previous, present and next-generation Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and look some examples of interaction interfaces developed by different research groups around the world.

Finally, Jose David will demonstrate the ATOMIC Authoring Tool, software initially developed to create Augmented Reality applications and mind maps, created under the GPL licence.

Speaker

Jose David Cuartas Correa is a student of visual design at the Caldas University in Manizales, Colombia, South America. He is at present an exchange student in the Advanced Diploma in Experimental Media Arts at CEMA – Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India. He also serves as visiting faculty at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, teaching the course “Interaction and Interface Design in the Web” at the foundation level. Jose David is the founder of the Junior Research Group in Free Software for Design, Caldas University, and current president of the SoLógiCo Libre ONG, which promotes the use and development of the free software, free culture and emergent technologies for art, design and entertainment.

Time and Date

Wednesday, 17 June, 2009; 6.00-7.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

Augmented Reality

ATOMIC Authoring Tool - September 2008

http://sologicolibre.org/projects/atomic/atomic/en

atSourceforge

http://atomic-project.sourceforge.net

March 2009

Puzzle in Augmented Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4g7nzl5DKI

June 2007

Music Player in Augmented Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enIN1diZuzA

May 2007

Interactive Sound Mixer in Augmented Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xLHO2c7lMQ

May 2007

Color theory demonstration using Augmented Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srDaBHiFhRs

April 2007

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/art-and-augmented-reality

Financial Speculation as Urban Planning

sunil — 2011-04-05T04:36:21Z

Talk by Prof Michael Goldman

A talk by Michael Goldman followed by an open discussion organised by a group of concerned citizens and the Centre for Internet and Society, about the roots of the US financial crisis and related dynamics in "world city" planning, such as that here in Bangalore.

Speaker Bio

Michael Goldman
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology
Univ of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
McKnight Presidential Fellow

Interest Areas: Transnational, political, environmental, and development sociology; Sociology of knowledge and power; Transnational institutions (international finance, expert networks).

Current Research: Neoliberalism and its discontents; the making of a world city: Bangalore, India; “Water for All”/ water privatization policies; development and environment in North-South relations.

Recent Publications

“How ‘Water for All!’ Became Hegemonic: The Power of the World Bank and its Transnational Policy Networks.” 2007. Geoforum special issue on global water policy, 38(5): 786-800.
“Under New Management: Historical Context and Current Challenges at the World Bank.” 2007. Brown Journal of World Affairs, special issue on Wolfowitz’s Bank, Vol. XIII: 2, Summer 2007.
“El neoliberalismo verde.” 2006. Chapter in Las Politicas de la Tierra, Alfonso Guerra and Jose Felix Tezanos, eds. Madrid: Editorial Sistema.
Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization. 2005. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Yale UP paperback edition, 2006; India edition, Orient Longman Press, 2006; Japanese edition, Kyoto University Press, 2008.
“World Bank.” 2005. Entry in Encyclopedia of International Development, Tim Forsyth, ed., London: Routledge.
“Tracing the Routes/Roots of World Bank Power.” 2005. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, special issue on global water policy, 25(1/2): 10-29.
“The Birth of a Discipline: Producing Authoritative Green Knowledge for the World (Bank).” 2005. Chapter in Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance, Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
“La tragedia della recinzione dei beni comuni.” 2005. Beni Comuni: Fra Tradizione e Futuro, Giovanna Ricoveri, ed., Rome: Editrice Missionaria Italiana.
“Eco-governmentality and Other Transnational Practices of a ‘Green’ World Bank.” 2004. in Liberation Ecologies 2nd ed. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds. London: Routledge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/financial-speculation-as-urban-planning

Experimental Economy Camp

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:36:50Z

Open Discussion

n.e.w.s. is a platform for participatory development of artistic and curatorial projects in contemporary art and new media framed by curatorial contributions from around the globe, bringing together voices and images from North, East, West and South. n.e.w.s. reflects geographic diversity and facilitates a framework for collaboration, content and visions of change outside the normal parameters of the established art world networks.

Recently, n.e.w.s. won the ‘Competition of Ideas’ for authoring a book proposal entitled “Arbitrating Attention”, which would explore new economic and social contexts for art. This 100-page text will be published at the beginning of next year. One of things they hope to do in the book is tap the undercurrent of new economic experiments in the way artistic activities can be de-framed yet incorporate survival tactics for sustainability.

At the Experimental Economy Camp at CIS, n.e.w.s. contributors Renée Ridgway, Stephen Wright and Prayas Abhinav will present certain ideas, seeking counter-points, information and queries, which lend different perspectives to the questions at hand, in order to outline possible strategies and targets. The discussions thereafter will attempt to draw learnings from the dynamic media, academic and scientific community with which CIS interacts, imagining 'new social and economic contexts for art.' At this camp, n.e.w.s hopes to meet and interact with people and researchers with an interest in the creative industries, entrepreneurial and economic experiments.

Further interested individuals and institutions can take part in a symposium and brainstorming event that n.e.w.s will organize in July 2009 in Bangalore. n.e.w.s. will also run an online forum during the symposium in July (http://northeastwestsouth.net).

Speakers

Renée Ridgway is an artist, free-lance curator and writer, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since completing her studies in fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute (MA), she has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and abroad (P.S.1 MoMA Hotel New York, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Gouda Museum) She has made numerous public presentations at various conferences and forums and taught at several universities in the Netherlands and abroad. From 2005-6 she served on the board of the former Gate Foundation, whose artists archive and library were given as a gift to the Van Abbemuseum, and where in 2007 she organised a panel as part of the Be(com)ing Dutch caucus, entitled 'Gate Foundation- Past, Present and Future'. For 2009 Ridgway is organising ‘Negotiating Equity’, a collaborative project at DAI, (Dutch Art Institute) involving the n.e.w.s. platform and her contributors that examines the artist and 'the curatorial'.

As an artist Ridgway is presently preparing the latest installment of her 10-year 'Manhattan Project': 'Beaver, Wampum, Hoes'- a series of installations and public interventions at various locations in and around NYC and the Netherlands in 2009. This focuses on the value of the contemporary ‘cultural currency’ of Dutchness, in relation to the Dutch colonial past (US, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname); the next presentation will be at De Lakenhal in Leiden, May 16th-August 31st 2009.

Ridgway is a co-initiator of n.e.w.s. Her website is http://reneeridgway.net/.

Stephen Wright is a Paris-based art theorist, writer, and Editorial Director of the Biennale de Paris. In 2004, he curated The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade (Apexart, New York), in 2005 In Absentia (Passerelle, Brest), in 2006 Rumour as Media (Aksanat, Istanbul) and Dataesthetics (WHW, Zagreb), and is currently preparing, amongst other projects, Withdrawal: The Performative Document (New York) as part of a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art without artworks, authorship or spectatorship. He has also written extensively on the theoretical dimensions of such practices, and, following a writing residency at Artexte (Montréal, 2006) a book-length essay on the subject, dealing with the challenges of performatively archiving and documenting disappearance, is forthcoming. Wright’s writing has also focused on the use-value of art, particularly in contexts of collaborative practices outside the performative framework of the artworld. A former programme director at the Collège international de philosophie (2000-2007), and corresponding editor of Parachute magazine (1999-2005), he is currently on the editorial advisory committee of the journal Third Text.

Born in 1963 in Vancouver, Canada, he lives and works in Paris.

Prayas Abhinav is a writer and artist working and living in Bangalore, India. He has an interest in re-vitalizing and re-imagining urban spaces. Through his work he explores how public and semi-public spaces can be utilized for cultural and civic uses. He explores the potential of low-fi technologies to connect communities and resources.

He has been part of efforts to seed open content movements in India and in 2007 helped with launching the Creative Commons India licenses in India. In 2007, he also initiated a long-term engagement with urban food systems by using public-spaces to grow vegetables and make them openly accessible through recipe-based maps. In 2008, he spent a month at Khoj Workshops to work on modular toolkits for anarchic protests in cities. In 2006 he made a short film with the Public Service Broadcasting Trust in which he narratively mapped the spaces which the homeless in Mumbai use to sleep at night. In 2005, as a fellow at Sarai-CSDS, he responded to the way urban spaces were used for advertising through poetry and photographs. He edited the Crimson Feet magazine from 2003-2005 (after which it died).

Prayas' projects are documented at http://prayas.in and http://cityspinning.org.

Time and Date

Friday, 17 April 2009; 5.30-7.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/experimental-economy-camp

Getting the net out of its web

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:11:22Z

Article by Malvika Tegta in Daily News and Analysis (DNA), 8 March 2009

Artists, academicians, tech heads and lawyers have come together to give the country a voice in technology, study, polity and discourse, says Malvika Tegta

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The Internet has changed lives in ways we haven't stopped to grasp — the real feeding into the virtual and the other way round. Also, how the Internet interacts with individuals varies across cultures and societies. Narratives on the medium originating in the West cannot size up the complexities of the developing world. In the absence of a voice from the "global south" in affecting the direction of the Internet, technologies continue to be designed for a certain kind of end user, with underlying assumptions. "That apart, as the Internet grows, it doesn't necessarily always grow for the better, with things like cyber terrorism, cyber bullying, pornography, identity theft, gambling, internet addiction, being the by-products of the information revolution," says Nishant Shah, director-research and one of the brains behind the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), initiated in August 2008, set up to take note of what we passively allow to direct our lives.

These are the issues that led Gibraltar-based Anurag Dikshit, co-founder of PartyGaming, parent company of online poker site PartyPoker.com, to think that "the time had come for India to have a voice in technology study, polity and discourse, as we quickly find ourselves becoming an Information Society". He, along with Alternative Law Forum's legal theorist Lawrence Liang, Shah and Sunil Abraham, brought CIS into being, pooling in the finest minds from the field of arts, academia, law and technology. CIS, since, has set out to produce local and contextual histories of the Internet to make voices "emerging out of Asia more visible in international dialogues around technology".

Their approach: research, awareness and advocacy. Their goal: to make sense of how the Internet is changing the world around us, with India at the heart.

CIS looks at, among other things, the way copyrights, closed standards and an absence of public policy in certain areas have affected access, innovation and kept the Internet from being less democratic and vibrant. "Copyright law is kind of a monolithic thing, like a 'one size fits all' kind of solution for encouraging creativity. It doesn't really work especially when you look at an equitable system of access," says programme manager Pranesh Prakash. He adds: "Copyright proves to be a huge barrier to promotion of accessibility, and in the Indian context needs some kind of relaxation." Programme manager at CIS, Nirmita puts this in perspective, in the particular case of internet access for the visually impaired and those with cognitive disabilities. "A blind person cannot read the written word, so you record an audio cassette or you have an e-version of it and a screen reader reads it for you. That inverts the conversion of a format, which is not permitted legally under the copyright law in India. Every time you want to convert it, you need to take permission of the copyright holder. So what that is essentially doing is depriving you of your right to read," she says. "Our country should have a law that is universal. We have signed United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that says that everything on the Internet should be in accessible formats, but it's not binding and we don't have a law on it."

In the area of science and academics, copyrights pose another challenge, that of impeding innovation by keeping from the taxpayer, results of at least the research that is funded by tax a notion CIS has been pushing for. "Scientific literature is propounded on the principles like everyone is allowed to review it and that knowledge spreads to a number of people," says Prakash. Both the scientist and the reader want that. But what we see today is that a few publishers control most of all scientific literary output, so most of it is not accessible because a month's subscription sometimes amounts to the entire library budget of an institution. That is especially a big problem for developing countries.

By the end of this year, CIS hopes that individual institutions take up open access policy. "It may not always have to be a top down approach," he says.

In the realm of governance, CIS identifies use of closed standards software as not only unwise strategy, but also socially and ethically a bad decision, and is looking at policy change in the area. Explains Sunil Abraham, director-policy, in his paper: "If I were to store data, information or knowledge in .doc, .xls or .ppt format, my ability to read my own files expires the moment the licence for my copy of Microsoft Office expires." He adds that governments have a responsibility to use open standards, especially for interactions with the public and where the data handled has a direct impact on democratic values. "In developing countries, governments have greater responsibility because most often they account for over 50% of the revenues of proprietary software vendors," he writes.

They are also exploring bridging digital divides without ignoring the "complex interplay, in the case of India for instance, of caste, language, affordability, education, literacy, and in some cases, even religion" and how the Internet is changing the landscape of higher education in India.
As Shah puts it: "Internet technologies are now becoming tools that we think with. We cannot write without the cursor blinking on an empty screen, we cannot talk in public without the aid of a digital presentation..."

It's about time, then, that we thought about the one thing that's becoming one of the bigger movers in our lives and build a discourse around it.

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To read the article in DNA's e-paper, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/getting-the-net-out-of-its-web

Art and Science from the Tiniverse--An Artist's Perspective on Nanotechnology

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:39:51Z

Talk by Julie Freeman

The Centre for Internet and Society invites you to a talk by Julie Freeman, Wellcome Trust Artist in Residence at the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Centre, Cranfield University.

Abstract

How many people know that, on a fairly prosaic level, nanoparticles are already in everyday use, enhancing the functionality of (for example) sun creams and sticking plasters? In tandem, rumours abound in the media of much more revolutionary advances, such as tiny machines that can zip around our bloodstream killing viruses, but these are still far from being realised. So what is nanotechnology about, and why do we need to know about it?

Sharing a desire to convey scientific information in a non-traditional and non-scientific way, Julie Freeman, artist, has collaborated with Jeremy Ramsden, Professor of Nanotechnology, to develop creative works to advance the understanding of fundamental processes, issues and techniques within and surrounding nanotechnology. The artist’s fascination with biology and technology has steered her toward his subject, where these worlds seem to collide.

In this talk Freeman will discuss her experiences of working with scientists in the nanotechnology world, how science and it's methodologies impact her artwork and will display the Nano Novels – sets of stereo literature and imagery – which help to contextualise nanotechnology.

Speaker

Julie Freeman's work spans visual, audio and digital art forms and explores the relationship between science, nature and how humans interact with it. For the past 12 years her work has focused on using electronic technologies to ‘translate nature’ – whether it is through the sound of torrential rain dripping on a giant rhubarb leaf; a pair of mobile concrete speakers who lurk in galleries haranguing passersby with fractured sonic samples or by providing an interactive platform from which to view the flap, twitch and prick of dogs’ ears.

In 2005 she launched her most known digital artwork The Lake, which used hydrophones, custom software and advanced technology to track electronically tagged fish and translate their movement into an audio-visual experience. The work was developed over three years and supported by Tingrith Coarse Fishery and a two year fellowship from NESTA (The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts).

She is currently artist-in-residence at the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Centre at Cranfield University where she is creating works that aim to increase public understanding of self-assembly and organising processes at the nanoscale and their potential social impacts and consequences.

Julie is a graduate of the MA in Digital Arts at the Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University, London, and Steering Group Chair of FreqOUT! an innovative London based community arts programme, enabling young people to work with wireless technologies.

Time and Date

Monday, 9 March, 2009; 4.00-5.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/art-and-science-from-the-tiniverse-an-artists-perspective-on-nanotechnology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy Response

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

Report

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

Endnotes

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

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

Re:Wiring Bodies

praskrishna — 2011-09-27T06:46:00Z

Asha’s monograph is a historical research inquiry to understand the ways in which gendered bodies are shaped by the Internet imaginaries in contemporary India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring-bodies.pdf