Centre for Internet and Society

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #CallingOutAndIn

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:13:43Z

Details of a session proposed by Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

Lists are empowering; they offer a method of curating—things, experiences, people, events. As elements of an archive, they are a powerful tool for including and marking something as important. A list is not a neutral collection of objects; it comes into being within a specific logic, an articulated or unseen/unspecified rules, or criteria by which these objects are either included or excluded. In the context of the #MeTooIndia movement, lists have been weaponized by survivors of sexual abuse or harassment, serving to call out behaviours that for many years had been normalized, accepted, or simply ignored, but a patriarchal system. The list, in this instance, becomes a means around which survivors can rally and find support, while also being a tool for punitive action of various kinds, from legal to administrative to social. While “naming and shaming” (or naming to shame) was the purpose that gained currency in the popular discourse, we would like to explore the multiple meanings and experiences that underlie and are implicated by the act of listing. With specific but not exclusive attention to the list that is commonly referred to as LoSHA, the papers on this panel approach the logic and culture of lists and listing as modalities of feminist action.

To begin with, Usha Raman looks at calling out through listing as a meaning making, legitimating, even therapeutic act for those who participate in the creation of the list as well as those who engage with it in different ways. Radhika Gajjala, along with Riddhima Sharma and Tarishi Varma then go on to discuss the role of feminist digital narratives as evidence and the ways in which they could transgress and rupture institutional/legal/academic institutions and infrastructures. Following this, Pallavi Guha discusses the #MetooIndia movement as the second wave to #LoSha movement, which started in 2017, and points to who and what is still left out of the online narrative of sexual harrassment. Sai Amulya Komarraju applies Sara Ahmed’s ideas about affective economies to look at the responses of feminists and feminist organizations to the two waves of #metoo in India and at the responses of the state and the judiciary following incidents of sexual harassment at work. Finally, Sugandha Sehgal asks, in the context of #LoSHA and #MeTooIndia, how the digital list as spreadable and replicable social media content proliferates online, while also exploring the opportunities digital listing as a form of activism offers to contemporary feminist praxis in the Global South.

Session Team

Usha Raman, professor, Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad.

Radhika Gajjala, professor of Media and Communication Studies and American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University.

Riddhima Sharma, is a doctoral scholar at Bowling Green State University.

Tarishi Varma, is a doctoral scholar at Bowling Green State University.

Pallavi Guha, assistant professor of communication and new media, Towson University, USA.

Sai Amulya Komarraju is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad.

Sugandha Sehgal is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #ButItIsNotFunny

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:12:36Z

Details of a session proposed by Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

Exactly a year after #LoSHA (List of sexual Harassers in the Academia) was compiled by Raya Sarkar in 2017, the second wave of #MeToo began when writer Mahima Kukreja accused comedian Utsav Chakravarty of sending her unsolicited pictures of his private parts. This sparked a barrage of tweets by her with screenshots from other women who had been in similar situations with him, and in one case, also a minor.This was the beginning of the second wave of #MeTooIndia.

In this session, we propose to look at the implications of “List” being circulated in relation to the comedy industry in particular and study the discourse surrounding it. While Raya Sarkar’s was structured as a list and circulated on social media as one too (albeit a dynamic one), the second wave of the movement was nothing of the sort. Sarkar has still refused to divulge details of the assault as shared with her in the interest of those that came forward with their stories. The second wave, involving primarily the media and entertainment industry, was about naming and shaming the perpetrators, mainly by specifying details of every case of harassment while keeping the survivors anonymous. In this case, there was no physical, tangible list, but host of people on social media sharing screenshots of the accounts and retweeting the same. Each of the panellists will be presenting papers and engaging with the interpretative idea of “list” as they understand it in relation to the comedy industry in India.

Apart from such “controversial” issues being brought forth in the media, comedy, or comedians have not necessarily featured as a genre of academic study in India. Although the content performed by the stand-up comedians today has been about challenging the status quo with regard to questioning hegemonic narratives, the idea that at the end of the day “it is just a joke”, unfortunately leads to dismissal of comedy as serious business. It is with this objective as well that we want to foreground the stand-up industry and the ways in which it contributes to dominant progressive as well as regressive discourses especially with respect to gender.

The session is intended to be a panel discussion that would foreground the multivalent possibilities of what “The List” entails with respect to comedy. Both the panelists would be presenting individual papers followed by a discussion of their findings with each other as well as to be thrown open to the audiences.

Paper 1: Sexual harassment in comedy: When Twitter threads are treated as “legitimate” testimonials [Madhavi Shivaprasad]

In my paper, I will be focussing on the characteristics of “The List” circulated by Mahima Kukreja and the reasons people began to consider that the #MeToo movement had “arrived” in India.

There are two main aspects to the way in which it played out in India. At first, it was mainly about showing solidarity with other women, make people aware of the “magnitude” of the problem, the pervasiveness of it. The second was the naming and shaming in the hope of taking away the power harassers hold over the women, banking on their silence.

However, there is also a third aspect to it that needs to be considered with much seriousness: that of the details of the sexual assault itself. These accounts were circulated widely and in reading these details is where the “virality” of the posts lay. It was almost as if digital media houses were having a field day reporting one harassment case after another. Thanks to unimaginable speeds of the internet, reports would be filed within hours of posting the tweet online. New names were being added every day, new lists being made.

It is also interesting that it was the “lack” of a conventional list that ended up making the list of comedians accused of sexual harassment go viral. The list here manifests in the form of multiple Twitter threads by different people associated with the comedy industry. So much so that it became difficult to keep track of who was saying what.

In this paper, I ask questions such as what specific characteristics of the stand-up industry made it possible for it to become the first to come to the limelight. At the same time, I speculate about effect of the #MeToo movement for the men and women who are a part of the comedy industry today. What does it mean for their careers now that some have been outed as harassers? How are the women dealing with the threat, and at the same time comfort of having #MeToo as a resort to made their concerns public?

The questions I ask therefore are these: How does the “List” initiated through Twitter threads become pervasive in its absence as a conventional sequence of items? Is it just the solace afforded by what the list represents that encouraged women to make their stories public? What other structures were in place which made it effective at such a magnitude? What implications does it hold for the larger feminist movement in the wake of so many comedians being dropped off the rosters of large media conglomerates such as Amazon Prime?

Paper 1: The list on YouTube: An analysis of the comments manifested by the Indian stand-up routines on street assaults [Sonali Sahoo]

There has been a shift from the mainstream idea of the essentials of a comic woman (Tuntun, Upasana Singh, Archana Puran Singh on the celluloid and Supriya Pilgaonkar and others on television) who are portrayed from the point of view of the male (for the script has always been written by males). The essentials of the comic woman shall be elaborated upon by tracing the evolution of the idea of the female comic on various settings such a films and television, live performances posted online during the discussion. Today, the noticeable shift has been the female comedians have not remained just the face in a comedic plot but also the voice along with the face (the stand-up comedian writing and performing her own script) in a comedic setting. However, the female stand-up comedians have faced a rebuttal at this juncture. They have been called out for not aligning to the dominant ideals of the topics to be included in a stand-up routine. Their issue-based humour associated with the body, and hegemony politics has been openly reprimanded on Twitter, other social media. One tweet invited a lot of criticism in December 2017 which said “female content bra, boobs, period.” People were agreeing with it but also disagreeing and defending it by saying “so what?” In this paper, though, the scholar in not interested not in the Twitter conversational list rather, she is looking at the comments section on YouTube to understand the reactions people have to content posted by these comedians on their YouTube channel. Following is the explanation of the objective of the discussion.

The list has existed in various forms, here I intend to look at the comments section on YouTube as a list, and look at the implications of it through over a period of 2 to 3 years. (on the YouTube channels of Radhika Vaz, Vasu Primlani, Daniel Fernandes, Karunesh Talwar amongst a few others) To be particular, how are the commentators influencing the comedians or are they really?

How is the list formulated by the commentators different in concern to male and female stand-up comedians when they incorporate street assault or harassment against women in their stand-up routines? (a common ground)
How does it bring out the ideology of the commentators?
Discussion of the impact factor determined through its reach by referring to various newspaper articles that apparently are the voice of a collective group of people in the Indian society.

Hence, the whole point of the scholar is to look at the “list” of YouTube comments as deeply rooted misogyny in the society which have come to the limelight only due to the female stand-up routines on street assaults.

In the end of this session the scholar would discuss the potential of stand-up industry as an important medium to start the discourse on the sexual assault. These comedic routines can also be looked at as to be the first of the incidences discussing their personal accounts of harassment on the comedic stage.

Session Team

Madhavi Shivaprasad is currently a Ph.D scholar in the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies at TISS, Mumbai. She also teaches full-time in the English department at Mount Carmel College Bangalore. Her areas of interest include gender and studies, humour studies, as well as disability studies.

Sonali Sahoo has an M.A. in English language and literature from St. Joseph’s College for women, Vizag. She is currently pursuing an M. Phil in English studies from Christ (Deemed to be University). Her area of interest include cultural, gender and humour studies in particular.

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #AyushmanBhavah

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:09:41Z

Details of a session proposed by Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

One of the earliest known forms of organised administrative list making in the modern history began with the census. Undeniably, from collection of taxes to understanding power dynamics of a diverse population, lists determine the administrative chain of command, from an era of data documentation to the brand new world of big data. Recently, we have been witnessing the increase in the volume of data and constant formulation of new techniques of list making. However, considering lists as a new infrastructure of knowledge, it is highly important to understand, study and scrutinize their legitimacy, politics, political and cultural economy, authority they fall under, and most importantly their targets.

Indian healthcare is a convoluted administration. There is a need for the healthcare system to effectively permeate into the lowest rungs of society, thereby replacing the existent maladroit structure. This session takes Ayushman Bharat – a Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY), as an admirable example which is based on a foundation of a series of lists, prepared for an administrative apparatus, in this case, the public health sector. However, not all reviews of this policy have been favourable to the cause, and the effectiveness to address health at all the primary, secondary and tertiary levels have oftentimes been met with crude skepticism and sardonic critiques. According to Young, a list is not just an organised and processed data, but it is also recorder of a data format that has multiple meaningful relations within its content while also being a window to the economy of selection and exclusion criteria adopted by societies in favour of “the social action it facilitates”. Currently being a crucial policy that involves serious list-making procedures on a large population of India, the need to scrutinize the cultural techniques behind list-making for Ayushman Bharat cannot be unseen.

Lists and network primarily serve in ways twain: the concept might be looked at as a network of information that is systemized to answer the epistemological questions asked by organizations. Additionally, networks clarify the mechanics of progression of an organization by proclivity of head-points. The holistic performance of any organization run by data depends on how well data is predisposed, which is why careful architecture of lists is absolutely essential. For Ayushman Bharat, the creation of lists does not find a pragmatic foundation on which its mettle is rested. The question therefore remains, is the concept of list still a crucial component of the operational infrastructure of the computation and network proliferation of the much talked about universal healthcare system?

We aim to establish two sub-sessions (45 minutes each). In the first half, we aim to:

Begin presenting the paper on Ayushman Bharat- how various lists heavily feature in India’s largest healthcare policy, the mechanisms by which it works and what output it yields, the financial interests of the corporates in Ayushman Bharat (insurance companies, private banks and hospitals, for-profit enterprises providing medical services in collaboration with private hospitals, etc), user expectations and consumer behaviour, the problems behind the policy execution, misutilisation and exploitation of political interest groups whether it be businesses, parties or influential individuals.
Discuss issues pertaining to the operations of Ayushman Bharat - how political groups take to social media platforms to disseminate their message, how there exists a wide communication gap intentionally placed to avoid retortion, how logical fallacies in and reasoning mismatches between the displayed progress and actual progress came into the picture, and how they can be removed, or even how the programme affects one’s political participation?
Present findings - research is mainly reliant on secondary material, with the exceptions of verbal interviews that we aim to conduct for our research purposes. These pre-recorded interviews are merely personal opinions of the interviewee that serve to gauge the impact of our narrative and emphasize (or mask) the thesis on which our research takes shape.

We will accommodate a slideshow to describe our thesis with examples from social media accounts of the National Health Protection Scheme and National Health Agency. The second sub-session instead will be more open to interactions and critical appreciations.

The piece of work is an evidence of collaborative effort in an interdisciplinary space of social science – Economics and Media. Both the co-authors hail from different disciplines that need to intertwine in order to address the topic of choice: The whatabouts of Ayushman Bharat. As a result of our diversity, we plan to address our areas of specialization respectively. For the next half of the session, we plan to interact with our peers, thereby preparing a report on the key-takeaways and suggestions of ideas identified in the session.

Session Team

Arya Lakshmi is a journalist and a media researcher. She has worked across India with various news media publications mostly covering politics. She completed her post graduation in Political Communication from Cardiff University, UK with her interests in Big Data, Internet and Electoral Behaviour. She is primarily involved in media research that revolves around internet and politics.

Adrij Chakraborty is an economics researcher. He is currently an economic analyst with Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy, University of Mumbai and is researching with the Government of Maharashtra on the agricultural practices and labour market behaviour in Maharashtra. He attended Edinburgh University as a graduate scholar with the Scottish Graduate Programme in Economics. His interests lie in economic policymaking in Labour Markets, Migration and Political Economics.

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

IRC19 - List of Proposed Sessions

sumandro — 2018-11-28T15:40:58Z

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

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

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo

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

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

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti

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

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

#ListsAsDatabase - Ria De and Samata Biswas

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

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

#SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice - Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan

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

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

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

sneha-pp — 2019-01-31T06:41:38Z

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

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

Location: Google Maps

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

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

Poster: Download (JPG)

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

IRC19: #List

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

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

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

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

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

Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo

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

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti

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

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

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

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

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

Papers

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

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

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

About the IRC Series

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

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

The IRC series is driven by the following interests:

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

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

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

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

sneha-pp — 2019-01-21T12:11:35Z

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

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

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

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

Selected Sessions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selected Papers

Brindaalakshmi.K

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gayas Eapen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

sneha-pp — 2018-12-06T07:00:30Z

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

Call for Papers

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

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

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

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

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

IRC19: List

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

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

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

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

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