Centre for Internet and Society

IRC 22 - Proposed Session - #LockdownsAndShutdowns

Admin — 2022-05-19T15:05:42Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - # Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Workshop or Collaborative Working Session

Session Plan

Internet shutdowns are a form of censorship which can have substantial economic and human rights implications. Despite the potential negative consequences, shutdowns are still used across the globe, and many social perspectives on shutdowns remain under-researched and poorly understood. For example, the relationship between internet shutdowns and one’s sense of safety and freedom at home. This connection is pertinent given the COVID19 pandemic and government recommendations to work from home, which emphasised the importance of the internet and the ability to connect with others freely. By connecting with others online, we create a sense of digital community. While many are spending more time at home, shutdowns continued despite the increasing need for online communication. This session aims to understand community perspectives surrounding shutdowns and other forms of censorship, specifically focusing on one’s “home”. Shutdowns are a common tool to curb forms of collective action (such as protests), and some public spaces have had reduced availability due to COVID19. Therefore, the importance of the internet in enabling social movements, like protests, cannot be understated. Thus, this session will touch upon many essential topics and encourage others to think about shutdowns and the increased importance of the internet in allowing social movements from within one’s home.

The session will last a total of 60 minutes. The first 5 minutes will provide an overview of the session’s structure and why this topic is important. We will then move into a semi-structured format consisting of 3 x 15-minute mini-sessions, with each mini-session touching upon a different question. Example questions may cover topics such as the unique role of the internet in enabling online social movements in times of a lockdown or if shutdowns during lockdowns merit a different moral threshold. The prompt questions will encourage interdisciplinary discussion so that participants from diverse backgrounds can make meaningful contributions. We envisage that this session will be organic and open in a large roundtable format. The last 10 minutes of the session will consist of an open-style discussion so that any remaining thoughts, opinions, and reflections from participants may be shared.

Session Team

Michael Collyer is an OTF Senior Fellow in Information Controls and a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Oxford. His research interests are information controls, Bayesian statistics, machine learning, and natural language processing.

Joss Wright is the Co-Director of the Oxford EPSRC Cybersecurity Doctoral Training Centre; Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade; and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. His work focuses on computational approaches to social science questions, with a particular focus on technologies that exert, resist, or subvert control over information.

Andreas Tsamados is a doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute focusing on human control over AI/ML applications within national security and defence. He is also developing the Algorithmic Resistance Cookbook, a guide to using data-driven tools and techniques to practice resistance against intrusive and repressive aspects of present-day algorithmic culture.

Marianne Díaz Hernández is a #KeepItOn Fellow at Access Now. Marianne is a Venezuelan lawyer, digital rights activist, and fiction writer, currently based in Santiago, Chile. Her work focuses mainly on issues regarding online freedom of speech, privacy, web filtering, internet infrastructure and digital security. She founded the digital rights NGO Acceso Libre, a volunteer-based organization that documents threats to human rights in the online environment in Venezuela. Before joining Access Now, Marianne worked as a public policy analyst for the Latin American NGO Derechos Digitales. She’s volunteered for Global Voices, particularly for the Advox project, since 2010. She has also published several fiction books, and co-founded the small press Casajena Editoras. In 2019, she was recognized with the “Human Rights Hero” award, granted by Access Now, for her “research and leading advocacy efforts against invasive measures taken by the Maduro government in Venezuela. She’s currently working towards a Master’s Degree in Narrative Writing at Alberto Hurtado University.

Nathan Dobson is a Postdoc at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford. He has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. His current research is on internet shutdowns in relation to elections and violence in Africa. He has a background in African Studies and has worked at the University of Florida, USA, and the University of Birmingham, UK.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-lockdownsandshutdowns

IRC 22 - Proposed Session - #LetsMoveIn

Admin — 2022-05-19T14:54:24Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - # Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Workshop/Collaborative Working Session

Session Plan

This is a collaborative session designed in the form of a workshop to understand the implications on social movements because of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Movements of many kinds have moved geographies from public spaces to within the private space of the home. Not only has the nature of movements changed because of this, but we have seen the idea of home being transformed and gaining novel meanings like never before on a global scale. This metamorphosis had to undergo the collapse of inside and outside of home as two separate spaces which we often used to refer to. We were forced to shift most of our ‘outside’ lives to ‘inside’ breakout rooms. We want to collectively understand through this workshop, the different manifestations that movements have taken through digital media devices and its implications on the idea of home. This session seeks to understand the implications of ‘reterritorialized’ home from an entry point of movements through a participatory dialogue which we hope will bring the multifaceted experiences to the forefront of discussion. In doing so, we would like to engage with broader questions of what transformations have happened to movements when we had to navigate ourselves mostly in the digital arena, how people reciprocate to this transformation, how gender, caste, class etc. shape the digital movements landscape, how digital [dis]enable the possibility of protesting in and from home, etc. Some of the concepts that we want to explore through the activities are spaciality, materiality, agency, public/private dichotomy, sociality, mediation, etc. We would like to use storytelling and role playing as activities to engage with these concepts and find more personal meanings to them.

Session Team

Arathy Salimkumar is a research scholar in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Calicut University Campus. She is engaged in a research project mapping the emergence and furtherance of Identity politics in Indian Cinema. She is interested in the questions of political identity and the movements and struggles emerging in association with it in contemporary India.

Faheem Muhammed is a research scholar in the Department of Electronic Media and Mass Communication, Pondicherry University. His work explores the role of digital technologies in resolving as well as exacerbating the status quo. His research interests include critical media studies, techno-culture, and social theories and policies, with an insight into theories of race, gender, colonialism, and social inclusion and exclusion.

Hazeena T is a research scholar in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. Her research interests include social change communication and politics of knowledge. She is interested in understanding the dynamics of knowledge politics in grassroots initiatives and its implications for communities involved.

Manisha Madapathi is a research scholar in the department of communication, in the University of Hyderabad. Her thesis project focuses on the phenomenon of internet shutdowns in India and the implications it has on the several stakeholders involved. She is interested in the processes of congregation and assembly during movements, and what channels enable it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-letsmovein

IRC 22 - Proposed Session - #IdentifyingTheIdeaofLaborinTeaching – Negotiating pedagogy at home and inside classroom(s)

Admin — 2022-05-19T15:16:11Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Presentation and Discussion

Session Plan

If we introspect the past two years in the context of the pandemic, techno-digital tools and methods have become a necessity from being a substitute in our daily ventures. Schools, colleges and other institutions were forced to continue with what we became familiar as ‘work from home’. Taking work spaces as case studies (offices/schools/colleges) we aim to explore how ‘home’ has transformed itself from an informal space to a forma one through the medium of digital devices and the internet. Schools, in particular have undergone a shift in the modes of their practices – onsite to online (home), which has also resulted in the transformation of spaces within which pedagogy used to navigate.

The devices and the programs which cater to platforms like Google classroom, Zoom and other have seen a revival in usage in these recent times. This execution of the digital platforms or the ‘Zooming Towards a University Platform’ (D’Souza, 2020) has however boosted the Education Technology sector since online teaching for them has always been the ‘front paw’ (D’Souza: 2020). With these platforms being increasingly used as mediums to conduct ‘classes’ from the vicinities of home, one significant issue that has come across is the issue of the space. To be more precise, the online platforms and digital devices have challenged the conventional classroom space which has resulted in the change of pedagogy and mobility of individuals – both students and educators etc. This change in the space – from brick and mortar to online interfaces can be related to the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia, which is a result of a decentralization of the physical classroom space.

Evidently, the practice of work, in this case teaching/pedagogy has also undergone changes. Interaction in a classroom was always aimed towards a broader objective carried out within a ‘public sphere’ (Habermas, 1962). With digitization owing to the pandemic the public sphere seemed to get replaced by private spaces especially homes, only to be integrated within an online (digital) space which has a temporal existence. Owing to this, academic work or labor has seen an imposed digitisation on the part of both educators and students, and the transformation of the existing space has called for a different approach towards pedagogy.

Drawing on these, we would like to seek answers for these questions:

How is work or labor in the academic sectors getting reconfigured with the imposition of the digital?
Is the idea of space and concept of work related to each other? if so, how? Or is work specific to space? What difference lies between the space of the home and the institutional space?
Is space or work a characteristic of each other? Do they fulfill each other’s’ features? Given this, does the idea of the public vs private sphere in terms of teaching and learning alter the notion of separate spaces?
How is the classroom getting reconfigured within the home and the digital ? what role does the individual(s) and the technodigital play?

Session Team

Sunanda Kar works as a research student in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Silchar, Assam. Her research interests include Digital Humanities, Literary studies, and New Media.

Bishal Sinha works as a Junior Research Fellow in the Department of English, Assam University. His Research interests include Postcolonial Studies, Film and Media Studies and Literary Gerontology.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-identifyingtheideaoflabourinteaching

IRC 22 - Proposed Session - #HomeBasedFlexiworkInCovid19

Admin — 2022-04-25T12:57:33Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - # Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Panel Discussion

Session Plan

The objective of this session is to elicit how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected work for women in India and Sri Lanka, through the opportunities of remote and flexible work (centred around the home).

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought out unprecedented changes to the way we work. Some have lost jobs, while others have shifted to remote work. Some have seen their businesses stagnate while others have grown new ones from home. Undoubtedly digital connectivity has been crucial to continuity of work for many, through remote and flexible work opportunities, often centred around the home.

But this kind of work is not without its own challenges; particularly for women. Women are increasingly absent from the formal labour market. Women have traditionally been marginalised when it comes to digital technology, in terms of access, affordability and skills. Women have also traditionally borne the larger share of the care burden in the home. Remote and flexible work have long been argued as significant enablers of womens sustained participation in the workforce, in addition to addressing the problem of women working below their skill grade. The COVID-19 pandemic has stress tested these so-called enabling work arrangements for women.

This panel will seek to shed light on the experiences of women working remotely and flexibly in India and Sri Lanka during the pandemic. It will seek to answer questions such as:

Who is able to work remotely and flexibly, and who faces barriers to do the same?
How do women (vis-a-vis men) perceive flexible and remote (home-based) work?
Do they see them as benefits or does this reinforce patriarchal mobility restrictions?
What are the challenges that women face in these kinds of work arrangements?
What is the role of the platform economy in enabling remote and flexible work options for women?
What are the analog complements for women to successfully work remotely and flexibly?
Which changes are likely to be sustained, and which will not

The session will take the form of a panel discussion led by the moderator. After they set the stage and context, the first panelist will discuss some of the high-level trends in digital access, skills and remote work disaggregated by gender from nationally representative survey findings in India and Sri Lanka. This will include discussion of the differential perceptions on remote work among men and women. The next two panelists will then discuss findings from ongoing research in India and Sri Lanka (respectively) on how digitally enabled work opportunities for women are contributing to the empowerment of women in the two countries. They will also discuss the specific challenges and opportunities that have been experienced by women during the pandemic, such as difficulties in balancing care work with paid work in the home, changing roles and dynamics between women and men in the home due to new digitally enabled work opportunities, inter alia. The next panelist will weigh in with findings from a study of digital opportunities in home-based work in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand. The last panelist, who runs a job search platform for blue collar workers, will bring in an industry perspective, shedding light on how employers view women as workers and how women might overcome challenges in finding jobs that match their skills and aspirations.

The session focuses on women, and what is needed to facilitate their participation in the labour market through digitally enabled remote and flexible work opportunities. Women are increasingly absent from the formal labour market and face a number of challenges (precarity, discrimination, etc) to equal participation. Women have also traditionally been marginalised when it comes to digital technology, in terms of access, affordability and skills, which further contributes to economic marginalisation and disempowerment. The research that will be discussed in the session brings to the conversation, the voices, perspectives and lived experiences of women in India, Sri Lanka and other Asian countries through their survey responses and in-depth interviews with them.

Session Team

Sabina Dewan is Founder and Executive Director of the JustJobs Network, which she began with John Podesta in 2013. She is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in India, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Before this, Dewan served as a Senior Fellow and Director for International Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC. Dewan’s research focuses on delineating strategies for job creation and workforce development. She works closely with governments, businesses, multilateral and grassroots organisations providing critical labour market information to improve interventions aimed at generating more and better employment, and cultivating employability, especially for women, youth and marginalised groups.

Mukta Naik, a Fellow at Centre for Policy Research, is an architect and urban planner. Her research interests include housing and urban poverty, urban informality, and internal migration, as well as urban transformations in small cities. At CPR, she focuses on understanding the links between internal migration and urbanisation in the Indian context. Recently, she has worked on gendered experiences of the labour market and related mobilities. She is currently involved with a project on examining the ways in which women’s platform work in India is impacted by corporate and government policy.

Ayesha Zainudeen is a Senior Research Manager at LIRNEasia. Her core areas of interest lie at the intersection of technology and inclusion in the Global South, with a current focus on the future of work. She has 17 years’ extensive experience in this field, having designed, managed, and led numerous research projects in the South and Southeast Asian region for clients such as IDRC (Canada), the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the GSM Association, inter alia. In her current research, she is documenting how digital technologies are changing work opportunities and contexts in particular for women in South Asia. She is also mapping online job portals in the Asia Pacific to understand their potential as a data source for near-real-time labour market analytics.

Gayani Hurulle is a Senior Research Manager at LIRNEasia, where she researches digital policy and regulation, digital inclusion and the future of work across South and Southeast Asia. She is currently assessing impacts of COVID-19 on labour markets in India and Sri Lanka, as well on technology adoption, platform use and education. She is also an external consultant at EY, where she is conducting World Bank Digital Economy Assessments. She has worked with varied clients such as the Ministry of Digital Infrastructure and Information Technology of Sri Lanka, IDRC, UNESCAP and Mozilla.

Hue-Tam Jamme is Assistant professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University. She studies urbanisms in transition from a comparative perspective. Using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, she focuses on the lived experience of societal transformations. Her research explores in particular whether the development of information and communication networks shapes inclusive urban spaces. Jamme currently leads a research project centred on the gig economy and women’s upward mobility and in the capitals of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand. In previous research, she investigated the socio-spatial consequences of the transition towards auto-mobility in Vietnam.

Devesh Taneja is the Co Founder of Vyre, an innovative hiring platform that uses a mix of technologies to facilitate early talent discovery and engagement for the service sector workers. His current research interest lies at the intersection of Technology, Entrepreneurship, Financial Inclusion and Impact Investing. He has several years of experience in investment banking in India and the United States wherein he has worked in fundraising for small businesses. He holds a Masters in Business Administration from Yale University.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homebasedflexiworkincovid19

IRC 22 - Proposed Session - #HomeAndTheInternet

Admin — 2022-05-19T15:21:27Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - # Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Presentation and Discussion of Papers

Session Plan

The COVID-19 pandemic left many of us stranded between homes – some were able to reach back to our natal homes while others had to make do with where we were then situated. This was a difficult journey of sudden confinement. In times like these when people ought to be with their families, many of us didn’t get the chance to be with them. There emerged new questions of what is home, where is our home.

Can there be a single home? Can people from the North Eastern belt call the mainland our home in times of crisis where racial discrimination was right on our face? Do meanings of home change for a person with psychosocial disabilities who relies on external communities for support system? What does this forced confinement inside the home bring for the queer subject for whom the public space was the only getaway to live our queer lives?

We understand that the pandemic opened up the canvas of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ by offering us alternative modes of socialization, thereby building communities within social movement which may not be tied to physical interaction. The internet in this context offered a temporary escape to many of us, while also latching on to our tendencies of addictive consumption. It was the only connection we had with the world outside. Issues that were previously overlooked gained attention as they reached to the level of crisis. Not only did educational learning suddenly shift to the digital space, we also witnessed a transition of the existing social movements into the digital landscape. This was obviously exclusionary for many without access, but also opened scope for a new accessibility of these existing modes of learning which the disabled population could better adapt to.

This session is a presentation of two papers by the three team members on the theme of home and the internet for Dalit-Bahujan and Tribal students in India along the intersections of queer, disabled and North Eastern identity-based experiences. With qualitative interviews of women and queer students, and students with psychosocial disabilities in higher education, we bring out narratives of how the pandemic has affected the idea of home for them, how their cross-cutting intersectional identities have played a role in their experience of the real and the digital space, how the burden of labour has changed for women students in these times, how the social movements took shape within the contours of the home and on the internet, and what are the mental health impacts of these experiences on these students. The papers will be partly autoethnographic as the research questions have evolved from the personal experiences of the researchers themselves.

Keywords: Mental health, movement building, working from home, friendship, labour, discrimination, social media, internet

Session Team

Bhanu Priya Gupta is a PhD scholar in Disability Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). Her research area is mental illness among Dalit-Bahujan women in the Hindi-speaking belt of India. She is a first-generation graduate who comes from the Bhadbunja community (most backward caste) of North India. She identifies as a Bahujan queer woman, a caregiver and person with mental illness. She has previously worked at National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) as a Research Associate. She is also a writer and has published her works at Mad in Asia, Velivada, In Plainspeak, and Gaysi Family.

Dona Biswas is a PhD candidate in Women’s and Gender Studies, studying in Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) and Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS). Her research area is social movement and women in movement, working on Bodoland Movement in Assam. She belongs to Namasudra (SC) Bengali community, migrated Agricultural labourer, in Assam. She has previously worked at Nirantar: A Centre for Gender and Education, Delhi as a Research Assistant on Early and Child Marriage in India. Her writings have been published at Feminism in India, Velivada, and Sanghaditha.

Ekta Kailash Sonawane belongs to Mahar (Dalit) community of Maharashtra. They did their Masters in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi wherein they wrote a dissertation on the intellectual history of class, caste and gender. They have worked as a journalist and researcher at Awaaz India TV and Institute of Human Development. Their work has been published at Dalit Camera, Indie Journal, Colour's Board, Feminist Collective. They have also published a feature article in Hindustan Times.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homeandtheinternet

IRC 22 - Proposed Session - #COVID19VaccineDiscourse

Admin — 2022-03-18T10:16:55Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - # Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Panel Discussion

Session Plan

This panel discusses vaccine hesitancy in the Global North and the Global South as is evident through social media. It is common to talk about the differences between the Global North and the Global South regarding vaccine hesitancy (Makau, 2021). Past studies have looked at economic, social, technological and power gaps regarding the impact of COVID-19 (Makau, 2021). However, our preliminary research suggests there are several similar factors affecting public perceptions of the COVID-19 attitude to vaccines across contexts such as religious beliefs, education, age, lack of trust on public health systems, influence of opinion and religious leaders among others (ECDC, 2022; Kanozia & Arya, 2021; Arce, J.S.S. et. al., 2021).

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic the notion of “home” has become a key space for individuals to feel safe and protected from the COVID-19 virus. Playing a vital role in the creation of this space is the use of social media and the ways in which it influences vaccine discourse in online spaces. The availability and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines provides people with the opportunity to return to the public space and embrace their communities outside of the physical space of home. Our concept of “home” encompasses the whole world. Though we will be discussing the similarities of the Global North and the Global South, we will be talking here of the “home” as a community space that makes us feel “home”, inclusive of the divisions that exist between the Global North and the Global South.

World Health Organization has emphasized the significant role of vaccines for ending the pandemic (Dror et al., 2020). Despite the availability of various vaccines globally, vaccine hesitancy has led to visible protests and resistance against vaccine mandates internationally (Kelly, 2022; Ngo, M., Bednar & Ray 2022). There is a gap in understanding how vaccines are a universal need. Questions we raise are the following: If online communication opens dialogue about vaccine hesitancy or further polarizes it, how does it open access to information regarding COVID-19 vaccine availability? Do digital spaces provide a place for discourse and discussion about these topics?

The reasons behind vaccine hesitancy may vary from place to place. Even though geographical borders seem to blur due to the interconnections in the world by the arrival of internet technology and communication, the world order is still often viewed as being dichotomous Global North and Global South to point to the global socio-economic gaps (Roberts et. al., 2015).

This panel plans to study relevant twitter hashtags to understand how social media has been used to drive people towards/against vaccine hesitancy. The data is scraped using computational tools such as Gephi and Netlytic to identify trends such as #antivaksin, #vaccineSideEffects and #pfizer. We will do close readings of the textual data scraped along with an examination of visible networks and clusters within to see what discursive connections emerge across contexts. We therefore identify common and/or contrasting themes across the specific regional contexts from the global south and global north.

References:

Dror et al. (2020). Vaccine hesitancy: the next challenge in the fight against COVID‑19.European Journal of Epidemiology, pp. 775-779.

Carpentier, N. (2017). Discourse. In Keywords for Media Studies. Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray. Ed., New York: NYU Press, pp. 59-62.

Kanozia, R., & Arya, R. (2021). Fake news, religion, and covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Media Asia, 48(4), https://doi.org/10.1080/01296612.2021.1921963, pp. 313–321.

Kelly, L. (2022, February 12). NZ, Australia vaccination mandates protests gain in numbers. Reuters. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/new-zealand-australia-vaccination-mandates-protests-gain-numbers-2022-02-12/

Roberts, J. Timmons, Amy Bellone Hite, and Nitsan Chorev, Eds. 2015. The Globalization and Development Reader Perspectives on Development and Global Change. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Makau, W. M. (2021). The impact of COVID-19 on the growing North-South divide. E-international Relations, 15.

ECDC. (2022, January 31). Overview of the implementation of COVID-19 vaccination strategies and deployment plans in the EU/EEA. Retrieved from European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/overview-implementation-covid-19-vaccination-strategies-and-deployment-plans

Ngo, M., Bednar, A., & Ray, E. (2022). Trucker Convoy Protesting Covid Mandates Slow Traffic Around Washington. The New York Times. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/us/trucker-convoy-dc-beltway.html.

Arce, J.S.S. et. al. (2021). COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in low-andmiddle-income countries, Nature Medicine, VOL 27 1386, 1385–1394, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01454-y.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covid19vaccinediscourse

IRC 22 - Proposed Session - # ActFromHome

Admin — 2022-04-25T12:46:10Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - # Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Workshop or Collaborative Working Session

Session Plan

Objectives of the Session

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, nations across the world instituted a range of public health measures that limited mobility in many areas, while confining families to homes for indefinite periods of time. Poverty, unemployment and other forms of inequality rose - both within and outside the home. Further, angst against various issues rose- worsening climate injustices, racial violence, gender discrimination, arbitrary layoffs across workplaces, and silencing of minority voices. In a pre-pandemic era, such issues would have elicited physical protest movements by the groups concerned, but with limited mobility - the digital space has become an arena for home-based protests and movements.

This workshop seeks to answer a fundamental question: “Can democracies under crisis survive the home based protests across digital platforms?” It will highlight the role of emerging technologies in shaping the role of home-based digital protests across nations and cultures, with a specific focus on perspectives from Israel and India. Further, it will analyse the immense opportunities and pitfalls of driving home-based social movements on digital platforms. Moreover, the workshop will investigate the ambiguous positioning of online government surveillance and content moderation on collective human rights, with a specific focus on human rights within the home. In addition, it will examine the impact of digital home-based protests upon the aptness and scope of modern democratic regimes.

Course of the Session and Work Division

Overview on the role of digital spaces and emerging technologies in promoting the role of the home as a space for protest
Thought exercise involving participants in analysing the merits and demerits of digitising home-based social movements.
Discussion on government surveillance and content moderation
Discussion on the impact of digital home-based protests
Group work involving participants in designing a digital social movement for a given cause (from a range of causes including climate action, gender equality, vaccine nationalism etc.)

Session Team

Maya Sherman is an Israeli Weidenfeld-Hoffmann leadership Scholar and MSc student of Social Sciences of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, exploring the aptness of digital surveillance policies in democratic regimes. At Oxford, she was selected to represent the university in the Europaeum Policy Seminar, discussing data governance and stargu in the EU, as well as serving as one of 100 promising young leaders in the Global Leadership Challenge 2021. Maya is currently leading several research and policy projects and teams of AI for Good, cooperating with big tech companies as Dell and Microsoft in the UK.

Rai Sengupta is currently pursuing an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the prestigious Weidenfeld Hoffmann Scholarship, a

prestigious full scholarship to Oxford which is granted to 35 scholars globally, in a bid to cultivate the leaders of tomorrow. While at Oxford, Rai is working as a consultant with the Asian Development Bank, helping to

integrate Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) considerations across the national statistical infrastructure of 5 Asian nations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-actfromhome

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 (IRC22): #Home, May 25-27

Puthiya Purayil Sneha — 2022-05-24T14:38:57Z

We are excited to announce that the fifth edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference will be held online on May 25-27, 2022.This annual conference series was initiated by the researchers@work (r@w) programme at CIS in 2016 to gather researchers and practitioners engaging with the internet in/from India to congregate, share insights and tensions, and chart the ways forward. This year, the conference brings together a set of reflections and conversations on how we imagine and experience the home —as a space of refuge and comfort, but also as one of violence, care, labour and movement-building.

Venue: Online on Zoom

Registration: https://tinyurl.com/reg-irc22

Code of Conduct: Download (PDF)

Conference Programme: Download (PDF)

The ‘home’ has been a key line of defence in efforts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Public health recommendations and governmental measures have enforced numerous restrictions on daily living, including physical distancing and isolation, home confinement, and quarantining. These mandates to be at home have relied on the construction, and assumption, of home as a familiar, stable and safe space.

However, home has always been a site of intense political contestation—be it through the temporal frames of belonging, ideas of citizenship and regionalism, role in the reproduction of capital accumulation, or as material signifiers of social status. Over the past 2 years, digital infrastructures have played an intensified role in the meaning making of the home. Coming to terms with the pandemic entailed an accelerated embedding of digital systems in many of our relationships. Be it with the state, educational institutions, workplaces, or each other. Solutions to the many challenges of infrastructure and mobility emerging over the last year have been sought in digital technologies. The digital mediation of the pandemic has ushered in visions of the ‘new normal’ as situated wholly in the digital.

While the initial anxieties of living through the pandemic may have now eased, and we make forays into a changed world, the spectre of the ‘next normal’ awaits. As we continue to come to terms with, and find ways to reorient the disruption of life, being at home has acquired many new meanings. What has it meant to be at home, and what is home? What is and has been the role of the internet and digital media technologies in navigating the contours of a changing ‘normal’? How have/can digital technologies help overcome, or exacerbate existing social, economic and political challenges during the pandemic? What forms of digital infrastructure—tools, platforms, devices and services—help build, sustain and alter the notion of home?

For IRC22, we invited sessions across a range of formats and themes to explore and challenge conceptions of the home. Different people imagine and experience the home in various ways—as a space of refuge and comfort, but also as one of violence, care, labour and/or movement-building. We invited contributions that speak to these provocations through one or more of the above thematic areas. A set of 12 sessions were finalised for the conference (including 4 individual presentations), based on peer selection by teams and presenters who proposed sessions as well as an external review.

Sessions

#WaitingForFood - Rhea Bose and Nisha Subramanian

#thismightnotbeonline - Kaushal Sapre and Aasma Tulika

#IdentitesVulnerabilitiesOpportunitiesDissent - Saumya Tewari, Manisha Madhava, Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay and Aparna Bose

#HomeAndTheInternet - Dona Biswas, Bhanu Priya Gupta and Ekta Kailash Sonwane

#LetsMoveIn - Arathy Salimkumar, Faheem Muhammed, Hazeena T and Manisha Madapathy

#LockdownsAndShutdowns - Michael Collyer, Joss Wright, Andreas Tsamados, Marianne Díaz Hernández and Nathan Dobson

#IdentifyingtheIdeaoflLaborinTeaching - Sunanda Kar and Bishal Sinha

#HomeBasedFlexiworkInCovid19 - Sabina Dewan, Mukta Naik, Ayesha Zainudeen, Gayani Hurulle, Hue-Tam Jamme and Devesh Taneja

#Involute:Jagged Seams of the Domestic and the Vocational - Akriti Rastogi, Deepak Prince, Misbah Rashid and Satish Kumar

#DigitisingCrisesRemakingHome - Vidya Subramanian, Kalindi Kokal and Uttara Purandare

Individual Presentations

#GoingHome: Constructions of a Digital-Urban Platform Interface in Delhi-NCR - Anurag Mazumdar

#SocialMediaActivism - Anushka Bhilwar

#TransActandWhatFollowed - Brindaalakshmi K

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*. The fourth Internet Researcher's Conference was held at Lamakaan, Hyderabad from January 30 - February 01, on the theme of the 'list'.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc-22-home

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 (IRC22) - Selected Sessions

Puthiya Purayil Sneha — 2022-04-26T07:00:30Z

Here is the list of selected sessions and individual presentations for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC22) - #Home. IRC22 will be held online from May 25-27, 2022. The conference announcement, along with details on registration will be published in the first week of May.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home: Call for Sessions

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home: List of Proposed Sessions

Selected Sessions and Total Scores

#WaitingForFood - Rhea Bose and Nisha Subramanian (85.00)

#thismightnotbeonline - Kaushal Sapre; Aasma Tulika (81.88)

#GoingHome: Constructions of a Digital-Urban Platform Interface in Delhi-NCR - Anurag Mazumdar (80.63)

#CovidConfessions - Indumathi Manohar (80.63)

#IdentitesVulnerabilitiesOpportunitiesDissent - Saumya Tewari; Manisha Madhava; Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay; Aparna Bose (79.38)

#HomeAndTheInternet - Dona Biswas; Bhanu Priya Gupta (77.50)

#LetsMoveIn - Arathy Salimkumar; Faheem Muhammed; Hazeena T; Manisha Madapathy (76.25)

#LockdownsAndShutdowns - Michael Collyer; Joss Wright (73.75)

#ActFromHome - Maya Sherman; Rai Sengupta (73.75)

#SocialMediaActivism - Anushka Bhilwar (69.38)

#TransActandWhatFollowed - Brindaalakshmi K (68.75)

#IdentifyingtheIdeaoflLaborinTeaching - Sunanda Kar; Bishal Sinha (68.75)

#HomeBasedFlexiworkInCovid19 - Sabina Dewan; Mukta Naik; Ayesha Zainudeen; Gayani Hurulle; Hue-Tam Jamme; Devesh Taneja (67.50)

#Involute:Jagged Seams of the Domestic and the Vocational - Akriti Rastogi; Deepak Prince; Misbah Rashid; Satish Kumar (65.63)

#DigitisingCrisesRemakingHome - Vidya Subramanian; Kalindi Kokal; Uttara Purandare (61.88)

Note: The total scores were derived from anonymous peer selection by all teams and scores by a panel of external reviewers, with both processes given a 50% weightage.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-home-selected-sessions