The Centre for Internet and Society
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IRC 22 - Proposed Session - #ThisMightNotBeOnline
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 </strong>- # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p><strong>Session Type:</strong> Demonstration of Research Output and Methods<br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Over the past two years, we have been experimenting with developing self-hosted servers as a way to address ideas around agency, capacity and enablement within internet infrastructures. The outcomes of these processes have developed into three projects that we would like to share through this session.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><a href="https://thisisherefornow.net/fornow/hfaw/index.html">home_for_a_while</a> was a local area WiFi network that was installed as part of the exhibition real time tactics at IIC, Delhi in December 2019. It was openly accessible within and around the exhibition premises and hosted texts, news articles, how-to manuals, notes and other research developed through conversations around internet shutdowns. Three days into the exhibition, protests erupted in various parts of Delhi against the enactment of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. The state responded with violence, but also with bandwidth throttling and internet shutdowns localised in neighbourhoods in and around Delhi. The experience of exhibiting home_for_a_while was almost a rehearsal for a process that would then break out of the white cube space and into inquilab network.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://thisisherefornow.net/fornow/inq_net/index.html">inquilab network</a> was an open, portable, community run local area WiFi network that travelled to various public protests in a backpack during the anti-CAA movement of 2019-20 in Delhi, India. inq.net operated independently of the internet. It was designed to enable the sharing of information and resources between everybody in its local proximity. It hosted freely downloadable crowdsourced content like pamphlets, zines, articles, posters, infographics, memes, etc. It eventually found a home in a public park in Hauz Rani, until the pandemic and the hastily executed nationwide lockdown brought the protest movement to a halt in March 2020.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.thismightnotbe.online/">thismightnotbe.online</a> is a self-hosted web server located in our home in Delhi, India. It was developed during the lockdown, and has been online (mostly) since October 2020. It is imagined as a publication platform, a pirate hub, a toolkit, a gathering site. It hosts a collaborative storage drive with <a href="https://nest.thismightnotbe.online/s/bTNZYddeAaxQFFS">books</a>, <a href="https://nest.thismightnotbe.online/s/SQzFn5zwxyHgykQ">music</a>, shared lists of <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/PhD_Hunt">PhD programs</a> and <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/artist_statement_generators">artist statement generators</a>, notes on <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/some_notes_on_contact_mics">building pre-amplifiers for contact mics</a>, <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/notes_about_games">games</a> and <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/mvs7z7mahob3om9p">workshop notes on language and computation</a>. It also hosts an <a href="https://www.thismightnotbe.online/radio_roohafza/">internet radio station</a> and a <a href="https://thismightnotbe.online/CicadaPowerlinesMetalDrawl">museum</a> from Shanghai.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">thismightnotbe.online is unstable, precarious and always under construction. Its internal network consists of old laptops and single board computers that share messy tabletops with a happy meal toy, crochet needles and a money plant among other things. You can tell from the sound of its cooling fan that it has visitors, or perhaps just a botnet sniffing around. It heats up during the summer months and goes offline with the occasional power cut. To maintain thismightnotbe.online is to live with it - to share a home; to host friends and colleagues working across geographies and timezones; to inhabit the liminal space between platform and user.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is curious to us that technical activities that go into enabling seamless communication - talking to people about connecting to an unknown WiFi network, getting the ISP to assign you a static IP address, securing an exposed web server - are often accompanied by faint discomfort, anxiety, clumsy and tentative interactions. Such instances urge us to think about some questions - How do our infrastructures produce conditions on agency, access and enablement? What affordances of scale, capacity and mobility do they allow for? How does communication as a technical activity affect the very desire to communicate itself? We would like to use the session to generate conversations around these ideas.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Session Team</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Kaushal Sapre </strong>(b. 1990) is an artist based in Delhi, India. He studied physics and chemical engineering before completing his masters in visual art practice in 2017. His work addresses everyday experiences of living within contemporary technical systems, in an effort to think through conceptions of subjecthood, agency and community. His practice often gets articulated through traces of activity within precarious infrastructural arrangements. He is currently - participating in the curatorial fray of Powerlines Cicada Metal Drawl, supported by Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; contributing to conversations around the social experience of telecommunication with -out-of-line-; maintaining a web server infrastructure with thismightnotbe.online; facilitating courses around digital media and technology at Ambedkar University Delhi. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Aasma Tulika </strong>(b. 1992) is an artist currently based in Delhi. She is interested in moments that disturb belief systems, and how mechanisms of control operate in such encounters experienced in everyday life. She locates technological infrastructures as sites to unpack the ways in which power embodies and affects narrative making processes. Her practice engages with narratives that circulate on social networks and mass media, to record and draw out experiences of ideological disorientations and slips. She has been a fellow at the Home Workspace Program 2019-20, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, and is currently participating in Capture All: A Sonic Investigation with Liquid Architecture and Sarai. She is a member of the collective -out-of-line-, and collaboratively maintains a home server hosting thismightnotbe.online.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Infrastructure StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T12:37:38ZBlog EntryIRC22 - Proposed Session - #“Going Home”: Constructions of a Digital-Urban Platform Interface in Delhi-NCR
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-goinghomeconstructionofadigitalurbanplatforminterfaceindelhincr
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022</strong> - # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p><strong>Session Type:</strong> Individual Paper Presentation<br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">My ongoing fieldwork with taxi drivers in Delhi-NCR suggests that the “go-home” feature and its equivalent in platform apps such as Uber and Ola have generated a lot of interest. This feature matches drivers with rides to their preferred destinations – usually allowing drivers to choose one or two destinations of their choice in a working day (Uber India Help nd). In an environment of algorithmic governance where drivers feel a considerable loss of control and autonomy, this feature offers a semblance of control over their conditions of survival and mobility. Departing from the enthusiasm generated among platform taxi drivers, this paper explores what “home” signifies for platform cultures with specific attention to the social and material infrastructures that enable and contest “going home.” The “home,” as in other instances, conveys familiarity, comfort and (intimate) knowledges. How and why (if so) do platforms as an urban-digital-labour-capital interface rely on or negate these constructions? Does this arrangement offer an incremental step of negotiating interlocking conflicts and if so, how? In summary, this paper provisionally suggests that “home,” as a feature and as an idea, may have been introduced by platform companies but its possibilities are not circumscribed by their designs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Cited</strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">Uber India (nd): “Set a Driver Destination,” Uber India Help, viewed on 9 March 2022, <a href="https://help.uber.com/driving-and-delivering/article/set-a-driver-destination?nodeId=f3df375b-5bd4-4460-a5e9-afd84ba439b9">https://help.uber.com/driving-and-delivering/article/set-a-driver-destination?nodeId=f3df375b-5bd4-4460-a5e9-afd84ba439b9</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Presenter </strong></p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong></strong></p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Anurag Mazumdar</strong> is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Geography & GIS, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. </p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-goinghomeconstructionofadigitalurbanplatforminterfaceindelhincr'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-goinghomeconstructionofadigitalurbanplatforminterfaceindelhincr</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T13:04:02ZBlog EntryIRC22 - Proposed Session - #SocialMediaActivism
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-socialmediaactivism
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 </strong>- # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p><strong>Session Type: </strong>Individual Presentation/Demonstration of Research Outputs and Methods</p>
<p><br /><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-de385f6c-7fff-07a0-15d4-2ae85ecdbd7c"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The said session is based upon the author’s original study on social media as a means of protest in the new digital age. Based on the study “Social Media and Protest: A Case Study on Anti CAA Protest in India” and updating it to “Social Media and Protest: A Case Study of Protest in India during COVID-19” through this session the aim is to bring in light the new ways how dissent or movements of resistance are being navigated. “Home” as being the theme of the conference becomes central point of view in this study and to understand how resistance movement can be participated from home and the impact it makes. This study can be beneficial to understand the socio-political movements in India and usage of digital technologies in mass participation in these movements – these range from amplification of resources, organizing gatherings etc. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The theme social media and modern activism has recently taken the limelight in study of liberal arts. Researchers and universities are now taking social media as a tool to understand modern activism. The proposed study was originally presented in the International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences, Oxford, United Kingdom. The session aims to discuss the findings of the said paper vis-à-vis Anti CAA protest in India as the case study. However, in regards to new developments around global and national politics, the author would also like to bring in perspective new case studies. And highlight the role of social media for dissent in India since 2019, followed in the Farmer’s Protest and much more. </p>
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<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Social Media and Protest: A Case Study of Protest in India during COVID-19 </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The study aims to understand the role of social media in the current chain of events of various activist protests that have happened in the 21st Century or are going around the world. It specifically focuses on the role of social media in mitigating the protest in India. Role of social media thus was recognized as one of the major influences in organizing and facilitating these protests across the country. A special emphasis has been levied upon how the role of social media and how it was changed during the COVID-19 timeline. Understanding how physical interaction was limited how did people still participate in the resistance movement and helped in amplifying the cause. For instance, the Farmers Protest of 2020 is an example of Pandemic, resistance and social media – using this as an example an attempt is being made to understand how the pandemic has severely use of social media among young audience. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In this study we unfold the active role of Social Media Apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram into creating awareness about the issue, advocating for one’s rights and organizing protests. Thus, looking at a new narrative of activism through online means or to say emergence of “Online Activism" and shift in resistance movements to digital spaces. </p>
<div style="text-align: justify;"> </div>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Keywords</strong>: social media, Activist Protest, COVID-19, Farmers Protest 2020, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Resistance, Digital Spaces, Online Activism </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Presenter </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Ms. Anushka Bhilwar </strong>(pronouns: they/she) are a student of MPP (Masters in Public Policy) at the University of Stirling, Scotland and an alumnus of Ambedkar University, New Delhi. Their research expands to AI and tech-policies to contemporary political thought and conflict studies. Currently, she works as a freelance writer and storyteller for Glasgow Women’s Library, Glasgow, United Kingdom and a contributing writer at People’s History of South Asia. In their previous endeavours they have worked within the capacity of a Research Associate and Technical Writer with United Nations Development Programme, New Delhi and Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-socialmediaactivism'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-socialmediaactivism</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T13:01:47ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - # ActFromHome
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-actfromhome
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p><strong>Session Type:</strong> Workshop or Collaborative Working Session<br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Objectives of the Session</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p><strong>Course of the Session and Work Division</strong></p>
<ol><li>Overview on the role of digital spaces and emerging technologies in promoting the role of the home as a space for protest</li><li>Thought exercise involving participants in analysing the merits and demerits of digitising home-based social movements.</li><li>Discussion on government surveillance and content moderation </li><li>Discussion on the impact of digital home-based protests </li><li>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.) </li></ol>
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<div><strong>Session Team </strong></div>
<div><strong>Maya Sherman</strong> 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.</div>
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<div><strong>Rai Sengupta</strong> 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</div>
<div>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</div>
<div>integrate Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) considerations across the national statistical infrastructure of 5 Asian nations.</div>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-actfromhome'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-actfromhome</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T12:46:10ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - #LockdownsAndShutdowns
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-lockdownsandshutdowns
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 -</strong> # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
<hr />
<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p><strong>Session Type:</strong> Workshop or Collaborative Working Session<br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Session Team </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Michael Collyer</strong> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Joss Wright </strong>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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Andreas Tsamados i</strong>s 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Marianne Díaz Hernández </strong>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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Nathan Dobson </strong>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. </p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-lockdownsandshutdowns'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-lockdownsandshutdowns</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-05-19T15:05:42ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - #MetaverseInquilab
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-metaverseinquilab
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - </strong># <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><strong>Session Type:</strong> Presentation and Panel Discussion </p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">This session will begin with a general overview of various social movements during the pandemic and how they were affected by it. For instance, the Farmer’s Protests and Anti-CAA Protests in India, BLM in America and other environmental, anti-globalization and LGBTQ global movements.</p>
<p dir="ltr">A cursory Google search on the term ‘Social Movements’ suggests -</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">“A social movement is a loosely organized effort by a large group of people to achieve a particular goal, typically a social or political one. This may be to carry out, resist or undo a social change. It is a type of group action and may involve individuals, organizations or both.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">The broad objectives of this session are -</p>
<ol>
<li>To reimagine the idea of social movements, not just as flash points but consistent, collective, coordinated efforts for effective social transformation over time and,</li>
<li>To broaden its ambit by reimagining spaces for protests, borrowing from “Yunus Berndt’s people-less protests”.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If geographically distributed work environments are now possible (courtesy of COVID), why not virtually launched DAO based social movements? We are living in unprecedented times. Today, the internet is not just facilitating social movements from home but also allowing many possibilities for more inclusive and democratic participation of communities, collaborative mobilizing and transparent funding mechanisms. The internet has made it possible for all of us to become citizen-activists and imagine create better future(s).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The metaverse is a 3D immersive participatory internet experience that makes use of AR and VR technologies. Combined with the blockchain and DAOs, this trifecta could potentially show the way for everlasting high-impact citizen-led social movements. The advantages of meta-activism include:</p>
<ol>
<li>Transparency - traceable trail of docs</li>
<li>Greater Reach - beyond borders - greater collabs</li>
<li>Efficient - low mobilization cost</li>
<li>Harder to Censor by Govts - cannot delete info on the blockchain</li>
<li>Liberating - use of avatars and pseudonymized identities (free from pre-existing structural inequalities and traditional markers individual, offering a clean slate)</li>
<li>An opportunity to Build New Decentralized Worlds with different (direct) governance structures - shifting human behaviour towards better outcomes</li>
<li>No Hierarchy - shared responsibilities, leaderless movements - reimaging leadership</li>
<li>Egalitarian Decision Making - Decision making occurs when conversations turn into proposals that are voted upon by members of the collective. No action is taken without recorded collective consent.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"> However, new technology by itself cannot fix all societal problems. We will need to put in place consensual principles that enable us to do so. It is precisely this area that excites both of us. How do we create meaningful digital publics? How do we ensure greater inclusion, participation and voice in such digital political spaces? Thus, in the session, we will elucidate on the ways in which citizen-activists can launch and lead sustained future movements on the metaverse:</p>
<ol>
<li>Hacks</li>
<li>Mass Migration from the State’s Central Registries</li>
<li>Social movements as Repositories of Truth - Ex: Farmer NFT & Museum</li>
<li>DAOs to Redeploy Cooperative Wealth</li>
<li>Peace Initiatives that Obliterate Borders - Ex: Aghaz-e-Dosti</li>
<li>Funding Mechanisms for Transparency - Ex: CryptoRelief</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"> Regarding session format, we’d like to present the key points from our joint paper followed by a panel discussion with the members of prominent social movements cited above, ending with a Q&A with the audience. Additionally, our paper will exist in the metaverse for people to come and read and engage with us further. We are in touch with the organizers of the Farmer’s Protests and founding members of Aghaz-e-Dosti. We will be contacting members from other social movements as well if our proposal is selected.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-metaverseinquilab'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-metaverseinquilab</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-03-18T13:01:11ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - #LetsMoveIn
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-letsmovein
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022</strong> - # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Session Type:</strong> Workshop/Collaborative Working Session</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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. </p>
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<div><strong>Session Team </strong></div>
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<div><strong>Arathy Salimkumar</strong> 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.</div>
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<div><strong>Faheem Muhammed </strong>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.</div>
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<div><strong>Hazeena T</strong> 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. </div>
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<div><strong>Manisha Madapathi </strong>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. </div>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-letsmovein'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-letsmovein</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-05-19T14:54:24ZBlog EntryIRC22 - Proposed Session - #DigitisingCrisesRemakingHome
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-digitisingcrisesremakinghome
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022- #Home.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 </strong>- # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Session Type:</strong> Panel Discussion</p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The session is planned as a panel discussion between three scholars on three distinct, interconnected notions of home – specifically the home as a dwelling unit, an administrative unit (such as a municipality, a city, or a state), and a country (or a nation state) in the context of India. We intend to parse these ideas within the context of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic to discuss notions of ‘safety’, ‘trust’, ‘support’, and ‘access’ by examining the digital turn in all three kinds of ‘home’. The session will open with the scholars speaking to each other, and laying out the central ideas. The conversation between the three scholars will act as provocations to enable a larger discussion with other attendees.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In 2020, when the first Covid-19 lockdowns began, the internet was discussed as a space of solidarity, of meeting, entertainment, work, and of support. But soon it became evident that access to such spaces of solidarity or support was not necessarily equal. While for some it was almost non-existent, for many others it was limited or regulated. In the Indian context these differences only stood out further due to unequal access to infrastructure, healthcare, and even basic necessities such as food that was starkly apparent in the long march of several thousand migrant workers from cities back to their ‘homes’ in rural areas at the height of the Indian summer.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">At the national level, the digital response to the pandemic was most palpable. The use of contact tracing through apps such as <em>Aarogya Setu, </em>the <em>CoWin</em> portal for vaccinations, and the often arbitrary use of drones, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence have raised questions about surveillance, inclusion, and how useful technology can be in assisting a public health crisis. Often such responses reflected a law and order response to what has been a public health crisis. On the other hand, the establishment of<em> Vande Bharat </em>missions to bring stranded Indians from around the world ‘back home to India’ presented a very different idea of home.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Administrative units at the state and local levels had differing procedures and interventions. Many attempted to follow the guidelines and interventions laid out by the central government, others introduced their own digital solutions but soon found that these were not enough to actually deliver governance during the pandemic.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This session will explore the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the digital becoming the default mode of managing the pandemic–or any sort of threat. We ask if the idea of ‘home’ as a ‘safe space’ had ever really been so and whether the pandemic exacerbated existing exploitative mechanisms within a ‘home’ – be it the dwelling, the city, or even one’s country. We also intend to discuss issues of access, surveillance, privacy, vulnerability, the burdens of care-work, the exploitative extraction of data, and divergent understandings of consent frameworks within these three axes of the idea of the ‘home’.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Session Team </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Vidya Subramanian </strong>is Raghunathan Family Fellow, South Asia Institute, Harvard University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests lie at the intersection of technologies and societies. Her current research investigates the changing nature of citizenship in the technological society we now inhabit. Focusing on India, her research is loosely framed by two large issues: the first is the colonisation of the everyday so-called real world by the digital; and the second is how power permeates and is implicated in such technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Kalindi Kokal</strong> is Post Doctoral Fellow, Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay. She has a doctorate in law from the Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Her doctoral work centred on understanding how non-state actors in dispute processing engage with state law. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of dispute-processing mechanisms in two rural communities in the states of Maharashtra and Uttarakhand in India. She works on understanding how the manner in which people actually experience state law coupled with their perceptions of dispute resolution and state courts underscore the need to explore broader understandings of law and dispute resolution.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Uttara Purandare </strong>is PhD Researcher, IITB-Monash Research Academy. She is pursuing her PhD in Public Policy under a joint programme offered by IIT Bombay and Monash University. Her area of research is smart cities. Looking specifically at the intersection of technology, gender, and governance, Uttara’s research focuses on how safety and surveillance are constructed by the smart city rhetoric and the role of private sector firms in governing the smart city. The COVID-19 pandemic and the technologies that have been introduced by national governments and smart cities purportedly to curb the spread of the virus have raised interesting questions about privacy and citizens’ rights during a crisis. Uttara is presently exploring some of these questions within the Indian context.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-digitisingcrisesremakinghome'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-digitisingcrisesremakinghome</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T12:23:42ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals
<b>Details of a session proposed by Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
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<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>All our tangible history can be attributed to our records-making going back to when the records were literally set in stone, so to say, archived using human digits (digital heritage!). Oral traditions such as songs, stories and recitals, performative traditions, arts and other cultural expressions that reaffirm of our collective experiences remain intangible. Stories create Legends, Rituals physically embody the legends through performances, Records attempt to freeze time at a moment. Thereby characterizing culture and memories of a community. Our effort here is to visit and discuss who creates the records, discuss the affordance of lists as an information artefact for exchange, facilitating dialogue and collective meaning-making. We peek at the traditional community of Helavaru as map and genealogy tellers, their legends, rituals / performances and the cultural economy involved in making and circulating the archives of cultural memories in contrast with the technology driven formulation of lists that are founding the Internet culture. Allegorically, if the memory of stone as a medium of a message is still alive in us, how are people included and who all are excluded from our “memories”.</p>
<p>Our session would be a performative through experimental list artefacts that intend to make visible the interplay between the form of the information artefact and the content. How do we perceive information when the form of the list changes. The implicit structure of lists is suggestive of a certain order, priority and disconnected connections. We intend to play with those structures, breaking them and making new ones in the process. What do we call a list? and what does it do?</p>
<ul>
<li>Priyanka and Aditya will bring "poetic" list artefacts that juxtapose traditional aspects of list making and lists as a dynamic phenomenon on the internet (ex. #Metoo).<br /><br /></li>
<li>Bhanu will introduce the traditional storytelling community of Helavaru as list performers.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Aishwarya will bring in the current context of social auditing and the stories from the ground today, from a rural context.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Dinesh will illustrate 3 ways list are formulated today mathematically, socially and technologically.</li></ul>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Priyanka</strong> is a new media artist-researcher, currently engaged with Microsoft as an interaction designer. While at Microsoft she solves design problems for the browser, her personal inquiries run deep into understanding people’s lives on the internet, nature of the digital-materiality and its affordances for expression and exchange in networked societies.</p>
<p><strong>Aditya</strong> is a designer and an entrepreneur always thinking of ways to display information beautifully. Lately he has been working on interfaces for lists to provide a clear stream of reason to anyone through simple model(s) of visualisation of information and, therefore attempt to make knowledge more accessible.</p>
<p>Priyanka and Aditya intends to play with the form of lists to investigate its effect on narrative construction. They will bring in “poetic-lists” - experimental list artefacts that probe into the implicit order and biases that lists bring to the act of meaning making, especially in the context of a collective audience.</p>
<p><strong>Bhanu Prakash GS</strong> - As Web application developer at Servelots(.com), he contributes to the open and free software, and has been working on developing tools for delivering visual stories from archives. He has worked with the NCBS@25 project titled “13 Ways” where stories from the history of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Democracy Archives for University of Gottingen, and also on methods to render the folk stories of Vijayadashami rituals into visual stories on the Web.</p>
<p>Bhanu introduces the ways the Helavaru community, in the pre-internet era, created, “circulated” and mutated Lists of names, facts and events forming the information networks of communities, castes, jaatis, clans, tribes. The Helavas are a nomadic community visible around Karnataka and Andhra who deck up their bullocks and carts, set out to the villages of their patrons to sing praises of great deeds of their forefathers and the genealogy of the families with great detail, and end their performance with a ritual Harike - a wish for the well being of their patrons. In return they are paid for their services with grains, clothes, goat, sheep, cow, bullocks and money as much as one can afford.</p>
<p>Their story is an indicator of the cultural economy, of interweaving a web of communities, their systems of socio-political-cultural organisation by developing competence in data indexing, backups and restores, dealing with identity and authentication, conflicts and negotiations and more from generation to generation. The Helavaru claim that each family recorded genealogy of at least 3 lakh families, and passing it on, and also losing in some cases is fascinating.</p>
<p><strong>Aishwarya</strong> is a Communication Strategist at the Society for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT) - Andhra Pradesh, Department of Rural Development, Government of Telangana. SSAAT has been set-up with a vision to uphold the concept of eternal vigilance by the people, facilitated by social activists and Government acting in conjunction.</p>
<p>A social audit is a standardised way of facilitating people to critique the implementation of a welfare scheme, and demand accountability from the government. It is a powerful tool which enables people to come forward, demand information, question officials, and fight for their rightful deliverables of a government scheme. This mechanism ensures transparency in the way a government functions, and has helped recover a lot of money lost to corruption.</p>
<p>In India, a Supreme Court mandate made the social audits of MGNREGS compulsory in all states. However, Social Audit units have been successful in empowering the people only in a few states. While the SAU facilitates an audit, it is conducted by people from the families of the beneficiaries. One social audit is a 15-day process of record verifications, door-to-door verifications, awareness rallies, a Gram Sabha and a Public Hearing. While a social audit ensures accountability, it lacks the guarantee of enforcement. The different layers of bureaucracy often swallows the essence of public participation and grievance redressal does not have follow-ups.</p>
<p>All grievances are recorded in the form of paras in the social audit database. While our on-ground social auditors may be socially and politically aware enough to observe and call out patterns in caste and gender discrimination, the results remain, but in a list on the MIS.</p>
<p><strong>Dinesh</strong> is part of Janastu team - a non-profit group. The team is eager to help address Web content accessibility for the low-literate using social semantic web concepts and are also looking at 3D methods for spatial navigation, location interpretation and storytelling. Janastu engages with software commons by developing and supporting open source social platforms.</p>
<p>Dinesh, with a Computer Science background, will bring list comprehension to this platform using map/reduce, monads, and blockchain as the technical formalisms that make the Internet work and how people are made to toe these invisible lines. Then initiate discussions on Machine Learning within the history of page ranking and how the who, where, what of lists manifest. This will be contextualized with the traditional, the social and the new media social networks and processes that nurture community memory by tuning the semantic distance needed for privacy and by making room for forgetting in ways that communities heal from trauma.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-28T15:55:24ZBlog EntryIRC19 - List of Proposed Sessions
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions
<b>Here is the list of sessions proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call" target="_blank">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
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<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah" target="_blank">#AyushmanBhavah</a> - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-butitisnotfunny" target="_blank">#ButItIsNotFunny</a> - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin" target="_blank">#CallingOutAndIn</a> - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-digitalplatformattributes" target="_blank">#DigitalPlatformAttributes</a> - Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy" target="_blank">#EnlistingPrivacy</a> - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo" target="_blank">#FOMO</a> - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists" target="_blank">#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design</a> - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface" target="_blank">#ListInterface</a> - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase" target="_blank">#ListsAsDatabase</a> - Ria De and Samata Biswas</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed" target="_blank">#LoSHAandWhatFollowed</a> - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting" target="_blank">#PowerListing</a> - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice" target="_blank">#SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice</a> - Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals" target="_blank">#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals</a> - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh</h4>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-28T15:40:58ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice
<b>Details of a session proposed by Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>2017 saw the sudden emergence of the hashtag #metoo, both in India and across the world. This has impacted not just the general public of the internet, but also the global movement women's rights movement and feminist discourse around sexual assault, gender and consent. #MeToo allowed (female) survivors of harassment to resort to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as a tool to accuse powerful men of sexual harassment. In 2017, we saw this with Rose McGowan who tweeted about Harvey Weinstein or Raya Sarkar who released #LoSHA, which further erupted in late 2018 into a larger wave of ‘outing’ of Indian perpetrators in media, politics, and other areas of work.</p>
<p>With #LoSHA and the 2018 wave of #metoo in India, there have been a gamut of responses, even some amount of polarisation, especially among Indian civil society. During #LoSHA, we observed resistance from traditional legal and Human Rights activists and practitioners against acknowledging the unique impact of ‘survivors’ testimonies on social media’ for fear of validating a method that lies outside of ‘due process’ and ‘fair trial’. They reason that due to the ungoverned nature of social media, its platforms are without checks and balances and therefore cannot regulate arbitrary misuse. However, one can argue that social media platforms are indeed regulated by the service providers who have the ultimate power to censor complainants by simply suspending or expelling them from the platform altogether. This became evident when Twitter silenced Rose McGowan and Facebook, Raya Sarkar, promptly after their testimonies began to gather accelerated traction. Thus, the accused may always appeal to the ultimate gatekeepers, the platform providers themselves. It is precisely due to the above stated reasons, that the 2017-2018 wave of social media testimonies has garnered considerable support from a typically contemporary civil society, who recognise the disruption as powerful despite the gaps in the methodology.</p>
<p><strong>Our Proposal</strong></p>
<p>The tentative proposal is for our team of 2 researchers to carry out a 15-20 minute lightning talk (a conversation or debate) providing a landscape analysis of #metoo, raising specific points of discussion and interest. Following this, we will open up the discussion with the audience in the form of multiple roundtable conversations, which will seek to address the following 2 questions:</p>
<ol>
<li>If survivors of sexual harassment are resorting to social media as a ‘means’, or their choice of instrument, what does this imply about the existing fora for due process?<br /><br /></li>
<li>New and emergent imaginaries/perspectives around the end of ‘justice’ that may lie outside the contours of conventional legal frameworks i.e. to what ‘end’ are these survivors disposed?</li></ol>
<p>Our session aims at working towards the following outcomes:</p>
<ol>
<li>A comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of phenomenon of social media - mediation of justice<br /><br /></li>
<li>A current and expanded understanding of 'justice' that is not bound by legal recourse</li></ol>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Esther Anne Victoria Moraes</strong> (Communications Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist and researcher who is passionate about expanding the discourse on the evolving forms of rights-based movements. At TYPF, Esther works on building feminist leadership through on-ground programming and on research on youth movements. Esther also works with on communication and public advocacy around issues of health, rights and youth leadership with a focus on young girls and adolescents. She coordinates online and on-ground public advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and rights and access to information through TYPF's national-level campaign, Know Your Body, Know Your Rights.</p>
<p><strong>Manasa Priya Vasudevan</strong> (Programme Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist researcher who is passionate about the theory and praxis of social justice in an increasingly internet-mediated world, especially in the context of urbanization and datafication. She has undertaken research and advocacy on issues at the intersections of information communication technologies and social justice, primarily in the area of internet governance. She has actively engaged with international multi-sectoral movement building and strategy, both online and offline. At TYPF, she manages the Know your body know your rights programme. Prior to this, she worked at IT for Change in Bengaluru.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:22:52ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #PowerListing
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting
<b>Details of a session proposed by Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>#PowerListing: Approaches towards an understanding of power dynamics of knowledge creation and agency behind ‘listing’ as exercised by the State, Individuals and Corporations</p>
<p>‘Lists’ come with an ontological mandate of organising information in a structured and hierarchical manner. This has a deliberate aspect with respect to the question of power. Our panel attempt to investigate the question of power in terms of who wields it and what implications, philosophically and materially, this lands on the stakeholders thereof. The questions of power have different insinuation when the agency of the ‘listing’ rests with the state, the individual or if it is folded within the operational matrix of a corporate service.</p>
<p>Our panel attempts to bring all these myriad conversations together to try and unpack the various nuances of this discussion on power around ‘lists’. Listed below is the detailed breakdown of this plan:</p>
<p><strong>Paper 1: Digital Lists and List-making in Post-disaster Contexts</strong> [Prof. Shubhda Arora]</p>
<p>Looking at crowd sourcing of lists for humanitarian and relief purposes, this paper explores list making and circulation in a post-disaster context, specifically looking at aspects of public list making and its challenges of credibility and duplicity. The paper further examines the interaction between these ‘unofficial’ lists and intervention agencies namely the Government, Army and NGOs, which prepare their own ‘official’ lists for purposes of relief and rehabilitation. Lists of missing people, of people being marked safe, of relief material and centres, of monetary aid, of loss in terms of human life, land and money are the different kinds of lists prepared and circulated through media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram among others. The constant revision of lists based on localized information and on-ground data, the compilation of master list from various sources of lists and the problem of ‘fake lists’ need further inquiry to understand digital list making after a disaster.</p>
<p><strong>Paper 2: Identity frameworks and #MeToo in India</strong> [Prof. Nidhi Kalra]</p>
<p>When Lawrence Grossberg argued that "Cultural studies needs to move towards a model of articulation as 'transformative practice', as a singular becoming of a community", he likely did not anticipate what became the #MeToo movement. Concerns of identity-transformation, community creation, and activism spread over social has been termed as arm-chair slactivism. Yet, we are witness and participant in a movement whose terrains and possibilities are forming as we read and write. Just a few hours before writing this piece news came of Tarana Burke, the founder of #MeToo claims that she is wary that the movement will need "to shift the narrative that it’s a gender war, that it’s anti-male, that it’s men against women, that it’s only for a certain type of person — that it’s for white, cisgender, heterosexual, famous women. That has to shift."</p>
<p>In the Indian context, #MeToo has been the vehicle of a movement with many identities linked to it--from scholars, politicians, celebrities, to Dalit female students, to women and men in the Media industry. Considering it is such a historic moment in internet history, it is important for us to use the lens of cultural studies to ask what this wave of activism does vis-a-vis identity production/transformation? What the sites of contestation around the concern of identity as it used in the #MeToo movement in India? This talk will hope to open dialogue about recording, transcribing and understand this moment and it's frameworks of identity.</p>
<p><strong>Paper 3: “Making” the (ethnic) citizen: NRC list as State power and anxiety</strong> [Prof. Smitana Saikia]</p>
<p>In borderland regions of modern nation states, the ontological status of legal subjects is often fraught with competing assertions. In India’s northeastern state of Assam, this is particularly true due to a historical movement of peoples from Bangladesh (then East Bengal/Pakistan). Assam’s own nativist movement against “illegal” immigrants in 1980s (both popular and an armed resistance) catapulted the issue into national prominence thereby reiterating the anxiety that nation-states feel while defining and interpellating its citizens, in an Althusserian sense. In this context, the NRC emerges as a tool to affect order in what remains a contested terrain of citizenship. This paper thus situates the NRC in the interacting landscape of the Indian nation-state’s attempt to “identify” (and hence create) citizens on one hand, and on the other, the Assamese elite’s attempt to create the ethnic “other” to consolidate and preserve political power. The paper argues that the state’s need to create a register (list) of citizens is at once a display of its hegemonic power, as it is also reflective of an acute anxiety inherent to projects of constructing (nation-) states.</p>
<p><strong>Paper 4: ‘Congratulations you got a match’-- The embedded listing within the dating app ‘Tinder’ & its implications thereof</strong> [Prof. Ravikant Kisana]</p>
<p>The process of ‘listing’ involves the act of segregating and organising data. This involves questions of power. Who makes the lists and to what end— the state or the subversive, with what motivations, are important points of investigation and discussion. However, such an operational understanding of a ‘list’ assumes a mechanical agency in the ‘listing’ process. This paper looks to investigate the digital apps and services which are based on automated listing and hierarchical segregation of its subscribers. Google, Facebook, Uber, etc— all contain within the folds of their operational code, an algorithmic listing of data. The researcher will seek to explore this nuance in the context of dating app ‘Tinder’, which now offers three levels possible dating matches that have been ‘listed’ and curated automatically. This paper will seek to interview users of the app and try to map the ideas and anxieties around such a digital listing of their very identity profiles.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Dr. Shubhda Arora</strong> is currently working as assistant professor of media and communication at FLAME University, Pune after having completed her doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad . Her doctoral thesis is in the area of Environmental and Disaster Risk Communication.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Smitana Saikia</strong> is an assistant professor of Politics at FLAME University, Pune. She has received her PhD from King’s College London and her thesis studied long term state and identity formation processes to explain conflict in India’s northeast. Her research interests include ethnic conflicts, borderlands, federalism, and caste and electoral politics in India.</p>
<p><strong>Prof. Nidhi Kalra</strong> has been a learning facilitator since 2008. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at FLAME University, Pune. Prior to that, she has taught at the English Department in Savitribai Phule Pune University and Gargi College in the University of Delhi. Nidhi has received her MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi, for which she worked on problematizing Holocaust memoirs. Her research interests include Memory Studies, Trauma Studies, Oral History, Digital Humanities, and Children’s/Young Adult Literature.</p>
<p><strong>Prof. Ravikant Kisana</strong> is currently the Co-Chair of Humanities & Languages at Flame University, Pune. He has previously completed his doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad. His doctoral research focused on the oral histories of Bollywood cinema in Kashmir, and its intersections with Kashmiri nationalism and resistance. His areas of research focus on the sociology of cinema, gender & sexuality intersections with films & new media platforms, as well as investigations into the structural mores of cybercultures.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:22:03ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #LoSHAandWhatFollowed
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed
<b>Details of a session proposed by Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>In an attempt to initiate a conversation around #LoSHA, a group of more than twenty students of Ambedkar University, Delhi, organised a series of events in April 2018, under the campaign <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/2039293892992857/">‘Questioning The Silence’</a>. While the primary focus of the initiative was to point to the cultures of sexual harassment in academia, concerns were also raised around the immediate reception of the LoSHA. What the crowdsourced LoSHA by Raya Sarkar, a law student and an Ambedkarite feminist, triggered were a series of responses, including the <a href="https://kafila.online/2017/10/24/statement-by-feminists-on-facebook-campaign-to-name-and-shame/">Kafila statement</a>; the second list which was made public on Facebook under the pseudonym Malati Kumari, and later deleted; followed by other lists and sexual harassment accusations in different workspaces; institutional backlash, as the LoSHA accused ‘trusted’ men in positions of power in academic spaces. Many also questioned the credentials of the list or chose to remain silent altogether.</p>
<p>Coming from an experience of institutionally engaging with the #LoSHA through the #questionthesilence campaign, we propose to conduct a session that seeks to theorize the ‘list’ as a document, the particularity of its form, and list as a medium and a message. What goes into the making of a list, and what are the kind of subjectivities produced through it? How does social media as an internet platform, in the preparation and circulation of the list, determine the discourses that emerge from it? Further, we want to explore the various possibilities of solidarity networks and feminist practices that have emerged post-LoSHA. Given the possibilities of new intimacies and relationships that liberal spaces open up, how have the debates around the LoSHA questioned the contemporary feminist understanding of sexual harassment and violation in these spaces? How has the existing imagination of gender justice been challenged by the LoSHA?</p>
<p>In an attempt to address these questions, we propose a session with three components. The first part will be a paper presentation which will theoretically engage with the concept of a list. It will explore whether ‘list’ as a medium can define the message, and perhaps mark its limits. It will critically engage with the LoSHA in the larger background of #MeToo with respect to questions around scope for subjectivity in list-making, its potential in questioning power and the ‘due process’ in place, politics around its making, and some of its limitations in addressing the issue of sexual harassment. The second part entails a curated panel discussion with the session organizers as panelists, wherein we will thematically engage with the responses to the #LoSHA, as crowdsourced through our social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter in the month of December. Speaking about the shortcomings of our past engagement, we see a need to approach the LoSHA from different vantage points. The third part of the session will be a poster exhibition, partly curated during the campaign itself, that seeks to demonstrate the kind of problematic remarks normalised under the garb of progressive pedagogy in liberal academic spaces.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Anannya Chatterjee</strong> is a trained Bharatnatyam dancer, a Hindustani classical singer and a theatre artist. She is a part of Sar-e-raahguzar, an endeavour to talk about love, resistance, hate crimes and freedom on the streets by employing the art forms she practices. She holds a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and has written her Masters’ dissertation titled <em>Love, Passion, Peril: A Feminist Understanding of Abuse in Heterosexual Romantic relationships in India</em>. She has also been a member of <em>Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks</em>, and believes in bringing together her art with her feminist politics.</p>
<p><strong>Arunima Singh</strong> holds a Bachelors deree in History form Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has worked as a freelance writer, model, game show host, and is currently working with Swiggy in Sales and Accounts Management. She is a member of <em>Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks</em>. She also plans to one day follow her dream of becoming the Jon Stewart of India. She worked on the figure of Bharat Mata for her MA thesis titled: <em>Clothing Womanhood - meanings of modesty and tradition: from colonial modernity to the contemporary</em>, and wishes to work on studying and deconstructing the discourses around oppression and modesty in her future studies.</p>
<p><strong>Bhanu Priya Gupta</strong> is an M.Phil. student in Women and Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), who has been invested in issues of gender, sexuality and mental health. She has previously worked with Indian Social Institute on social conflict among dalit women in rural Haryana. She is a freelance facilitator on gender, violence and identity formation, with People for Parity, and has conducted gender and capacity building workshops in urban and rural Rajasthan with adolescent school children, middle-aged women and village stakeholders. She has also attended training programmes on gender, sexuality and rights, at Crea and TARSHI. She is currently working on physical disability, sexuality and the emergence of disability life writing in India.</p>
<p><strong>Renu Singh</strong> is a doctoral candidate in Women and Gender Studies Program at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Study (CWDS). She holds an M.Phil. degree in Public Health from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her interdisciplinary training has allowed her to work in the development sector for eight years, while she has also been associated with sexual harassment complaints committees at some of the academic institutions she has been a part of. She is involved with the women’s movement for almost 15 years, especially in Delhi, on issues around social reproduction, affect and care, gender & sexuality, intimacy, love and interpersonal lives. She has also been involved in student politics and is an active member of New Socialist Initiative (NSI) and <em>Stree Mukti Sangathan</em>. She is currently working on higher education, young women’s aspirations and interpersonal ties in the backdrop of liberalization.</p>
<p><strong>Rhea Bose</strong> did her Bachelors in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and holds a Masters’ degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Until recently, she was working at Centre for Social Research, Delhi. Her interest in the field of gender has manifested in different ways, including participation in the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS) where she presented a paper on women in global politics, conducting workshops on gender sensitization in schools as a part of an initiative called <em>Khalbali</em>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:21:01ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListsAsDatabase
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase
<b>Details of a session proposed by Ria De and Samata Biswas for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>The internet-based List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA), initiated by Dalit feminist and lawyer activist Raya Sarkar in 2017 anonymously crowd-sourced names of academics and activists who were accused of harassing women colleagues and students. While a large number of women in the academia rallied in support of the list and its motivations, it also unleashed anxieties about how the list was put together, and the kind of impact it was feared to have. Variously, it has been equated to Khap Panchayats, vigilantism, mob lynchings etc. Last month, the government of India launched an online National Database on Sexual Offenders (NDSO), which will contain the details—names, photographs, residential address, fingerprints, DNA samples, PAN and Aadhar numbers—of individuals convicted on charges of sexual offences against women and children. An associated portal, the Cyber Crime Prevention Against Women and Children (CCPWC) was also launched where citizens can enter complaints against child pornography and other sexually explicit material. Both are modes of digital enlisting through the use of new media technologies, one that is open access and therefore available for modification, co-option and critique, while the other is to be accessible only to law personnel. This two-member panel locates the list in the context of ongoing debates about the conversion of social justice and rights issues in to data repositories. We take in to account the debates on the Right to be Forgotten or the right to delist from the internet, as a specific concern raised in the Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 submitted by the Justice B.N. Krishna Committee. The Bill recognises data principals (or the individuals to whom personal data belongs) as a central component of the legal framework, and subjects data fiduciaries (or agencies seeking to collect, use and process personal data) to the free, informed and explicit consent of the data principals. Right to be Forgotten has clearly emerged as a logical extension of the demands for one’s Right to Privacy. Given that a number of logics, that of ‘naming and shaming’ of offenders, a digital list (database) as a means of communication, dissemination of information and surveillance etc. underscore both the #LoSHA and the NDSO, how do we navigate the messy terrain of human rights concerns about the freedom of speech and expression on the one hand, and the rights to privacy on the other hand? We also think about this vis-a-vis the larger issues related to the data economy and those of data ownership. We refer to studies on state-generated data on crime in India and elsewhere to understand how such data artefacts can be monopolised and processed by private and non-governmental agencies, and how they co-opt contemporary feminist politics and articulations?</p>
<p>We, Samata Biswas and Ria De, will present a collaborative study, organised across two 30 minute long papers, plus a 15 minute discussion time for each totalling to the mandated 90 minute session. The first paper will study the form and scope of the list as a digital artefact through a detailed analysis of the #LoSHA and the NDSO. The second paper will configure the two lists in terms of their status within the data economy.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Ria De</strong> is pursuing her PhD in Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research was about stardom and intermediality. She is interested in popular culture, network and media studies and gender. Currently, she is interested in the women’s movements in the Indian film industries.</p>
<p><strong>Samata Biswas</strong> teaches English Literature at Bethune College, Kolkata, India. Her doctoral research was about body cultures in contemporary India, analysing fitness, weight loss, and diet discourses as present in popular media as well as through narratives of participants. She is interested in visual culture, gender studies, and literature and migration. At present, she is trying to map Kolkata as a sanitary city, focusing on access to clean sanitation or the lack thereof. She runs the blog ‘Refugee Watch Online’. Her latest publication is on “Haldia: Logistics and Its Other(s)” in Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Ranabir Samaddar (Edited) Logistical Asia: The Labour of Making a World Region. (Palgrave Mcmillan, 2018)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:20:14ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #EnlistingPrivacy
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy
<b>Details of a session proposed by Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>This session offers a provocation to advance the conversation on privacy in India. Privacy is at once a legal right, a technological/design feature and an everyday practice of managing our social and personal lives. What do we mean when we invoke privacy in our everyday conversations? Privacy conjoins opposing impulses to engage in online public sociality and expressing a desire for limits on data sharing. We trade privacy for convenience. When we skip
lengthy terms and conditions of apps, websites and other online agreements we enter into an agreement without much concern for what we are agreeing to when we tick the box at the bottom of the contract. Privacy is a right we cannot <em>not</em> want. As much as privacy remains a subject of, and subject to impassioned speech, it becomes a cognitive burden when we are called upon to read the privacy policies before signing up for an online service.</p>
<p>In this session, we invite participants to tell stories on privacy based on their life experiences. The session aims to employ the concept of a list liberally to understand how privacy continues to be on a to-do list of sorts for lawmakers, technologists and users who are constantly being informed to manage their online account settings, to constantly make certain things private and to care about privacy. Even as privacy has finally joined the list of fundamental rights in India, its meaning continues to be contested. What may be the politics of privacy at play in the circulation of the #MeToo list? Privacy itself may be spoken of as a list of values and affordances: as dignity and bodily integrity of rights subjects, as confidentiality of certain information, the integrity of data flows, self-determination and individual autonomy. The list of all things privacy will evolve with new, privacy-by-design technologies in a rapidly evolving information technology global landscape.</p>
<p>The objective of the session is to bring the examples of potential and actual privacy violations from our daily life in the public domain. We plan to invite three to five participants to engage in a small roundtable-format discussion on privacy and the metaphor of list. Pawan Singh (New Generation Network Fellow, Deakin University) and Pranjal Jain (Masters student of Design, Srishti School of Design) will facilitate the session. We plan to invite participants from our academic and professional networks at the International Institute of Information Technology,
Bangalore, NUMA co-working space and Digital Identity Research Initiative (DIRI) at the Indian School of Business (ISB).</p>
<p>We plan to contact interested participants through email in December 2018. In order for this roundtable-format session to be productive, we plan to invite participants from diverse backgrounds who can share their perspectives.</p>
<p>The intent of the session is to make a repository of examples from daily life on privacy at the intersection of online space and social life. The repository of examples can be a dynamic list that grows as participants, attendees and others add to the conversation on privacy. It may be maintained as a digital artefact or an online resource.</p>
<p>We are looking for participants who questions what is privacy to them and still in the process of figuring out what is privacy? We also welcome the participants who do not know what is privacy but curious to discover it.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Pawan Singh</strong>: New Generation Network Scholar at Deakin University. Works on issues of identity, representation, privacy and the costs of social justice in India and globally. Current project on Aadhaar, data privacy and social media in India.</p>
<p><strong>Pranjal Jain</strong>: Human-Centered Designer from Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology. Currently in the 2nd year of Master in Design and research assistant at Digital Identity Research Initiative, Indian School of Business. Believe in Ethical Data Practices. Works on designing for online privacy through speculative and critical design.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2019-01-08T09:56:31ZBlog Entry