CISxScholars Delhi - William F. Stafford (Nov 03, 6:30 pm)
Event details
When
from 06:30 PM to 08:00 PM
Where
Contact Name
CISxScholars are informal events organised by CIS for presentation, discussion, and exchange of academic research and policy analysis.
Public Measurements, Private Measurements and the Convergence of Units
In this discussion I will focus on a comparison between the standard government prescribed meters for autorickshaws and taxis and the role of ridesharing apps as instruments which take measurements, as the basis for the calculation of fares, and the more general questions which arise for commerce, technology and their regulation. I will organise the paper around the observations of a paratransit operations engineer on the distinction between public and private instruments, and explore the possible implications of new forms of commercialisation of location and proximity and reactions to such developments for understanding questions of fairness and corruption.
William F. Stafford
William F. Stafford, Jr., is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. William's research focuses on the auto-rickshaw meter in New Delhi, as a way to engage with classical questions concerning the relationship between measurement, quantification and delimitations of domains of labour. William's general interests concern the analytics of labour and the reconfiguration of what are often taken as its axiomatic aspects. Before joining Berkeley, he studied Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Delhi School of Economics.
