Internet Researchers' Conference

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 http://editors.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 http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-home-selected-sessions

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 http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covid19vaccinediscourse

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 (IRC22) - Proposed Sessions

Admin — 2022-04-26T07:07:52Z

Here is the list of sessions proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

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

#DigitisingCrisesRemakingHome

#LetsMoveIn

#ThisMightNotBeOnline

#MetaverseInquilab

#IdentitesVulnerabilitiesOpportunitiesDissent

#LockdownsAndShutdowns

#ActFromHome

#COVID19VaccineDiscourse

#HomeBasedFlexiworkInCovid19

#HomeAndTheInternet

#SocialMediaActivism

#“Going Home”: Constructions of a Digital-Urban Platform Interface in Delhi-NCR

#WaitingForFood

#TransActandWhatFollowed - Access to care for transgender persons during the COVID-19 pandemic

#CovidConfessions: An internet art project

#Identifying the idea of labor in teaching – Negotiating pedagogy at home and inside classroom(s)

#Involute - Jagged Seams of the Domestic and the Vocational

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-sessions

IRC22 - Proposed Session - #CovidConfessions: An internet art project

Admin — 2022-04-25T13:16:53Z

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

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

Session Type: Online Interactive Exhibit/Individual Presentation/Demonstration of research outputs and methods

Session Plan

Featuring anonymous stories of resilience, wisdom, and joy, in Kannada, Hindi, & English

Background: Over the past 2 years, digital infrastructures have played an intensified role in the meaning making of the home. As the internet offers up access to work, play, and social contact it also mediates our relationships with our own identities, our successes, and failures. In the anonymity of the online community (for those who are privileged enough to have access to the internet and personal hardware like a smartphone or laptop), physical markers of belonging, material signifiers of social status can become irrelevant. For many who don’t have stable home environments, online communities can become a home that their own physical dwellings cannot.
Questions: How can anonymity construct a stable and safe space? How can sharing anonymously via digital technologies help overcome mental health stresses caused by prolonged isolation? Can one find refuge and comfort in the stories and experiences of others? How can online safe spaces be curated as a tool for healing?
#CovidConfessions: This session is an internet art experiment. The goal is to create an archive of anonymous covid confessions to share in the form of illustrations, voice overs, and animation, with the world. Here is a reference to the art style. This is a long-form story, but I’m looking to create long-form, as well as single-slide bitesized multi-media pieces for social media. I know that there are similar confession style online spaces like this one but I’m looking to take these words one step further and create art that can be a healing.
Accessibility: In order to be accessible to non-English speakers, I’d like to gather and include stories in Hindi and Kannada: #कोविडकहानी #CovidKahani #ಕನ್ನಡಕಥೆ #CovidKatha
Gathering Stories: Stories will be collected through digital platforms like LinkedIn/Twitter/Instagram and personal networks like WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram, via a google sheet like this one. I will need this translated into Hindi and Kannada. I will reach Kannada speakers through Telegram and WhatsApp, English speakers through instagram, and Hindi speakers through Instagram and WhatsApp. Would love inputs on how to do this better.

Marginalised Voices: The internet is inherently a privileged space, and given that online confessions are given anonymously and without physical intervention, I don't see how I can reach out to non-internet users for stories at this point without compromising their anonymity — including them is out of the scope of this project. I acknowledge that it's very difficult to centre marginalised voices in this project — would love inputs on how to tackle that.

Session Type

An asynchronous online interactive exhibit, running from April 27 to May 27.
The internet is asynchronous, so we should make space for exhibit style projects which are not tied down to particular live “session.” This is an ongoing project that everyone can participate in. This project will be hosted on a microsite, linked to the IRC website, and shared on the instagram handle: @covid.confessions.project.
However, if I were hard pressed to choose one of the four formats, I would pick format 3 “Demonstration of research outputs and methods.” I can speak about what has been successful and what hasn’t worked with the project, what the reach and impact has been, and whether it answered any of the questions I began with.

Presenter

Indumathi Manohar came to a career in design via theatre, dance, and scuba diving. Currently Communications Designer at CIS, she works on making research publications, annual reports, podcasts, events, and op-eds, more accessible to a larger audience through visual design— whether it be through layout design, infographics, social media creatives or web banners. You can find her work here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covidconfessions

IRC22 - Proposed Session - #TransActandWhatFollowed - Access to care for transgender persons during the COVID-19 pandemic

Admin — 2022-05-19T15:12:46Z

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

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

Session Type: Individual Presentation

Session Plan

This session will be an individual presentation by Brindaalakshmi.K. Transgender persons were among the most severely affected during COVID-19 pandemic. The government of India made no special efforts to address the concerns of the transgender community during the lockdowns. Further hampering the access to their rights, the Government of India issued the rules for the new law, Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 while the world was under a global lockdown. Transgender persons have had to go back to living in severely transphobic and abusive environments with their natal families. Access to healthcare and COVID-19 vaccination has also been a challenge for many transgender persons due to the lack of valid identification documents. Digitisation of the process to change the name and gender on identification documents has made the situation worse for a historically silenced population group. The digital process has widened the gap in accessing healthcare and other support systems during the pandemic.

Under the theme of violence and care, this paper will explore the systemic violence faced by the transgender community during the COVID-19 pandemic and their struggles and challenges in accessing healthcare and other relief. The intent is to explore the role of technology in both enabling better access and also widening the access gap for transgender persons and also the data gap further perpetuating the erasure of transgender persons. The widening access gap will be understood by focusing on the digital process to change ID documents while the positive aspects of the use of technology will be explored by looking at some of the community driven online campaigns to raise funds and other support for transgender persons during the lockdowns.

This session will be based on the initial findings from the qualitative research study, Gendering of Development Data in India: Post-Trans Act 2019 by Brindaalakshmi.K for the Centre for Internet & Society as part of the Our Voices, Our Future project supported by Association for Progressive Communications. For the purpose of this study, qualitative interviews were conducted with NGOs, activists and lawyers to cover the rights related challenges faced by transgender persons. Apart from gender, different intersections of their identity such as caste, religion, urban/rural and disability were also covered in these interviews. Some of the findings will be shared during this presentation.

Presenter

Brindaalakshmi. K is Co-Lead, Queer & Digital at Point of View. They are authoring the study, Gendering of Development Data in India: Post-Trans Act 2019 for the Centre for Internet & Society, India as part of the Our Voices Our Future project supported by Association for Progressive Communications. They previously authored the study, Gendering of Development Data in India: Beyond the Binary for the Centre for Internet & Society, India as part of the Big Data for Development Network (2020). They are a queer rights activist and peer supporter working with the LGBTIQA+ community in India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-transactandwhatfollowed

IRC 22 - Proposed Session - #ThisMightNotBeOnline

Admin — 2022-04-25T12:37:38Z

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

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

Session Type: Demonstration of Research Output and Methods

Session Plan

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.

home_for_a_while 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.

inquilab network 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.

thismightnotbe.online 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 books, music, shared lists of PhD programs and artist statement generators, notes on building pre-amplifiers for contact mics, games and workshop notes on language and computation. It also hosts an internet radio station and a museum from Shanghai.

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.

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.

Session Team

Kaushal Sapre (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.

Aasma Tulika (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.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline

IRC22 - Proposed Session - #“Going Home”: Constructions of a Digital-Urban Platform Interface in Delhi-NCR

Admin — 2022-04-25T13:04:02Z

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

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

Session Type: Individual Paper Presentation

Abstract

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.

Cited

Uber India (nd): “Set a Driver Destination,” Uber India Help, viewed on 9 March 2022, https://help.uber.com/driving-and-delivering/article/set-a-driver-destination?nodeId=f3df375b-5bd4-4460-a5e9-afd84ba439b9

Presenter

Anurag Mazumdar is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Geography & GIS, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-goinghomeconstructionofadigitalurbanplatforminterfaceindelhincr

IRC22 - Proposed Session - #SocialMediaActivism

Admin — 2022-04-25T13:01:47Z

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

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

Session Type: Individual Presentation/Demonstration of Research Outputs and Methods

Session Plan

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.

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.

Abstract

Social Media and Protest: A Case Study of Protest in India during COVID-19

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.

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.

Keywords: social media, Activist Protest, COVID-19, Farmers Protest 2020, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Resistance, Digital Spaces, Online Activism

Presenter

Ms. Anushka Bhilwar (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.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-socialmediaactivism

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 http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-actfromhome