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IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitalliteraciesatthemargins
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Aakash Solanki, Sandeep Mertia, and Rashmi M.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>The session intends to initiate a discussion on digital literacies in the wake of ‘Digital India’ programme drawing on the empirical insights from three different field situations. The discussion will be anchored in the social and material context of Digital India but will not be limited to it. The questions we raise in this specific context may be extended to understand the current conceptual as well as practical deployment of many ICT4D programmes as envisioned by both government and non-government actors. The idea of digital literacy is central to both the conceptualization and the execution of such programmes, and the actors in charge work with their own understanding of the context and needs of the people they aim to empower. There have been very few attempts to systematically understand the concept of digital literacy which leave much scope for either lenient contextual interpretations or context insensitive one-size-fits-all approach towards technological interventions. This session is an effort to begin one such discussion which we hope will refine the prevalent understanding of digital literacy/literacies in India.</p>
<p>From a glance at the structure of Digital India programme, it is apparent that the programme is designed to achieve digital inclusion and is primarily directed towards the digitally marginalized in spite of having a more comprehensive agenda. The schemes such as National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM) and the way they are conceived are indexical of the kind of target groups which the programme plans to address. A key concern for us is to think through the mismatches between the frameworks of the digital literacy initiatives and the local socio-technical contexts which we observed in our field sites. The objective of the session is not as much to arrive at the definitional fixity of the concept of digital literacy as it is to complicate and problematize the prevalent definitions of digital literacy implicit in both visualization and execution of such initiatives. We plan to meet this objective through empirical insights we have on three different field sites.</p>
<p>The session will also focus on certain methodological questions that might help us better understand digital literacy. This part of the session addresses questions such as: how can we conceptually define digital literacy/literacies? What parameters should go into the measuring of digital literacy? How should we theoretically understand it – as technical skills or knowledge or some higher cognitive ability? How can we best pedagogically achieve it given the complexity of ground reality? The questions will be directed towards encouraging thought in this area rather than providing answers. The session will also try and discuss various kinds of policy and pedagogical documentation available on digital literacy and critically debate their conceptualization and execution by juxtaposing them against various uses of ICTs on the ground by specific groups of users. This part of the discussion will draw upon scholarly and other kinds of documentation available on the topic and use them to evaluate various government and corporate initiatives to achieve digital literacy in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>In keeping with the spirit of the conference, the three discussants’ will try to put forth empirical insights from their respective field situations and frame nuanced research and discussion questions on digital literacies at the margins of techno-cultural capital and/or access. Further the discussion will be aided by specific readings and the insights drawn from them. The idea is to have a symmetrical, reciprocatory and anthropologically comparative conversation on questions of technology, materiality, access, meaning making, development and literacy, by moving back and forth between different fieldsites and interpretive frameworks.</p>
<p><strong>Field Note I</strong></p>
<p>The first discussant's work on social media use in rural Rajasthan discusses socio-technical changes instituted by the introduction of ICTs despite their developmental failures. He claims that these changes have been often viewed from technologically or socially deterministic positions and that there are significant empirical gaps between such technocratic discourses and the grassroots experiences of technology. There is a growing usage of social and digital media in rural areas where ICT4D and e-Governance pilot projects have failed to meet their goals. Based on an ethnographic study of ICTs in two villages of Rajasthan, his work aims to situate social and digital media in a complex rural society and media ecology using co-constructivist approach. Focusing on context sensitive meaning making of ICTs, it will seek to contribute to an empirically sound discourse on media, technology and rural society in India.</p>
<p><strong>Field Note II</strong></p>
<p>The second discussant's work on mobile phones and multimedia consumption among the digitally marginalized users in Bangalore brings into focus the popular usage of ICTs, specifically mobile phones, among the subaltern users. While such popular usage indicates a certain level of literacy already achieved by the digitally marginal groups by mere exposure and peer learning, it is not sufficient to do away with all kinds of guided training required to make such users participate in informationalized environments. Her observations on the mobile phone usage among the subaltern users in Bangalore problematize the notion of digital literacy and invite us to think about it as a more layered and stratified concept. They raise questions such as ‘what constitutes digital literacy?’ – some complex use of gadgets learnt by mere exposure and peer knowledge or an awareness about the social relevance of the technologies and knowledge about their appropriate deployment in different social contexts? While mere access and some nominal training might be helpful in equipping people with some knowledge about gadget-use, her study points out that such initiatives are far from achieving the right degree of digital literacy needed to make these people participate in new media ecologies. Thus it contends the claims of 1. Organic literacy attained by mere exposure and peer sharing of technological knowledge and 2. Literacy attained by current training programmes which might equip the digitally marginalized with knowledge of technological use but not necessarily inform them about the context relevant knowledge needed for their appropriate deployment.</p>
<p><strong>Field Note III</strong></p>
<p>The third discussant's work on e-governance initiatives in an Indian state plans to return the gaze on to the bureaucracy itself and takes the conversation from the margins back to the centre. His work moves away from the target groups generally alluded to in programs such as the NDLM. It takes into accounts the struggles, anxieties, hopes and promises of/for a bureaucracy in coming to terms with a gradual but seemingly eventual shift from paper work to digital paper work. The users in this case are staff members tasked by the higher-level bureaucracy-who have little or no clue about it themselves- to learn a new tool and migrate all paper work to the digital domain. Many of e-governance projects are spearheaded by corporate organizations, which in turn dictate the terms of the conversation on Digital Literacy even within the government. What impact does this have on how Digital Literacy is understood, articulated and executed in ICT4D programs within and without the government.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Chapter 5: Communication Biopower, 131-157. <em>Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age</em>. London: Pluto Press.</p>
<p>Mazzarella, William. 2010. Beautiful Balloon: the Digital Divide and the Charisma of New Media in India. <em>American Ethnologist</em>, 37(4), 783-804.</p>
<p>Smith, Richard Saumarez. 1985. Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law. <em>Contributions to Indian Sociology</em> 19(1): 153–176.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitalliteraciesatthemargins'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitalliteraciesatthemargins</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:20:26ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitalDesires
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaldesires
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Silpa Mukherjee, Ankita Deb, and Rahul Kumar.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>We propose to design the panel as a workshop with three paper presentations followed by an open discussion with the house exploring the key question of media objects‟ (in the form of film/film music/memes/gifs/trolls) changing relations with law; copyright and piracy having attained newer connotations in the age of media convergence. While we deal with the materiality of cinema in the new media moment, the session will open out debates on the mutability of media objects in a networked digital terrain ushered in by fast growing and cost-effective internet culture in urban India.</p>
<p>In terms of methodology the panel deploys media archaeology to trace the mutations that film culture has undergone in the digital age. The coexistence of the obsolete media copyright with its meme and its digitally re-mastered copy on torrent informs the research that the three papers involve. A certain engagement with the logic of informed/fan-cinephilic digital labour that unwittingly maintains and updates the algorithmic database of Web 2.0 services will run through the presentations. Along with archival research and interviews with professionals
involved with online media companies and “users” who are now the "pirate/prosumer-cinephiles" of media objects, we will carry out extensive digital ethnography to map the chimera of digital territory that user traffic based internet culture in India helped produce.</p>
<p>The digital is a space of intervention: a space for the users to intervene and play with the material online. It is a constant form of participation underscoring a potential for democratic authorship. The definitive notion of authorship voices the overarching body of the state through its legal status. Thus copyright as a legal entity produces a discourse of power through this form of authorship. The contemporary medium or rather the multi-media
constellation driven by internet culture in India produces an alternative discourse on authorship, complicating the notion of copyright and piracy at the same time. This charged terrain of (il)legality is also due to the nature of piracy in the digital domain, which does not exist in isolation but have now created bodies or spheres where it has been appropriated as a sub-cultural practice. The figure of the “pirate”/ the “troll”/ the “fan” and the “cinephile” now merges with the technologically enabled body of the user of new media who negotiates with the medium in multiple ways (and morphs it) and thereby touches all kinds of spaces within and outside the webspace. It has changed the physical scope of cinephilia as addressed in the paper "A Laptop and a Pen-drive: Cinephiles of Mukherjee Nagar," where the culture of networked sharing evolves from and further complicates physical stations. It has permeated into the body of film music in the paper "Licensed, Remixed and Pirated: Item numbers and the web", which interrogates the layers of user-based morphs that the text of a dance number in Bollywood undergoes in the culture of web based remixing and hacking. It changes the way protected materials like films circulate in the space designated as YouTube, marked by its ability to reproduce copyright materials without violating the law as the third paper titled "Online Streaming in the Era of Digital Cinephilia" points out; the logic of the obsolete
license of old Hindi films which gains a new viral life on YouTube with its official upload vying with the multiple hacker-user uploads.</p>
<p>Thus the panel intends to explore the dizzying overlaps that produce this internet induced distinct zone of ambiguity that neither the law nor the state or the author can claim ownership over. The very embodiment of the material in the digital is in transition i.e. in a state of being morphedby the blurring of the identities of the multiple bodies at work at each moment. Through the three papers we intend to chart this transitional aesthetic sometimes contained and sometimes flowing out of the body of the media text onto the physical, technological and
extra textual objects as well. The panel seeks to position this new world of media objects that overlap and form an uncontainable entity, seeking newer forms of negotiations with the older existing order. We seek to explore then what happens to the very essence of author(ity)ship when digital enters its domain.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p><strong>A Laptop and a Pen-drive: Cinephiles of Mukherjee Nagar</strong></p>
<p>With the changes technology has brought to contemporary life, cinephiles – for whom movies are a way of life, films and how they are experienced have undergone major changes. The classic cinephile, as the term was adopted in the 1960s has undergone a major change in the era of internet piracy. I will look at the way pirated films via torrent downloads are consumed by students in certain pockets in New Delhi especially around Mukherjee Nagar area. These students who come from the upwardly mobile Indian middle class families are engaged inpreparations of competitive exams to land a lucrative government job. Circumstances dictate that these students own a laptop to watch films but not a high speed internet connection. To fuel their cinephilic urge, they are dependent upon soft copy vendors of pirated films. These vendors are like a video library, the repository here being a laptop and a storage drive. These professional film pirates depend upon the p2p file sharing commonly referred as "torrent."
DVD and Blu Rays released by official sources are ripped at a bigger size by certain uploaderswhich are downloaded by another one who rips it to an even smaller size, fit enough to be downloaded by pirates with a slower broadband till it reaches places like Mukherjee Nagar. Using this particular case study, where the world of online film piracy merges with a third world piracy domain, I plan to interrogate the logistics of a new kind of cinephilia and
try and frame this particular form of informal circuit of media production and consumption into a coherent perspective.</p>
<p>Relevant websites: <a href="https://kat.cr">https://kat.cr</a>, <a href="https://yts.la/">https://yts.la/</a>, <a href="https://torrentfreak.com">https://torrentfreak.com</a>.</p>
<p>Relevant software: Handbrake, uTorrent / Deluge / Vuze.</p>
<p>Relevant reading: Treske, Andreas. <em>The Inner Life of Video Spheres: Theory for the YouTube Generation</em>. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2013</p>
<p><strong>Licensed, Remixed and Pirated: Item Numbers and the Web</strong></p>
<p>The coming of new digital technologies has rendered the relationship of media objects’ with law extremely malleable and volatile. It urges us to rethink certain categories we have been working with, viz. piracy and copyright. The specific focus of the paper will be on item numbers’ relationship with changing technology and the law. The proprioceptive body being the central node of enquiry here: the law that affects the body that moves on screen and the body that is moved by the screen is made flexible in the digital age with Web 2.0’s unique design that spawns hackability and remixability. Through the registers of music licensing to YouTube, circulation of content offline as MP3 downloads in cheap mass storage devices, user generated morphed content related to item numbers (in the form of memes, GIFs, trolls, posters, tumblr blogs and listicles) spawned by amateur digital culture and remixing videos of film content the paper traces the gray zone between web based music piracy and its copyright rules. It will interrogate the moment when the entertainment industry has recognized the clear
shift of its spectatorship from the older media to the more digital platforms and appropriates the contingency brought in by the algorithmic anxiety of Web 2.0 and its unique relationship with law and hence censorship regulations to innovate newer means of mass circulation and bypassing censorship.</p>
<p>Relevant content: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2O2dBonBok">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2O2dBonBok</a>.</p>
<p>Relevant user-traffic-oriented platforms: <a href="http://www.memegenerator.com">http://www.memegenerator.com</a>, <a href="http://www.trolldekho.com">http://www.trolldekho.com</a>, <a href="http://www.imgur.com">http://www.imgur.com</a>, <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/">https://www.tumblr.com/</a>.</p>
<p>Relevant curated online media platforms: <a href="http://scoopwhoop.com/">ScoopWhoop</a>, <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/tag/india">Buzzfeed India</a>, <a href="http://blog.erosnow.com/">blog.erosnow.com</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Online Streaming in the era of Digital Cinephilia</strong></p>
<p>Digital piracy has allowed for certain democratization of film distribution and consumption through a parallel economy of piracy. The lack of control over these channels of distribution produces a blatant threat to the copyright and intellectual property rights that are quintessential to the mainstream culture of commercial film distribution. This paper will focus on the intersection of these two dichotomous cultures through the experience of
watching old films via online streaming. The resurfacing of old films hosted by big corporations like Shemaroo, Venus and Ultra who began as film rights and video rights owners at one point host their old video content in a user generated space called youtube. The video content is a very specific form here. It is an obsolete entity, defined by its ambiguity with copyright that is able to make a legal transgression in order to circulate.</p>
<p>The circulation of the feature films in a web space that is primarily known for its clip culture also provides an interesting paradigm for the copyright material. The big corporate copyright floats in a culture of pirated experiences where the legal domain becomes a dizzying site of contradictions. Through this paper I will draw parallels between the history of these companies and their work in the field of film circulation and to the creation of a new form of cinephilia and its complicated relationship to the law. I will use a variety of archival sources, legal documents and discourses on online streaming to contextualize my argument.</p>
<p>Relevant websites: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/ShemarooEnt">https://www.youtube.com/user/ShemarooEnt</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/VenusMovies">https://www.youtube.com/user/VenusMovies</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/UltraMovieParlour">https://www.youtube.com/user/UltraMovieParlour</a></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>None.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaldesires'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaldesires</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:03:52ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitaIndiaUnpacked
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaindiaunpacked
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Deniz Duru Aydin and Amrita Sengupta.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>According to International Telecommunication Union (ITU), four billion people from developing countries remain offline, which represents 2/3 of the total population of developing countries. As policymakers around the
world are increasingly becoming aware of the impacts of connectivity for socio-economic development, bridging the digital divide and bringing access to the unconnected are seen as one of the most critical policy issues of our time. Most recently, the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set an ambitious goal of "significantly
increasing access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020.”</p>
<p>As a country with the third largest Internet user population - despite a low penetration rate of 24% - India has recently put its connectivity agenda to the forefront of national policy making with its Digital India campaign. At the same time, new business models put forward by global tech giants (with the partnership of local telecom providers) are also changing the ICT landscape (Facebook – Free basics, Google – internet Saathi). At the intersection of these two trends lies an increased focus on mobile broadband, which is today the most widely used substitute for computer-based internet access, not only in India but also elsewhere.</p>
<p>In this Workshop Session, we want to critically analyze the objectives of these policy proposals. We suggest the following themes, as starting points for discussion:</p>
<ul>
<li>While mobile phones bridge certain kinds of social divide, it also a perpetrates a second level of digital divide where the user experience through a cheap mobile phone and a limited data package is different and more restricted than a PC / an advanced smart phone / tablet with high speed internet access.</li>
<li>The need for an effective database/measurement system which not only tracks the access but also the kind of access provided, its penetration into marginalized backward communities and how it is really impacting development as one sees it.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>We will divide the participants into smaller groups and each group will be asked to engage in a series of topics and come back with 3 key recommendations in their proposed topic.</p>
<p>Series of questions / challenges / (subject to review as we work on the workshop materials):</p>
<ul>
<li>How does the current digital India campaign perpetrate divides by not looking into the question of user experience?</li>
<li>Is it enough to look at the rural/Urban divide? Is there a need to look specifically at the Government defined backward classes / communities while one speaks of internet connectivity?</li>
<li>What is an effective measure of success for these programmes? How can we critically set up measures for this programme such that it looks not only at the user penetration but also look at things like user experience / digital literacy / specific penetration into backward communities, as well as opportunities for self-expression?</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
None.
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaindiaunpacked'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaindiaunpacked</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:17:41ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #ArchiveAnarchy (Archives, Accessibility, and Social Media)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-archiveanarchy
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ranjani M Prasad and Farah Yameen.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>In the last decade, the internet has aided a proliferation of information networks - Google Books, archive.org, Hathi Trust, pad.ma and similar archive based knowledge platforms – and cloud based data storage has become a useful and accessible alternative to file based systems.</p>
<p>The session opens up with questions of accessibility, ownership and hegemonies in an active archive. It takes up three archives that are being built at Ambedkar Univeristy and other similar archives to explore the emerging issues of knowledge sharing on the internet.</p>
<ul>
<li>The Lotika Vardarajan archive is an ethnographic archive putting together an academic’s research on indigenous Maritime and Textile traditions and their indepth documentation.</li>
<li>The Delhi Oralities Archive is an oral history archive of city memories and resident narratives that seeks to be accessible to the city as an open resource.</li>
<li>The Institutional Memory Archive is a living archive continuously reinventing itself according the needs of the university campus that it documents.</li></ul>
<p>The archiving impulses in each case are different as are the dissemination needs of the archive. How do Internet tools like social media, audio and video distribution platforms like Soundcloud and YouTube intervene in the archiving space to enable and catalyze access? Do dissemination strategies provided by Twitter and Facebook affect the use and usability of archives? Does such access threaten questions of ownership and privacy? Who owns a public archive like Delhi Oralities? What hierarchies operate in living archives to decide what is archived and who archives it? What are the limits of such knowledge repositories and the open access movement itself, especially in the light of traditional knowledge structures?</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>The discussion session explores questions of archives outside the academic research space. It discusses the possibility of using non-traditional platforms for data sharing to maximize access, sustainability and co-authorship for living archives.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>Basic knowledge about existing social media platforms, open source repository softwares such as DSpace and familiarity with Creative Commons licensing.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-archiveanarchy'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-archiveanarchy</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:11:45ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #AFCinema2.0
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-afcinema2.0
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Akriti Rastogi and Ishani Dey. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<blockquote>Amour fou is saturated with its own aesthetic, it fills itself to the borders of itself with the trajectories of its own gestures, it runs on angels' clocks, it is not a fit fate for commissars & shopkeepers. Its ego evaporates in the mutability of desire, its communal spirit withers in the selfishness of obsession. (Bey, 1985)</blockquote>
<p>Confronted with consolidating rhizomatic concerns that inevitably crop their heads in any forum on internet discussions, let alone cinema, AF, or Amour fou encapsulates the very essence of free access cinema – AF is “not the result of freedom but rather its precondition” (Bey, 1985), AF is Cinema in web 2.0.</p>
<p>The proposed session will be an interactive conversation exploring the Indian scenario of internet based independent filmmaking. The key concerns mediating this dialogue are the mobilization of the internet as a space of exhibition and distribution and its implications in moving through extra-legal spaces, garnering cultural capital and articulating desires of its audience. The purpose here is to engage with cinema within “the broader industrial, institutional, and market contexts in which film exists” moving away from film scholarship focusing solely on the “meaning of the text” while disregarding the very circumstances in which those texts or discourses are “produced and circulated” (McDonald, 2013: 147).</p>
<p>Drawing from traditional methods in cinema scholarship, we turn to our own research methods in trying to articulate contextual engagements with amorphous forms of medium, media and archive. We explore the research potentials that the internet provides as an immediate archive of the contemporary while providing provocations to engage with the internet as an alternative space for film exhibition, distribution and funding. While Ishani Dey explores the mobilization of internet’s potential as an alternative space for film exhibition tracing connections that link pirate circuits, film festivals and subversive mainstream aesthetic shifts; Akriti Rastogi provides an overview of entrepreneurial space of internet based independent filmmaking and the surge in DIY filmmaking in web 2.0.</p>
<p>The session concludes with mediations over the poetics of technological access. The internet’s prolific open access archive’s potential to foster cinephilia and the mutations in viewing habits that ensue lead to novel cinematic experiences and their implication for the profilmic aesthetic. In continuum our encounters with the mainstream and anonymous figures etches out the narrative of experiencing cinema and filmmaking in web 2.0.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>This session proposes to conceptualize the implications of open access digital media spaces for cinema in India. Reading cinema as a product of market driven industry factors it interrogates the shifting industrial, institutional, and market contexts which contemporary India cinema negotiates and the implications of contingent media, mode and exhibition on the cinematic experience. The primary concern is to form methods to navigate the expansive archive of the internet and mark the potentials for alternate production and distribution practices that lie within. The session proposes to walk through a number of case studies illustrating the dissolution of dichotomies that is brought about by the interventions of digital and new media technologies. Drawing parallels between earlier shifts in cinema studies discourses with the coming in of videotape and satellite television in India in the 80s and the contemporary debates surrounding digital film practices and direct to home transmissions, the session attempts to historicize cinephilia within the milieu of technophilia in India.</p>
<p><strong>Provocations</strong></p>
<p>Informal distribution networks like peer-to-peer distribution and pirate circles come to the foreground in the discussion on the construct of the cinephile. While the space of the auteur-entrepreneur claims the spotlight in discussions surrounding linkages in film exhibition – navigating through pirate circles to film festivals, bootlegging to the big league.</p>
<p>The figure of the anonymous filmmaker stands precariously on the divide of the legal and extra-legal boundary that the internet thrives in traversing, thus emerging as a vast platform for exhibition that is then mobilized by the DIY filmmaker. The growing popularity of the short film format and the shifts in viewing screens are seen as symptomatic of internet’s effect on cinema’s aesthetic.</p>
<p>The essential provocation here is that while cinema affects the modes of archiving on the internet, the internet in turn affects the cinematic form.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>McDonald, P. (2013). "Introduction: In Focus Media Industries Studies." <em>Cinema Journal</em>, 52(3).</p>
<p>Lobato, R. (2012) <em>Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution</em>.</p>
<p>Zimmerman, R. D.H. (2009). "Cinephillia, Technophilia and Collaborative Remix Zones." <em>Screen</em>, 135-147.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-afcinema2.0'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-afcinema2.0</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:12:03ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - #ThisMightNotBeOnline
http://editors.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>
<hr />
<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>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<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>
<div style="text-align: justify;"> </div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Infrastructure StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T12:37:38ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - #MetaverseInquilab
http://editors.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>
<hr />
<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>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-metaverseinquilab'>http://editors.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 - #LockdownsAndShutdowns
http://editors.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>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-lockdownsandshutdowns'>http://editors.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 - #LetsMoveIn
http://editors.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>
<hr />
<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>
<div style="text-align: justify;"> </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div><strong>Session Team </strong></div>
<div> </div>
<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>
<div> </div>
<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>
<div> </div>
<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>
<div> </div>
<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>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-letsmovein'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-letsmovein</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-05-19T14:54:24ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - #IdentifyingTheIdeaofLaborinTeaching – Negotiating pedagogy at home and inside classroom(s)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-identifyingtheideaoflabourinteaching
<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>
<hr />
<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p><strong>Session Type: </strong>Presentation and Discussion<br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">If we introspect the past two years in the context of the pandemic, techno-digital tools and methods have become a necessity from being a substitute in our daily ventures. Schools, colleges and other institutions were forced to continue with what we became familiar as ‘work from home’. Taking work spaces as case studies (offices/schools/colleges) we aim to explore how ‘home’ has transformed itself from an informal space to a forma one through the medium of digital devices and the internet. Schools, in particular have undergone a shift in the modes of their practices – onsite to online (home), which has also resulted in the transformation of spaces within which pedagogy used to navigate.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The devices and the programs which cater to platforms like Google classroom, Zoom and other have seen a revival in usage in these recent times. This execution of the digital platforms or the ‘Zooming Towards a University Platform’ (D’Souza, 2020) has however boosted the Education Technology sector since online teaching for them has always been the ‘front paw’ (D’Souza: 2020). With these platforms being increasingly used as mediums to conduct ‘classes’ from the vicinities of home, one significant issue that has come across is the issue of the space. To be more precise, the online platforms and digital devices have challenged the conventional classroom space which has resulted in the change of pedagogy and mobility of individuals – both students and educators etc. This change in the space – from brick and mortar to online interfaces can be related to the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia, which is a result of a decentralization of the physical classroom space.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Evidently, the practice of work, in this case teaching/pedagogy has also undergone changes. Interaction in a classroom was always aimed towards a broader objective carried out within a ‘public sphere’ (Habermas, 1962). With digitization owing to the pandemic the public sphere seemed to get replaced by private spaces especially homes, only to be integrated within an online (digital) space which has a temporal existence. Owing to this, academic work or labor has seen an imposed digitisation on the part of both educators and students, and the transformation of the existing space has called for a different approach towards pedagogy.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Drawing on these, we would like to seek answers for these questions:</p>
<ol>
<li>How is work or labor in the academic sectors getting reconfigured with the imposition of the digital?</li>
<li>Is the idea of space and concept of work related to each other? if so, how? Or is work specific to space? What difference lies between the space of the home and the institutional space?</li>
<li>Is space or work a characteristic of each other? Do they fulfill each other’s’ features? Given this, does the idea of the public vs private sphere in terms of teaching and learning alter the notion of separate spaces?</li>
<li>How is the classroom getting reconfigured within the home and the digital ? what role does the individual(s) and the technodigital play?</li></ol>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div><strong>Session Team </strong></div>
<div><strong><br /></strong></div>
<div>
<div><strong>Sunanda Kar </strong>works as a research student in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Silchar, Assam. Her research interests include Digital Humanities, Literary studies, and New Media.</div>
<div><strong><br /></strong></div>
<div><strong>Bishal Sinha </strong>works as a Junior Research Fellow in the Department of English, Assam University. His Research interests include Postcolonial Studies, Film and Media Studies and Literary Gerontology.</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-identifyingtheideaoflabourinteaching'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-identifyingtheideaoflabourinteaching</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-05-19T15:16:11ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - #HomeBasedFlexiworkInCovid19
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homebasedflexiworkincovid19
<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>
<hr />
<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p><strong>Session Type: </strong>Panel Discussion <br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The objective of this session is to elicit how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected work for women in India and Sri Lanka, through the opportunities of remote and flexible work (centred around the home).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The COVID-19 pandemic has brought out unprecedented changes to the way we work. Some have lost jobs, while others have shifted to remote work. Some have seen their businesses stagnate while others have grown new ones from home. Undoubtedly digital connectivity has been crucial to continuity of work for many, through remote and flexible work opportunities, often centred around the home.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">But this kind of work is not without its own challenges; particularly for women. Women are increasingly absent from the formal labour market. Women have traditionally been marginalised when it comes to digital technology, in terms of access, affordability and skills. Women have also traditionally borne the larger share of the care burden in the home. Remote and flexible work have long been argued as significant enablers of womens sustained participation in the workforce, in addition to addressing the problem of women working below their skill grade. The COVID-19 pandemic has stress tested these so-called enabling work arrangements for women.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">This panel will seek to shed light on the experiences of women working remotely and flexibly in India and Sri Lanka during the pandemic. It will seek to answer questions such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Who is able to work remotely and flexibly, and who faces barriers to do the same? </li>
<li>How do women (vis-a-vis men) perceive flexible and remote (home-based) work? </li>
<li>Do they see them as benefits or does this reinforce patriarchal mobility restrictions?</li>
<li>What are the challenges that women face in these kinds of work arrangements?</li>
<li>What is the role of the platform economy in enabling remote and flexible work options for women? </li>
<li>What are the analog complements for women to successfully work remotely and flexibly? </li>
<li>Which changes are likely to be sustained, and which will not</li></ul>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div>The session will take the form of a panel discussion led by the moderator. After they set the stage and context, the first panelist will discuss some of the high-level trends in digital access, skills and remote work disaggregated by gender from nationally representative survey findings in India and Sri Lanka. This will include discussion of the differential perceptions on remote work among men and women. The next two panelists will then discuss findings from ongoing research in India and Sri Lanka (respectively) on how digitally enabled work opportunities for women are contributing to the empowerment of women in the two countries. They will also discuss the specific challenges and opportunities that have been experienced by women during the pandemic, such as difficulties in balancing care work with paid work in the home, changing roles and dynamics between women and men in the home due to new digitally enabled work opportunities, inter alia. The next panelist will weigh in with findings from a study of digital opportunities in home-based work in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand. The last panelist, who runs a job search platform for blue collar workers, will bring in an industry perspective, shedding light on how employers view women as workers and how women might overcome challenges in finding jobs that match their skills and aspirations. </div>
</div>
<div>
<div> </div>
<div>The session focuses on women, and what is needed to facilitate their participation in the labour market through digitally enabled remote and flexible work opportunities. Women are increasingly absent from the formal labour market and face a number of challenges (precarity, discrimination, etc) to equal participation. Women have also traditionally been marginalised when it comes to digital technology, in terms of access, affordability and skills, which further contributes to economic marginalisation and disempowerment. The research that will be discussed in the session brings to the conversation, the voices, perspectives and lived experiences of women in India, Sri Lanka and other Asian countries through their survey responses and in-depth interviews with them.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div><strong>Session Team </strong></div>
<div><strong>Sabina Dewan</strong> is Founder and Executive Director of the JustJobs Network, which she began with John Podesta in 2013. She is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in India, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Before this, Dewan served as a Senior Fellow and Director for International Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC. Dewan’s research focuses on delineating strategies for job creation and workforce development. She works closely with governments, businesses, multilateral and grassroots organisations providing critical labour market information to improve interventions aimed at generating more and better employment, and cultivating employability, especially for women, youth and marginalised groups.</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>M<strong>ukta Naik, a Fellow at Centre for Policy Research</strong>, is an architect and urban planner. Her research interests include housing and urban poverty, urban informality, and internal migration, as well as urban transformations in small cities. At CPR, she focuses on understanding the links between internal migration and urbanisation in the Indian context. Recently, she has worked on gendered experiences of the labour market and related mobilities. She is currently involved with a project on examining the ways in which women’s platform work in India is impacted by corporate and government policy. </div>
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<div><strong>Ayesha Zainudeen </strong>is a Senior Research Manager at LIRNEasia. Her core areas of interest lie at the intersection of technology and inclusion in the Global South, with a current focus on the future of work. She has 17 years’ extensive experience in this field, having designed, managed, and led numerous research projects in the South and Southeast Asian region for clients such as IDRC (Canada), the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the GSM Association, inter alia. In her current research, she is documenting how digital technologies are changing work opportunities and contexts in particular for women in South Asia. She is also mapping online job portals in the Asia Pacific to understand their potential as a data source for near-real-time labour market analytics.</div>
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<div><strong>Gayani Hurulle</strong> is a Senior Research Manager at LIRNEasia, where she researches digital policy and regulation, digital inclusion and the future of work across South and Southeast Asia. She is currently assessing impacts of COVID-19 on labour markets in India and Sri Lanka, as well on technology adoption, platform use and education. She is also an external consultant at EY, where she is conducting World Bank Digital Economy Assessments. She has worked with varied clients such as the Ministry of Digital Infrastructure and Information Technology of Sri Lanka, IDRC, UNESCAP and Mozilla. </div>
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<div><strong>Hue-Tam Jamme </strong>is Assistant professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University. She studies urbanisms in transition from a comparative perspective. Using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, she focuses on the lived experience of societal transformations. Her research explores in particular whether the development of information and communication networks shapes inclusive urban spaces. Jamme currently leads a research project centred on the gig economy and women’s upward mobility and in the capitals of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand. In previous research, she investigated the socio-spatial consequences of the transition towards auto-mobility in Vietnam. </div>
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<div><strong>Devesh Taneja </strong> is the Co Founder of Vyre, an innovative hiring platform that uses a mix of technologies to facilitate early talent discovery and engagement for the service sector workers. His current research interest lies at the intersection of Technology, Entrepreneurship, Financial Inclusion and Impact Investing. He has several years of experience in investment banking in India and the United States wherein he has worked in fundraising for small businesses. He holds a Masters in Business Administration from Yale University. </div>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homebasedflexiworkincovid19'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homebasedflexiworkincovid19</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Infrastructure StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T12:57:33ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - #HomeAndTheInternet
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homeandtheinternet
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
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<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>Presentation and Discussion of Papers</p>
<p><br /><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The COVID-19 pandemic left many of us stranded between homes – some were able to reach back to our natal homes while others had to make do with where we were then situated. This was a difficult journey of sudden confinement. In times like these when people ought to be with their families, many of us didn’t get the chance to be with them. There emerged new questions of what is home, where is our home.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Can there be a single home? Can people from the North Eastern belt call the mainland our home in times of crisis where racial discrimination was right on our face? Do meanings of home change for a person with psychosocial disabilities who relies on external communities for support system? What does this forced confinement inside the home bring for the queer subject for whom the public space was the only getaway to live our queer lives? </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">We understand that the pandemic opened up the canvas of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ by offering us alternative modes of socialization, thereby building communities within social movement which may not be tied to physical interaction. The internet in this context offered a temporary escape to many of us, while also latching on to our tendencies of addictive consumption. It was the only connection we had with the world outside. Issues that were previously overlooked gained attention as they reached to the level of crisis. Not only did educational learning suddenly shift to the digital space, we also witnessed a transition of the existing social movements into the digital landscape. This was obviously exclusionary for many without access, but also opened scope for a new accessibility of these existing modes of learning which the disabled population could better adapt to.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">This session is a presentation of two papers by the three team members on the theme of home and the internet for Dalit-Bahujan and Tribal students in India along the intersections of queer, disabled and North Eastern identity-based experiences. With qualitative interviews of women and queer students, and students with psychosocial disabilities in higher education, we bring out narratives of how the pandemic has affected the idea of home for them, how their cross-cutting intersectional identities have played a role in their experience of the real and the digital space, how the burden of labour has changed for women students in these times, how the social movements took shape within the contours of the home and on the internet, and what are the mental health impacts of these experiences on these students. The papers will be partly autoethnographic as the research questions have evolved from the personal experiences of the researchers themselves. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong style="text-align: start;">Keywords:</strong><span style="text-align: start;"> </span>Mental health, movement building, working from home, friendship, labour, discrimination, social media, internet</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><span style="text-align: start;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="text-align: start;" dir="ltr"><strong>Session Team </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: start;" dir="ltr"><strong>Bhanu Priya Gupta </strong>is a PhD scholar in Disability Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). Her research area is mental illness among Dalit-Bahujan women in the Hindi-speaking belt of India. She is a first-generation graduate who comes from the Bhadbunja community (most backward caste) of North India. She identifies as a Bahujan queer woman, a caregiver and person with mental illness. She has previously worked at National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) as a Research Associate. She is also a writer and has published her works at Mad in Asia, Velivada, In Plainspeak, and Gaysi Family.</p>
<p style="text-align: start;" dir="ltr"><strong>Dona Biswas</strong> is a PhD candidate in Women’s and Gender Studies, studying in Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) and Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS). Her research area is social movement and women in movement, working on Bodoland Movement in Assam. She belongs to Namasudra (SC) Bengali community, migrated Agricultural labourer, in Assam. She has previously worked at Nirantar: A Centre for Gender and Education, Delhi as a Research Assistant on Early and Child Marriage in India. Her writings have been published at Feminism in India, Velivada, and Sanghaditha. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Ekta Kailash Sonawane</strong> belongs to Mahar (Dalit) community of Maharashtra. They did their Masters in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi wherein they wrote a dissertation on the intellectual history of class, caste and gender. They have worked as a journalist and researcher at Awaaz India TV and Institute of Human Development. Their work has been published at Dalit Camera, Indie Journal, Colour's Board, Feminist Collective. They have also published a feature article in Hindustan Times.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homeandtheinternet'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homeandtheinternet</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-05-19T15:21:27ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - #COVID19VaccineDiscourse
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covid19vaccinediscourse
<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><strong>Session Type: </strong>Panel Discussion <br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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). </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>References:</strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">Dror et al. (2020). Vaccine hesitancy: the next challenge in the fight against COVID‑19.<em>European Journal of Epidemiology,</em> pp. 775-779.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Carpentier, N. (2017). Discourse. <em>In Keywords for Media Studies. </em>Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray. Ed., New York: NYU Press, pp. 59-62.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Kelly, L. (2022, February 12). NZ, Australia vaccination mandates protests gain in numbers.<em> </em><span style="text-align: justify;"><em>Reuters.</em> Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/new-zealand-australia-vaccination-mandates-protests-gain-numbers-2022-02-12/</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">Roberts, J. Timmons, Amy Bellone Hite, and Nitsan Chorev, Eds. 2015. <em>The Globalization and Development Reader Perspectives on Development and Global Change.</em> Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Makau, W. M. (2021). The impact of COVID-19 on the growing North-South divide.<em> E-international Relations, </em>15.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Arce, J.S.S. et. al. (2021). COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in low-andmiddle-income countries,<em> Nature Medicine,</em> VOL 27 1386, 1385–1394, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01454-y.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covid19vaccinediscourse'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covid19vaccinediscourse</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-03-18T10:16:55ZBlog EntryIRC 22 - Proposed Session - # ActFromHome
http://editors.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><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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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-actfromhome'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-actfromhome</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T12:46:10ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference 2022 (IRC22): #Home, May 25-27
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc-22-home
<b>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.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Venue: Online on Zoom</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Registration: <a class="external-link" href="https://tinyurl.com/reg-irc22">https://tinyurl.com/reg-irc22</a></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Code of Conduct:<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/IRC22_CoCFSP" class="external-link"> Download (PDF)</a></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Conference Programme: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/IRC22.Programme.Final%20" class="external-link">Download (PDF)</a></strong></p>
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<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy_of_IRCPoster2.jpg/@@images/fa92d73e-af12-492b-b55c-f06e7a661415.jpeg" alt="null" class="image-inline" title="IRC Poster 2" /></p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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?</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
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<h3><strong>Sessions</strong></h3>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-waitingforfood">#WaitingForFood</a> - Rhea Bose and Nisha Subramanian</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline">#thismightnotbeonline</a> - Kaushal Sapre and Aasma Tulika</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-identitiesvulnerabilitiesopportunitiesdissentir">#IdentitesVulnerabilitiesOpportunitiesDissent</a> - Saumya Tewari, Manisha Madhava, Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay and Aparna Bose</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homeandtheinternet">#HomeAndTheInternet</a> - Dona Biswas, Bhanu Priya Gupta and Ekta Kailash Sonwane </p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-letsmovein">#LetsMoveIn</a> - Arathy Salimkumar, Faheem Muhammed, Hazeena T and Manisha Madapathy</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-lockdownsandshutdowns">#LockdownsAndShutdowns</a> - Michael Collyer, Joss Wright, Andreas Tsamados, Marianne Díaz Hernández and Nathan Dobson</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-identifyingtheideaoflabourinteaching">#IdentifyingtheIdeaoflLaborinTeaching</a> - Sunanda Kar and Bishal Sinha</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homebasedflexiworkincovid19">#HomeBasedFlexiworkInCovid19</a> - Sabina Dewan, Mukta Naik, Ayesha Zainudeen, Gayani Hurulle, Hue-Tam Jamme and Devesh Taneja</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-involutejaggedseamsofthedomesticandthevocational">#Involute:Jagged Seams of the Domestic and the Vocational -</a> Akriti Rastogi, Deepak Prince, Misbah Rashid and Satish Kumar</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-digitisingcrisesremakinghome">#DigitisingCrisesRemakingHome</a> - Vidya Subramanian, Kalindi Kokal and Uttara Purandare</p>
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<h3><strong>Individual Presentations</strong></h3>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-goinghomeconstructionofadigitalurbanplatforminterfaceindelhincr">#GoingHome: Constructions of a Digital-Urban Platform Interface in Delhi-NCR</a> - Anurag Mazumdar</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-socialmediaactivism">#SocialMediaActivism</a> - Anushka Bhilwar</p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-transactandwhatfollowed">#TransActandWhatFollowed</a> - Brindaalakshmi K</p>
<h3><strong>About the IRC Series</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The IRC series is driven by the following interests:</p>
<ul>
<li>creating discussion spaces for researchers and practitioners studying internet in India and in other comparable regions,</li>
<li>foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India,</li>
<li>accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and</li>
<li>exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) objects of power/knowledge.</li></ul>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-e32d113c-7fff-b48f-7af4-0a47077cf4a6"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The<a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16"> first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference</a> series was held in February 2016. It was hosted by the<a href="https://www.jnu.ac.in/SSS/CPS/"> Centre for Political Studies</a> at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund. The<a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17"> second Internet Researchers' Conference</a> was organised in partnership with the<a href="http://citapp.iiitb.ac.in/"> Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy</a> (CITAPP) at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus on March 03-05, 2017. The<a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc18"> third Internet Researchers' Conference</a> was organised at the<a href="http://www.sambhaavnaa.org/"> Sambhaavnaa Institute</a>, Kandbari (Himachal Pradesh) during February 22-24, 2018, and the theme of the conference was *offline*. The<a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list"> fourth Internet Researcher's Conference </a>was held at <a class="external-link" href="https://digital.lamakaan.com/">Lamakaan, Hyderabad</a> from January 30 - February 01, on the theme of the 'list'.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc-22-home'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc-22-home</a>
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No publisherPuthiya Purayil SnehaResearchers at WorkInternet Researcher's ConferenceFeaturedIRC22HomepageInternet Studies2022-05-24T14:38:57ZBlog Entry