The Centre for Internet and Society
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IRC22 - Proposed Session - #CovidConfessions: An internet art project
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covidconfessions
<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 dir="ltr"><strong>Session Type:</strong> Online Interactive Exhibit/Individual Presentation/<span style="text-align: justify;">Demonstration of research outputs and methods</span></p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
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<div>Featuring anonymous stories of resilience, wisdom, and joy, in Kannada, Hindi, & English</div>
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<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Background: </strong>Over the past 2 years, digital infrastructures have played an intensified role in the meaning making of the home. As the internet offers up access to work, play, and social contact it also mediates our relationships with our own identities, our successes, and failures. In the anonymity of the online community (for those who are privileged enough to have access to the internet and personal hardware like a smartphone or laptop), physical markers of belonging, material signifiers of social status can become irrelevant. For many who don’t have stable home environments, online communities can become a home that their own physical dwellings cannot.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Questions: </strong>How can anonymity construct a stable and safe space? How can sharing anonymously via digital technologies help overcome mental health stresses caused by prolonged isolation? Can one find refuge and comfort in the stories and experiences of others? How can online safe spaces be curated as a tool for healing?</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">#<strong>CovidConfessions: </strong>This session is an internet art experiment. The goal is to create an archive of anonymous covid confessions to share in the form of illustrations, voice overs, and animation, with the world. <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JzIidOwfMdz_vJCjUfnfCjEYNIogLjw2/view?usp=sharing">Here is a reference to the art style</a>. This is a long-form story, but I’m looking to create long-form, as well as single-slide bitesized multi-media pieces for social media. I know that there are similar confession style online spaces like <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-confessions-share-your-anonymous-stories-time-covid-19-n1166556">this one</a> but I’m looking to take these words one step further and create art that can be a healing.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Accessibility:</strong> In order to be accessible to non-English speakers, I’d like to gather and include stories in Hindi and Kannada: #कोविडकहानी #CovidKahani #ಕನ್ನಡಕಥೆ #CovidKatha</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Gathering Stories</strong>: Stories will be collected through digital platforms like LinkedIn/Twitter/Instagram and personal networks like WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram, via <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1y3Lo_zd-PlddKfbbemKPHCrSKzblUDSOpFXmjclGjBE/edit">a google sheet like this one</a>. I will need this translated into Hindi and Kannada. I will reach Kannada speakers through Telegram and WhatsApp, English speakers through instagram, and Hindi speakers through Instagram and WhatsApp. Would love inputs on how to do this better.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Marginalised Voices: The internet is inherently a privileged space, and given that online confessions are given anonymously and without physical intervention, I don't see how I can reach out to non-internet users for stories at this point without compromising their anonymity <span style="text-align: justify;">— including them is out of the scope of this project. I acknowledge that it's very difficult to centre marginalised voices in this project <span style="text-align: justify;">— would love inputs on how to tackle that.</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Session Type</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">An asynchronous online interactive exhibit, running from April 27 to May 27. <br />The internet is asynchronous, so we should make space for exhibit style projects which are not tied down to particular live “session.” This is an ongoing project that everyone can participate in. This project will be hosted on a microsite, linked to the IRC website, and shared on the instagram handle: @covid.confessions.project.<br />However, if I were hard pressed to choose one of the four formats, I would pick format 3 “Demonstration of research outputs and methods.” I can speak about what has been successful and what hasn’t worked with the project, what the reach and impact has been, and whether it answered any of the questions I began with.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Presenter</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Indumathi Manohar </strong> came to a career in design via theatre, dance, and scuba diving. Currently Communications Designer at CIS, she works on making research publications, annual reports, podcasts, events, and op-eds, more accessible to a larger audience through visual design— whether it be through layout design, infographics, social media creatives or web banners. You can find her work here.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covidconfessions'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covidconfessions</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T13:16:53ZBlog EntryIRC22 - Proposed Session - #TransActandWhatFollowed - Access to care for transgender persons during the COVID-19 pandemic
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-transactandwhatfollowed
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 -</strong> #<a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p><strong>Session Type: </strong>Individual Presentation</p>
<p><br /><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">This session will be an individual presentation by Brindaalakshmi.K. Transgender persons were among the most severely affected during COVID-19 pandemic. The government of India made no special efforts to address the concerns of the transgender community during the lockdowns. Further hampering the access to their rights, the Government of India issued the rules for the new law, Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 while the world was under a global lockdown. Transgender persons have had to go back to living in severely transphobic and abusive environments with their natal families. Access to healthcare and COVID-19 vaccination has also been a challenge for many transgender persons due to the lack of valid identification documents. Digitisation of the process to change the name and gender on identification documents has made the situation worse for a historically silenced population group. The digital process has widened the gap in accessing healthcare and other support systems during the pandemic. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Under the theme of violence and care, this paper will explore the systemic violence faced by the transgender community during the COVID-19 pandemic and their struggles and challenges in accessing healthcare and other relief. The intent is to explore the role of technology in both enabling better access and also widening the access gap for transgender persons and also the data gap further perpetuating the erasure of transgender persons. The widening access gap will be understood by focusing on the digital process to change ID documents while the positive aspects of the use of technology will be explored by looking at some of the community driven online campaigns to raise funds and other support for transgender persons during the lockdowns. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">This session will be based on the initial findings from the qualitative research study, Gendering of Development Data in India: Post-Trans Act 2019 by Brindaalakshmi.K for the Centre for Internet & Society as part of the Our Voices, Our Future project supported by Association for Progressive Communications. For the purpose of this study, qualitative interviews were conducted with NGOs, activists and lawyers to cover the rights related challenges faced by transgender persons. Apart from gender, different intersections of their identity such as caste, religion, urban/rural and disability were also covered in these interviews. Some of the findings will be shared during this presentation. </p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Presenter </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Brindaalakshmi. K</strong> is Co-Lead, Queer & Digital at Point of View. They are authoring the study, Gendering of Development Data in India: Post-Trans Act 2019 for the Centre for Internet & Society, India as part of the Our Voices Our Future project supported by Association for Progressive Communications. They previously authored the study, Gendering of Development Data in India: Beyond the Binary for the Centre for Internet & Society, India as part of the Big Data for Development Network (2020). They are a queer rights activist and peer supporter working with the LGBTIQA+ community in India. </p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-transactandwhatfollowed'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-transactandwhatfollowed</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-05-19T15:12:46ZBlog 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>
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<p><strong>Session Type:</strong> Demonstration of Research Output and Methods<br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Over the past two years, we have been experimenting with developing self-hosted servers as a way to address ideas around agency, capacity and enablement within internet infrastructures. The outcomes of these processes have developed into three projects that we would like to share through this session.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><a href="https://thisisherefornow.net/fornow/hfaw/index.html">home_for_a_while</a> was a local area WiFi network that was installed as part of the exhibition real time tactics at IIC, Delhi in December 2019. It was openly accessible within and around the exhibition premises and hosted texts, news articles, how-to manuals, notes and other research developed through conversations around internet shutdowns. Three days into the exhibition, protests erupted in various parts of Delhi against the enactment of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. The state responded with violence, but also with bandwidth throttling and internet shutdowns localised in neighbourhoods in and around Delhi. The experience of exhibiting home_for_a_while was almost a rehearsal for a process that would then break out of the white cube space and into inquilab network.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://thisisherefornow.net/fornow/inq_net/index.html">inquilab network</a> was an open, portable, community run local area WiFi network that travelled to various public protests in a backpack during the anti-CAA movement of 2019-20 in Delhi, India. inq.net operated independently of the internet. It was designed to enable the sharing of information and resources between everybody in its local proximity. It hosted freely downloadable crowdsourced content like pamphlets, zines, articles, posters, infographics, memes, etc. It eventually found a home in a public park in Hauz Rani, until the pandemic and the hastily executed nationwide lockdown brought the protest movement to a halt in March 2020.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.thismightnotbe.online/">thismightnotbe.online</a> is a self-hosted web server located in our home in Delhi, India. It was developed during the lockdown, and has been online (mostly) since October 2020. It is imagined as a publication platform, a pirate hub, a toolkit, a gathering site. It hosts a collaborative storage drive with <a href="https://nest.thismightnotbe.online/s/bTNZYddeAaxQFFS">books</a>, <a href="https://nest.thismightnotbe.online/s/SQzFn5zwxyHgykQ">music</a>, shared lists of <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/PhD_Hunt">PhD programs</a> and <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/artist_statement_generators">artist statement generators</a>, notes on <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/some_notes_on_contact_mics">building pre-amplifiers for contact mics</a>, <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/notes_about_games">games</a> and <a href="https://pad.thismightnotbe.online/p/mvs7z7mahob3om9p">workshop notes on language and computation</a>. It also hosts an <a href="https://www.thismightnotbe.online/radio_roohafza/">internet radio station</a> and a <a href="https://thismightnotbe.online/CicadaPowerlinesMetalDrawl">museum</a> from Shanghai.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">thismightnotbe.online is unstable, precarious and always under construction. Its internal network consists of old laptops and single board computers that share messy tabletops with a happy meal toy, crochet needles and a money plant among other things. You can tell from the sound of its cooling fan that it has visitors, or perhaps just a botnet sniffing around. It heats up during the summer months and goes offline with the occasional power cut. To maintain thismightnotbe.online is to live with it - to share a home; to host friends and colleagues working across geographies and timezones; to inhabit the liminal space between platform and user.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is curious to us that technical activities that go into enabling seamless communication - talking to people about connecting to an unknown WiFi network, getting the ISP to assign you a static IP address, securing an exposed web server - are often accompanied by faint discomfort, anxiety, clumsy and tentative interactions. Such instances urge us to think about some questions - How do our infrastructures produce conditions on agency, access and enablement? What affordances of scale, capacity and mobility do they allow for? How does communication as a technical activity affect the very desire to communicate itself? We would like to use the session to generate conversations around these ideas.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Session Team</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Kaushal Sapre </strong>(b. 1990) is an artist based in Delhi, India. He studied physics and chemical engineering before completing his masters in visual art practice in 2017. His work addresses everyday experiences of living within contemporary technical systems, in an effort to think through conceptions of subjecthood, agency and community. His practice often gets articulated through traces of activity within precarious infrastructural arrangements. He is currently - participating in the curatorial fray of Powerlines Cicada Metal Drawl, supported by Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; contributing to conversations around the social experience of telecommunication with -out-of-line-; maintaining a web server infrastructure with thismightnotbe.online; facilitating courses around digital media and technology at Ambedkar University Delhi. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Aasma Tulika </strong>(b. 1992) is an artist currently based in Delhi. She is interested in moments that disturb belief systems, and how mechanisms of control operate in such encounters experienced in everyday life. She locates technological infrastructures as sites to unpack the ways in which power embodies and affects narrative making processes. Her practice engages with narratives that circulate on social networks and mass media, to record and draw out experiences of ideological disorientations and slips. She has been a fellow at the Home Workspace Program 2019-20, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, and is currently participating in Capture All: A Sonic Investigation with Liquid Architecture and Sarai. She is a member of the collective -out-of-line-, and collaboratively maintains a home server hosting thismightnotbe.online.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Infrastructure StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T12:37:38ZBlog EntryIRC22 - Proposed Session - #“Going Home”: Constructions of a Digital-Urban Platform Interface in Delhi-NCR
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-goinghomeconstructionofadigitalurbanplatforminterfaceindelhincr
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022</strong> - # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p><strong>Session Type:</strong> Individual Paper Presentation<br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">My ongoing fieldwork with taxi drivers in Delhi-NCR suggests that the “go-home” feature and its equivalent in platform apps such as Uber and Ola have generated a lot of interest. This feature matches drivers with rides to their preferred destinations – usually allowing drivers to choose one or two destinations of their choice in a working day (Uber India Help nd). In an environment of algorithmic governance where drivers feel a considerable loss of control and autonomy, this feature offers a semblance of control over their conditions of survival and mobility. Departing from the enthusiasm generated among platform taxi drivers, this paper explores what “home” signifies for platform cultures with specific attention to the social and material infrastructures that enable and contest “going home.” The “home,” as in other instances, conveys familiarity, comfort and (intimate) knowledges. How and why (if so) do platforms as an urban-digital-labour-capital interface rely on or negate these constructions? Does this arrangement offer an incremental step of negotiating interlocking conflicts and if so, how? In summary, this paper provisionally suggests that “home,” as a feature and as an idea, may have been introduced by platform companies but its possibilities are not circumscribed by their designs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Cited</strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">Uber India (nd): “Set a Driver Destination,” Uber India Help, viewed on 9 March 2022, <a href="https://help.uber.com/driving-and-delivering/article/set-a-driver-destination?nodeId=f3df375b-5bd4-4460-a5e9-afd84ba439b9">https://help.uber.com/driving-and-delivering/article/set-a-driver-destination?nodeId=f3df375b-5bd4-4460-a5e9-afd84ba439b9</a> </p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Presenter </strong></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><strong>Anurag Mazumdar</strong> is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Geography & GIS, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. </p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-goinghomeconstructionofadigitalurbanplatforminterfaceindelhincr'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-goinghomeconstructionofadigitalurbanplatforminterfaceindelhincr</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T13:04:02ZBlog EntryIRC22 - Proposed Session - #SocialMediaActivism
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-socialmediaactivism
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.</b>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 </strong>- # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
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<p><strong>Session Type: </strong>Individual Presentation/Demonstration of Research Outputs and Methods</p>
<p><br /><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The said session is based upon the author’s original study on social media as a means of protest in the new digital age. Based on the study “Social Media and Protest: A Case Study on Anti CAA Protest in India” and updating it to “Social Media and Protest: A Case Study of Protest in India during COVID-19” through this session the aim is to bring in light the new ways how dissent or movements of resistance are being navigated. “Home” as being the theme of the conference becomes central point of view in this study and to understand how resistance movement can be participated from home and the impact it makes. This study can be beneficial to understand the socio-political movements in India and usage of digital technologies in mass participation in these movements – these range from amplification of resources, organizing gatherings etc. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">The theme social media and modern activism has recently taken the limelight in study of liberal arts. Researchers and universities are now taking social media as a tool to understand modern activism. The proposed study was originally presented in the International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences, Oxford, United Kingdom. The session aims to discuss the findings of the said paper vis-à-vis Anti CAA protest in India as the case study. However, in regards to new developments around global and national politics, the author would also like to bring in perspective new case studies. And highlight the role of social media for dissent in India since 2019, followed in the Farmer’s Protest and much more. </p>
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<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Social Media and Protest: A Case Study of Protest in India during COVID-19 </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The study aims to understand the role of social media in the current chain of events of various activist protests that have happened in the 21st Century or are going around the world. It specifically focuses on the role of social media in mitigating the protest in India. Role of social media thus was recognized as one of the major influences in organizing and facilitating these protests across the country. A special emphasis has been levied upon how the role of social media and how it was changed during the COVID-19 timeline. Understanding how physical interaction was limited how did people still participate in the resistance movement and helped in amplifying the cause. For instance, the Farmers Protest of 2020 is an example of Pandemic, resistance and social media – using this as an example an attempt is being made to understand how the pandemic has severely use of social media among young audience. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In this study we unfold the active role of Social Media Apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram into creating awareness about the issue, advocating for one’s rights and organizing protests. Thus, looking at a new narrative of activism through online means or to say emergence of “Online Activism" and shift in resistance movements to digital spaces. </p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Keywords</strong>: social media, Activist Protest, COVID-19, Farmers Protest 2020, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Resistance, Digital Spaces, Online Activism </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Presenter </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Ms. Anushka Bhilwar </strong>(pronouns: they/she) are a student of MPP (Masters in Public Policy) at the University of Stirling, Scotland and an alumnus of Ambedkar University, New Delhi. Their research expands to AI and tech-policies to contemporary political thought and conflict studies. Currently, she works as a freelance writer and storyteller for Glasgow Women’s Library, Glasgow, United Kingdom and a contributing writer at People’s History of South Asia. In their previous endeavours they have worked within the capacity of a Research Associate and Technical Writer with United Nations Development Programme, New Delhi and Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-socialmediaactivism'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-socialmediaactivism</a>
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No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T13:01:47ZBlog 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>
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<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>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T12:46:10ZBlog 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>
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<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p><strong>Session Type:</strong> Workshop or Collaborative Working Session<br /><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" 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 - #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 - #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 EntryIRC22 - Proposed Session - #DigitisingCrisesRemakingHome
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-digitisingcrisesremakinghome
<b>Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022- #Home.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 </strong>- # <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Home - Call for Sessions</a></p>
<hr />
<p dir="ltr"><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Session Type:</strong> Panel Discussion</p>
<p><strong>Session Plan</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The session is planned as a panel discussion between three scholars on three distinct, interconnected notions of home – specifically the home as a dwelling unit, an administrative unit (such as a municipality, a city, or a state), and a country (or a nation state) in the context of India. We intend to parse these ideas within the context of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic to discuss notions of ‘safety’, ‘trust’, ‘support’, and ‘access’ by examining the digital turn in all three kinds of ‘home’. The session will open with the scholars speaking to each other, and laying out the central ideas. The conversation between the three scholars will act as provocations to enable a larger discussion with other attendees.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In 2020, when the first Covid-19 lockdowns began, the internet was discussed as a space of solidarity, of meeting, entertainment, work, and of support. But soon it became evident that access to such spaces of solidarity or support was not necessarily equal. While for some it was almost non-existent, for many others it was limited or regulated. In the Indian context these differences only stood out further due to unequal access to infrastructure, healthcare, and even basic necessities such as food that was starkly apparent in the long march of several thousand migrant workers from cities back to their ‘homes’ in rural areas at the height of the Indian summer.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">At the national level, the digital response to the pandemic was most palpable. The use of contact tracing through apps such as <em>Aarogya Setu, </em>the <em>CoWin</em> portal for vaccinations, and the often arbitrary use of drones, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence have raised questions about surveillance, inclusion, and how useful technology can be in assisting a public health crisis. Often such responses reflected a law and order response to what has been a public health crisis. On the other hand, the establishment of<em> Vande Bharat </em>missions to bring stranded Indians from around the world ‘back home to India’ presented a very different idea of home.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Administrative units at the state and local levels had differing procedures and interventions. Many attempted to follow the guidelines and interventions laid out by the central government, others introduced their own digital solutions but soon found that these were not enough to actually deliver governance during the pandemic.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This session will explore the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the digital becoming the default mode of managing the pandemic–or any sort of threat. We ask if the idea of ‘home’ as a ‘safe space’ had ever really been so and whether the pandemic exacerbated existing exploitative mechanisms within a ‘home’ – be it the dwelling, the city, or even one’s country. We also intend to discuss issues of access, surveillance, privacy, vulnerability, the burdens of care-work, the exploitative extraction of data, and divergent understandings of consent frameworks within these three axes of the idea of the ‘home’.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Session Team </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Vidya Subramanian </strong>is Raghunathan Family Fellow, South Asia Institute, Harvard University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests lie at the intersection of technologies and societies. Her current research investigates the changing nature of citizenship in the technological society we now inhabit. Focusing on India, her research is loosely framed by two large issues: the first is the colonisation of the everyday so-called real world by the digital; and the second is how power permeates and is implicated in such technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Kalindi Kokal</strong> is Post Doctoral Fellow, Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay. She has a doctorate in law from the Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Her doctoral work centred on understanding how non-state actors in dispute processing engage with state law. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of dispute-processing mechanisms in two rural communities in the states of Maharashtra and Uttarakhand in India. She works on understanding how the manner in which people actually experience state law coupled with their perceptions of dispute resolution and state courts underscore the need to explore broader understandings of law and dispute resolution.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Uttara Purandare </strong>is PhD Researcher, IITB-Monash Research Academy. She is pursuing her PhD in Public Policy under a joint programme offered by IIT Bombay and Monash University. Her area of research is smart cities. Looking specifically at the intersection of technology, gender, and governance, Uttara’s research focuses on how safety and surveillance are constructed by the smart city rhetoric and the role of private sector firms in governing the smart city. The COVID-19 pandemic and the technologies that have been introduced by national governments and smart cities purportedly to curb the spread of the virus have raised interesting questions about privacy and citizens’ rights during a crisis. Uttara is presently exploring some of these questions within the Indian context.</p>
<div style="text-align: justify;"> </div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-digitisingcrisesremakinghome'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-digitisingcrisesremakinghome</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminProposed SessionsIRC22Internet StudiesInternet Researcher's Conference2022-04-25T12:23:42ZBlog Entry Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List, Jan 30 - Feb 1, Lamakaan
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list
<b>Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions. IRC19 will be organised in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, during January 30 - February 1, 2019.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Venue: <a href="http://www.lamakaan.com/" target="_blank">Lamakaan</a>, Off Road 1, Near GVK Mall, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad 500034</h4>
<h4>Location: <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/grVp3tKUGiu" target="_blank">Google Maps</a></h4>
<h4>Conference Programme: <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CIS_India/irc19-list-conference-programme" target="_blank">Read</a> (SlideShare) and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-conference-programme/at_download/file">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Code of Conduct and Friendly Space Policy: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-code-of-conduct-and-friendly-space-policy/at_download/file" target="_blank">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Poster: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list/image" target="_blank">Download</a> (JPG)</h4>
<h4>Registration: Directly at the venue, it is a free and open conference</h4>
<hr />
<h3><strong>IRC19: #List</strong></h3>
<p>For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the <em>list</em> in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the <em>list</em> as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated <em>list</em> of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a <em>list</em> that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft <em>lists</em> and their revisions. NRC is producing a <em>list</em> with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a <em>list</em> of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a <em>list</em> to connect/aggregate other <em>lists</em>, a <em>meta-list</em>.</p>
<p>From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, <em>lists</em> have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The <em>list</em> - in terms of <em>list</em> of people receiving a message, <em>list</em> of machines connecting to a router or a tower, <em>list</em> of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the <em>list</em>, as <a href="http://amodern.net/article/on-lists-and-networks/" target="_blank">Liam Young documents</a>, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.</p>
<p>As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the <em>list</em> becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.</p>
<ul>
<li>Who makes lists?</li>
<li>How are lists made?</li>
<li>Who can be on a list, and who is missing?</li>
<li>Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?</li>
<li>What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?</li>
<li>What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?</li>
<li>What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?</li>
<li>What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?</li>
<li>What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?</li>
<li>What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?</li>
<li>What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?</li>
<li>What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?</li>
<li>How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?</li>
<li>Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?</li>
<li>Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?</li></ul>
<p>For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.</p>
<h3><strong>Sessions</strong></h3>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah" target="_blank">#AyushmanBhavah</a></strong> - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-butitisnotfunny" target="_blank">#ButItIsNotFunny</a></strong> - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin" target="_blank">#CallingOutAndIn</a></strong> - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy" target="_blank">#EnlistingPrivacy</a></strong> - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo" target="_blank">#FOMO</a></strong> - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists" target="_blank">#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design</a></strong> - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface" target="_blank">#ListInterface</a></strong> - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed" target="_blank">#LoSHAandWhatFollowed</a></strong> - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting" target="_blank">#PowerListing</a></strong> - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals" target="_blank">#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals</a></strong> - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh</p>
<h3><strong>Papers</strong></h3>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers#brindaalakshmi" target="_blank">Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature</a></strong> - Brindaalakshmi.K</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers#gayas" target="_blank">De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods</a></strong> - Gayas Eapen</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers#monish-ranjit" target="_blank">Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC</a></strong> - Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh</p>
<h3><strong>About the IRC Series</strong></h3>
<p>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>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>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>The <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16" target="_blank">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/" target="_blank">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" target="_blank">second Internet Researchers' Conference</a> was organised in partnership with the <a href="http://citapp.iiitb.ac.in/" target="_blank">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" target="_blank">third Internet Researchers' Conference</a> was organised at the <a href="http://www.sambhaavnaa.org/" target="_blank">Sambhaavnaa Institute</a>, Kandbari (Himachal Pradesh) during February 22-24, 2018, and the theme of the conference was *offline*.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at WorkEvent2019-01-31T06:41:38ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Selected Sessions and Papers
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers
<b>Here is the list of selected sessions and papers for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19) - #List. IRC19 will be held in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, from Jan 30 to Feb 1, 2019. The conference announcement, along with the final agenda, will be published on Monday, January 7.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call" target="_blank">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers" target="_blank">Call for Papers</a></h4>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions" target="_blank">List of Proposed Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Selected Sessions</h4>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah" target="_blank">#AyushmanBhavah</a> - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-butitisnotfunny" target="_blank">#ButItIsNotFunny</a> - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin" target="_blank">#CallingOutAndIn</a> - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy" target="_blank">#EnlistingPrivacy</a> - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo" target="_blank">#FOMO</a> - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists" target="_blank">#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design</a> - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface" target="_blank">#ListInterface</a> - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince <strong>(7 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed" target="_blank">#LoSHAandWhatFollowed</a> - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose <strong>(7 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting" target="_blank">#PowerListing</a> - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana <strong>(10 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals" target="_blank">#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals</a> - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh <strong>(11 votes)</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h4>Selected Papers</h4>
<p id="brindaalakshmi"><strong>Brindaalakshmi.K</strong></p>
<p><strong><em>Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature</em></strong></p>
<p>In July 2009, the Delhi High Court legalised homosexual acts among consenting adults. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court of India held that homosexuality between two consenting adults was illegal and reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This section was reinstated under the pretext of the LGBTIQA+ community being a minuscule minority. The Supreme Court saw this as insufficient for declaring that Section 377 as going against Article 14, 15 and 21. However, on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India passed the historic verdict reading down Section 377 to decriminalise homosexuality in India. In the time between 2013 and 2018, the LGBTIQA+ community struggled to their presence and rights. Different groups and organisations have worked on this.</p>
<p>One such collectives has been Orinam, an all-volunteer unregistered Chennai-based collective. Started in 2003, Orinam among other things, has also been recording queer experiences on its website since Dec 2005. These experiences of queer people and their families have been recorded in Tamil and English on Orinam’s blog, Our Voices as poetry, fiction, news, views, podcasts and reviews. The website also archives queer events in India through The Orinam Photo archives. Orinam has also been archiving the legal developments with respect to the rights of LGBTIQA+ community. This included legal documents, landmark verdicts, letters written by the family of queer individuals in multiple Indian languages to the Supreme Court to read down Section 377, among others <strong>[1]</strong>. These listings along with others, in turn also contributed to building the case for the legal battle to eventually read down Section 377.</p>
<p>This paper looks specifically at the functioning of Orinam based in Chennai that uses lists in a way to support a marginalised community acknowledging their realities and also keeping them alive in different ways. This is being done through its support resources, peer support, activism or archiving queer experiences in the form of literature and other media, both online and offline. This paper will trace Orinam’s work through the fifteen years of its existence as a listing and archiving platform supporting the LGBTIQA+ community.</p>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Orinam@15: talk delivered at 15th Anniversary Celebrations. Dec 23, 2018</p>
<p><em>Brindaalakshmi is a member/volunteer of the Chennai based queer collective, Orinam; and is currently working with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, on a study on 'Gendering of Development Data in India'.</em></p>
<p id="gayas"><strong>Gayas Eapen</strong></p>
<p><strong><em>De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods</em></strong></p>
<p>Natural disasters can be crucial time for making lists: of people in need of assistance, rescue, support, relief and other similar disaster-related operations. In lists concerning rescue, being on the list and not being on it could mean the difference of life and death. In which case it is important to consider: how do the processes which make such lists possible come about? How do they ensure that people are not left out of these lists? How they do they sort out redundancies? I study the lists made during the Kerala floods of 2018 to attempt to answer some of these questions.</p>
<p>As rescue requests started piling up on social media, a group of volunteers set up the web portal, keralarerscue.in, which later became the central database of all the rescue requests. The portal was unique in two fronts. First, the developers building the portal were volunteers from the community instead of being the state employees, but, nonetheless, worked in coordination with the the government and rescue agencies along with the feedback they were getting from people. Second, the rescue requests were being crowdsourced from people directly. This led to the duplication of requests, it wasn’t until much later that it was realized that crowdsourced information was not coming directly from the victims, but from people who were placing requests on their behalf.</p>
<p>In this paper I argue how feedback from the community, coupled with the personal investment of the programmers lead to improvements in the structuring and use of the database. I will delineate the concerns of de-duplication (process of removing redundancies) which posed a serious dilemma, of either deleting crucial information hence posing danger to people’s lives, or incurring loss of precious resources in chasing repeated rescue requests.</p>
<p>I argue that the streamlining of programming operations by developing methods such as ticketing system (of labelling the urgency or marking completion of rescue requests by telephonically confirming them) were made possible because of a participatory model of building lists. Those involved in the technical creation of the lists identified closely with the experiences of the people stuck in the flood. The solution, which involved not deleting names of people but instead undertaking another painstaking scrutinizing operation even in a time sensitive environment, can be placed in stark contrast to how lists have been created by state or corporate agencies in similar crucial situations.</p>
<p><em>Gayas is an assistant professor of English and Journalism (as part of the Resident Expert Panel, 2018-19) at Dayapuram Arts and Science College, Kozhikode, University of Calicut.</em></p>
<p id="monish-ranjit"><strong>Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh</strong></p>
<p><strong><em>Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC</em></strong></p>
<p>This paper focuses on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as a case study to discuss legal and administrative challenges in categorizing Assamese residents as citizens of India. At a fundamental level, lists manifest a binary of categories: people who are on the list and others who are not. However, the process of achieving this binary distinction, especially in the exercise of updating NRC, has required bureaucratic accounting of a wide variety of Assameseresidents who neither are completely on the list nor completely off it. This paper specifically focuses on instances of inclusion and exclusion of three categories of Assamese residents in the process of updating the NRC: (i) Original Inhabitants (OI), (ii) Doubtful Voters (D-Voters), and (ii) Women applicants who have been excluded from the list because of the lack of appropriate bureaucratic documents. As an administrative exercise, the NRC as a citizen identification project is a moment where temporalities of NRC as a classification system does not map onto the individual biographies of a variety of Assamese residents as outlined above. In such moments of ‘torque’ (Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting things out: Classifications and its consequences, 2000), listing (or the process of making a list) is not simply bureaucratic accounting; it is also a lived experience of mismatch and the struggle that follows in efforts to secure representation through listing. We show that while the NRC update in
Assam may itself be driven by anxieties around illegal immigration, the attempts to technologically, legally, and politically categorize the ‘other’ using the information infrastructure of NRC have profound consequences on the ‘self’ of India as a nation state.</p>
<p><em>Monish is a Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, India; and Ranjit is a PhD candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Internet and Society, India.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p>The sessions have been selected based on the votes submitted by all the session teams (that proposed a session for IRC19). Please find details of this process in the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call" target="_blank">Call for Sessions</a> page. The papers have been selected by the researchers@work team.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC192019-01-21T12:11:35ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Call for Papers
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers
<b>Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list*. </b>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Call for Papers</strong></h3>
<h4>For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.</h4>
<p>Paper abstracts (of not more than 500 words) are to be submitted by <strong>Sunday, December 23</strong> via email sent to <strong>raw@cis-india.org</strong>.</p>
<p>Authors of selected paper abstracts will be informed by Monday, December 31, and will be expected to present the full paper (either in person, or remotely) at the IRC19 - #List, to be held in Hyderabad during Jan 31 - Feb 2, 2019.</p>
<p>Selected paper authors, who are unemployed or underemployed, will be offered support to cover travel expenses fully/partially.</p>
<p>The only eligibility criteria for submitting papers is that they must engage with the thematic of the conference - *list*.</p>
<h3><strong>IRC19: List</strong></h3>
<p>For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.</p>
<p>From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.</p>
<p>As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.</p>
<ul>
<li>Who makes lists?</li>
<li>How are lists made?</li>
<li>Who can be on a list, and who is missing?</li>
<li>Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?</li>
<li>What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?</li>
<li>What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?</li>
<li>What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?</li>
<li>What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?</li>
<li>What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?</li>
<li>What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?</li>
<li>What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?</li>
<li>What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?</li>
<li>How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?</li>
<li>Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?</li>
<li>Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC192018-12-06T07:00:30ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals
<b>Details of a session proposed by Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>All our tangible history can be attributed to our records-making going back to when the records were literally set in stone, so to say, archived using human digits (digital heritage!). Oral traditions such as songs, stories and recitals, performative traditions, arts and other cultural expressions that reaffirm of our collective experiences remain intangible. Stories create Legends, Rituals physically embody the legends through performances, Records attempt to freeze time at a moment. Thereby characterizing culture and memories of a community. Our effort here is to visit and discuss who creates the records, discuss the affordance of lists as an information artefact for exchange, facilitating dialogue and collective meaning-making. We peek at the traditional community of Helavaru as map and genealogy tellers, their legends, rituals / performances and the cultural economy involved in making and circulating the archives of cultural memories in contrast with the technology driven formulation of lists that are founding the Internet culture. Allegorically, if the memory of stone as a medium of a message is still alive in us, how are people included and who all are excluded from our “memories”.</p>
<p>Our session would be a performative through experimental list artefacts that intend to make visible the interplay between the form of the information artefact and the content. How do we perceive information when the form of the list changes. The implicit structure of lists is suggestive of a certain order, priority and disconnected connections. We intend to play with those structures, breaking them and making new ones in the process. What do we call a list? and what does it do?</p>
<ul>
<li>Priyanka and Aditya will bring "poetic" list artefacts that juxtapose traditional aspects of list making and lists as a dynamic phenomenon on the internet (ex. #Metoo).<br /><br /></li>
<li>Bhanu will introduce the traditional storytelling community of Helavaru as list performers.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Aishwarya will bring in the current context of social auditing and the stories from the ground today, from a rural context.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Dinesh will illustrate 3 ways list are formulated today mathematically, socially and technologically.</li></ul>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Priyanka</strong> is a new media artist-researcher, currently engaged with Microsoft as an interaction designer. While at Microsoft she solves design problems for the browser, her personal inquiries run deep into understanding people’s lives on the internet, nature of the digital-materiality and its affordances for expression and exchange in networked societies.</p>
<p><strong>Aditya</strong> is a designer and an entrepreneur always thinking of ways to display information beautifully. Lately he has been working on interfaces for lists to provide a clear stream of reason to anyone through simple model(s) of visualisation of information and, therefore attempt to make knowledge more accessible.</p>
<p>Priyanka and Aditya intends to play with the form of lists to investigate its effect on narrative construction. They will bring in “poetic-lists” - experimental list artefacts that probe into the implicit order and biases that lists bring to the act of meaning making, especially in the context of a collective audience.</p>
<p><strong>Bhanu Prakash GS</strong> - As Web application developer at Servelots(.com), he contributes to the open and free software, and has been working on developing tools for delivering visual stories from archives. He has worked with the NCBS@25 project titled “13 Ways” where stories from the history of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Democracy Archives for University of Gottingen, and also on methods to render the folk stories of Vijayadashami rituals into visual stories on the Web.</p>
<p>Bhanu introduces the ways the Helavaru community, in the pre-internet era, created, “circulated” and mutated Lists of names, facts and events forming the information networks of communities, castes, jaatis, clans, tribes. The Helavas are a nomadic community visible around Karnataka and Andhra who deck up their bullocks and carts, set out to the villages of their patrons to sing praises of great deeds of their forefathers and the genealogy of the families with great detail, and end their performance with a ritual Harike - a wish for the well being of their patrons. In return they are paid for their services with grains, clothes, goat, sheep, cow, bullocks and money as much as one can afford.</p>
<p>Their story is an indicator of the cultural economy, of interweaving a web of communities, their systems of socio-political-cultural organisation by developing competence in data indexing, backups and restores, dealing with identity and authentication, conflicts and negotiations and more from generation to generation. The Helavaru claim that each family recorded genealogy of at least 3 lakh families, and passing it on, and also losing in some cases is fascinating.</p>
<p><strong>Aishwarya</strong> is a Communication Strategist at the Society for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT) - Andhra Pradesh, Department of Rural Development, Government of Telangana. SSAAT has been set-up with a vision to uphold the concept of eternal vigilance by the people, facilitated by social activists and Government acting in conjunction.</p>
<p>A social audit is a standardised way of facilitating people to critique the implementation of a welfare scheme, and demand accountability from the government. It is a powerful tool which enables people to come forward, demand information, question officials, and fight for their rightful deliverables of a government scheme. This mechanism ensures transparency in the way a government functions, and has helped recover a lot of money lost to corruption.</p>
<p>In India, a Supreme Court mandate made the social audits of MGNREGS compulsory in all states. However, Social Audit units have been successful in empowering the people only in a few states. While the SAU facilitates an audit, it is conducted by people from the families of the beneficiaries. One social audit is a 15-day process of record verifications, door-to-door verifications, awareness rallies, a Gram Sabha and a Public Hearing. While a social audit ensures accountability, it lacks the guarantee of enforcement. The different layers of bureaucracy often swallows the essence of public participation and grievance redressal does not have follow-ups.</p>
<p>All grievances are recorded in the form of paras in the social audit database. While our on-ground social auditors may be socially and politically aware enough to observe and call out patterns in caste and gender discrimination, the results remain, but in a list on the MIS.</p>
<p><strong>Dinesh</strong> is part of Janastu team - a non-profit group. The team is eager to help address Web content accessibility for the low-literate using social semantic web concepts and are also looking at 3D methods for spatial navigation, location interpretation and storytelling. Janastu engages with software commons by developing and supporting open source social platforms.</p>
<p>Dinesh, with a Computer Science background, will bring list comprehension to this platform using map/reduce, monads, and blockchain as the technical formalisms that make the Internet work and how people are made to toe these invisible lines. Then initiate discussions on Machine Learning within the history of page ranking and how the who, where, what of lists manifest. This will be contextualized with the traditional, the social and the new media social networks and processes that nurture community memory by tuning the semantic distance needed for privacy and by making room for forgetting in ways that communities heal from trauma.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-28T15:55:24ZBlog EntryIRC19 - List of Proposed Sessions
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions
<b>Here is the list of sessions proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call" target="_blank">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah" target="_blank">#AyushmanBhavah</a> - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-butitisnotfunny" target="_blank">#ButItIsNotFunny</a> - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin" target="_blank">#CallingOutAndIn</a> - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-digitalplatformattributes" target="_blank">#DigitalPlatformAttributes</a> - Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy" target="_blank">#EnlistingPrivacy</a> - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo" target="_blank">#FOMO</a> - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists" target="_blank">#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design</a> - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface" target="_blank">#ListInterface</a> - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase" target="_blank">#ListsAsDatabase</a> - Ria De and Samata Biswas</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed" target="_blank">#LoSHAandWhatFollowed</a> - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting" target="_blank">#PowerListing</a> - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice" target="_blank">#SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice</a> - Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals" target="_blank">#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals</a> - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh</h4>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions</a>
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No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-28T15:40:58ZBlog Entry