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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
The digitalisation of fiscal flows in Bangladesh generates a data deluge that runs countercurrent to money's movements. This paper explores the sociopolitical stakes, ethical conundrums, and material consequences of these new citizen-state digital fiscal data relations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between countercurrent flows of money and data in three newly digitalised systems in Bangladesh: local-level holding tax collection, social safety net programmes, and land management systems. It asks how data collection and digital transformation are reshaping citizen-state relationships and financial processes in everyday life. The paper will explore tax, benefits, and land management through three lenses:
1) Infrastructural labour: Personal efforts and interests undergird the maintenance of digital fiscal systems, including who becomes in/excluded and how data is 'cooked' by gatekeepers and intermediaries to capture flows of value.
2) Ethical life: Data relations invoke concerns about trust, privacy, judgment, and obligation. These issues go beyond industry attention to data ‘purity’ (a fiction) and ‘safe’ storage to relations of data/money collection and control. Digitalisation engages local ethical registers to spin webs of generative/extractive obligations characterised by the nature of communities' role in data arrangements.
3) Materiality and value: Value judgments arise when encountering enduring frictions between social knowledge, paper data and digital data. Digitalisation choices entail the confrontation of violent legacies, e.g. of colonial exclusions and how sociopolitical categories affect people’s possibilities.
Fiscal flows: a site of ethnographic intervention and disciplinary reflection