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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the work of a team of New Delhi-based designer-researchers aimed at redefining India’s national clothing size standards. It reveals how they evaluate universal and context-specific measures of inclusion and conceptualize public audiences as citizen-data

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the planning and execution activities of a team of New Delhi-based designer-researchers aimed at redefining India’s national clothing size standards. Born out of a dissatisfaction with sizing and proportional standards used in the ready-made apparel industry—e.g., for clothing tags, mannequins, and automated production machinery—that was created in the 1980s to primarily serve export markets, they now seek to ‘indigenize’ the industry’s production culture. As India’s domestic fashion consumer audiences have grown, industry size standards have been increasingly identified with ‘European’ bodies and criticized for societal harms, such as contributing to material waste and negatively impacting self-esteem through ‘ill-fit.’ However, as evident in the work of these designer-researchers, generating more inclusive nationally-specific sizing data is not straightforward. Drawing on anthropological perspectives on bureaucratic rationalization (Cohn 1996), the constitutive force of standards (Lampland and Star 2009), and the paradoxical exclusions of ‘inclusive’ initiatives (Partridge 2012), this paper explores how designer teams evaluate the applicability of universal and context-specific measures of inclusion during their conceptualization of public audiences as citizen-data.

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Information technologies for targeting social system: an algorithm with double productive character. Through ethnographic work, we explore how the targeting system induces a process of decoding “the vulnerable” between local-level professionals and social system possible beneficiaries.

Paper long abstract:

This article problematizes the sociopolitical dimension of information technologies in social management. Specifically, we account for a double productive character of the Social Registry of Households (RSH) as an algorithm (Dixon-Roman, 2016): in terms of a regime of truth of “the vulnerable” and for social intervention. In this work, our interest is to explore technological instruments and measurements for poverty management and “targeting.” To do this, we are illuminated by moments of Chilean cybernetic politics when they expose the multiple forms of the techno-political relationship. We explored this instrument from cultural studies of quantification (Dixon-Román, 2016), which considers data production as a cultural process, present in multiple spaces, and circulating productively in everyday life (Riberi, 2022). Specifically, we analyze the intermediation among households and municipalities for house registration, i.e. the production of the RSH data. Through ethnographic work of the encounter between local-level professionals and social system possible beneficiaries, the opacity of the centralized targeting system induces a process of decoding “the vulnerable” at the local level that becomes an apparent intervention process.

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This paper is about digitality as a condition that becomes folded in procedural bureaucracy and healthworkers who navigate the frequent slips between the paper and the digital as they assemble people, objects and programs together.

Paper long abstract:

In July 2022 I am sitting in Villupuram’s ‘Block War Room’ where the health staff are showcasing a powerpoint presentation on a digital health project called the Tamil Nadu Population Health Registry. It is a dashboard, a mobile app, a web portal, depending on who is looking at it, but most importantly it is a ‘single source of truth’ that records and profiles health data of residents in Tamil Nadu, India. ‘Digital India’ as an emerging political form is an instantiation of lively capacities into the ‘idle’ archives of data by linking, networking, interoperating for ‘comprehensive governance’ (Cohen 2016) This has not come about, yet, but the idea of surfacing all existing data onto a plane of legibility and forging an interactive collective that emits the right kinds of prompts and predictions changes things. It shifts an understanding of population data from a repository of identities and categories to the expansive circuits of databases that can materialize new relations between people, technologies and government programs. This paper is about digitality as a condition that becomes folded in procedural bureaucracy and healthworkers who navigate the frequent slips between paper and digital as they assemble people, objects and programs together. I argue that as old and new regimes of state work get entangled, digitisation, digital truths, databases refashion local and national hopes for health security with technology, for modern health centers, and this changes how care is distributed and sought in these spaces.

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Digital data about the social and material processes of providing Islamic religious services in Turkey have shaped the various sites on which they impinge. The recent exponential expansion of the jurisdiction of Islamic authorities has been coconstituted with the datafication of religious services.

Paper long abstract:

This paper approaches the unintended effects of data from the vantage point of a domain not conventionally considered digital: religion. In contemporary Turkey, digital data infrastructures act as constitutive elements of a complex religio-governmental arrangement emanating from the bureaucratization of Islamic authority under state governance. Since the secular Turkish Republic was founded following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the religious affairs of the Sunni-Muslim majority have been centralized by a state institution known as the Directorate of Religious Affairs (“Diyanet” in Turkish). All Turkish mosques are operated by the Diyanet and staffed by state-appointed imams and preachers. In recent years, these mosques, Islamic authorities, and religious services have increasingly been interconnected through an assemblage of digital infrastructures — the most notable of which is the Religious Affairs Information Management System. This online data infrastructure was originally designed to audit, standardize, and regulate the practices of religious functionaries, as well as facilitating their bureaucratic affairs as state employees. Based on a six month ethnographic study, this paper shows that the recent exponential expansion of the jurisdiction of Islamic authorities has been co-constituted with the datafication of religious services. Digital data about the social and material processes of providing Islamic religious services have shaped the various sites on which they impinge in surprising and unintended ways. Once relegated to facilitating faith, worship, and religious education, Islamic religious authorities increasingly find themselves as accountable for providing the state’s social and welfare services due to the datafication and infrastructuralization of religious services.

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Paper short abstract:

My wardrobe does not look very digital, but almost every item can be seen on Instagram. This paper examines what happens when we intellectually discard the data inherent to digital fashion photography and reinterpret garments in universe without social media.

Paper long abstract:

Following a long period of digital ethnographic fieldwork with well-dressed sartorialists on Instagram I stepped away from the digital fieldsite and looked around my terrestrial space. Chaos reigned. Suits sprawled on every surface, ties overflowed their boxes and shoes were scattered with abandon on the stairs. I had spent years photographing these items for my digital self to wear on Instagram but now, they seemed little more than hollow, lifeless objects...tailored detritus washed up on the shores of my post-fieldwork blues. These tangible objects of wool, cotton, leather and silk had been transformed into something else; digital data. I had been so compelled by the power of the image that the objects themselves had somehow lost their currency. This paper examines a process of rediscovery, with objects of clothing from the researcher’s personal collection being examined devoid of their digital context. These objects cast a deep transactional digital shadow, but by considering this through the lens of multiverse spacetime these objects can be experienced anew, before helping the researcher reposition the digital in relation to these garments. By asking what happens to material culture through the process of datafication, this paper will problematize the increasing weight we place on data in the world of fashion and retail and question how the image as data impacts our own practices, values and imagination.

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Food delivery platforms use data to organize the flow of meals, but delivery workers need to fill the gaps between data-driven planning and lived experience. Centering riders’ embodied practices in material delivery processes, the paper scrutinizes the place of the digital in contemporary gig work.

Paper long abstract:

Food delivery couriers have become emblematic of digitally mediated gig work. The platform companies they work for purport to provide a seamless digital solution to challenges of social reproduction. By collecting and algorithmically processing data on riders’ physical movements through space and time, platform companies orchestrate deliveries and control the labor process. But this ordering of space and time often fails to account for the messy material reality that riders encounter when picking up orders, biking to customers, and dropping off meals. On an everyday basis, workers need to fill the gaps between data-driven planning and lived experience, where the view from the algorithmic control room suggests the possibility of seamless physical flows. The core labor of delivering meals remains firmly tethered to couriers‘ embodied, skillful, and affective engagement with material urban worlds.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork as a delivery worker in Oslo, I center bike couriers’ manual, embodied labor and consider how they interact with a variety of material artifacts, ranging from their bikes and uniforms to receipts, roads, and doorbells. I examine how delivery workers enable the circulation of delivered meals by mediating between their own embodied experience and the platform’s data-driven management of the delivery. Delivery workers’ practices take place in a complex infrastructural assemblage that is largely constituted digitally yet intensely experienced in its materiality. By relocating the digital in food delivery gig work, this paper suggests a need to critically examine the effect of data in the undoing and redoing of contemporary labor regimes.

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I explore how the autorickshaw-mounted panic button's promise to facilitate protection of anyone, anytime, anywhere through the deployment of locational data and digital communications capabilities anchors complex engagements with the materiality of failure as an idiom of democratic discourse.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2012, autorickshaw fare meters in Delhi, India have been equipped with panic buttons, integrating GPS receivers and SIM cards that make the real-time production and communication of locational data possible, embodying a promise of security to anyone, anywhere, anytime within the city. However, when asked engineers working with these systems generally agreed they were not functional. While such an observation on bureaucratic failure is common enough, it is complicated by forms of technological error associated with the panic button’s communicative architecture and the digital infrastructures in which it is embedded. Though error can be mitigated in various ways, it is an irreducible aspect of any complex system, complicating standing questions of agency and accountability by introducing a distinction between contingent and necessary failures. In the context of a promise to protect all persons, wherever they are, all the time, error imparts a quality of necessity to the inevitable instances of failure to keep that promise. Oddly enough, this necessary possibility of failure is socially contextualized by means of an object unrelated to the panic button’s digital architecture – a metal box in which meters are often housed that may restrict access to the panic button itself. In this paper, I will explore how the box multiplies the sites of the panic button’s failure, paradoxically preserving the universality and egalitarianism of its promise made possible through digital mediation by staging failure as a technical affordance rather than an unfortunate outcome.

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This paper seeks to explore the complex and fluid life of Slovenian linguistic data reflecting local and global events through the users of the Slovenian language. It focuses on how linguistic data is lived by a group of linguists who are cocreating the digital platform Fran.

Paper long abstract:

During the pandemic a group of linguists tried to make sense of this phenomenon through gathering and combining linguistic data from the most relevant new and previously published dictionary entries, and language consultancy responses related to Covid-19, published as the 7.1 special version of Fran (a web portal representing the combined work of the Fran Ramovš Institute for Slovenian Language). Outside of Fran, linguistic data simultaneously exists in different forms and relations amongst the general public, expert users, language corpuses, linguists and their hard drives, backups on data servers, paper cards in archives, written texts and audio-visual contents.

How does the digital augmentation of linguistic data change the relations to the before mentioned users, mediums and environments? Can the digitalization of linguistic data be understood in terms of Haraway's (2016) cyborg, as an extended social tissue that connects human and nonhuman entities through their partial connections? Can partial connections (Strathern, 2004) illuminate the different spatial and environmental habitats and states of linguistic data? Can we apply the concept of correspondences (Ingold, 2021) to how linguistic data is lived by us, the users? Does this data exist as an otherness? And how does it inhabit linguists who translate the practices of language users into representations of formalized Slovenian language?

Finally, the pandemic not only shifted the focus of linguists’ work, it also shifted the way they worked. It affected their workflow; the immediacy of their social contact which affects how they debate and finally define linguistic data before publication.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the differences/ similarities between the face as a digital byproduct and the face as a crafted artefact. My analysis is based on fieldwork in two cleft lip and/palate clinics in Stockholm and Asunción.

Paper long abstract:

The face has arguably been transformed by the emergence of the “digital;” it’s in focus on platforms like Snapchat and Zoom; vast databases of “digital” faces fuel facial recognition technologies, and movie industries scan faces to own digital copies. Unsurprisingly, the face is commonly illustrated as one divided into data points. However, despite the digital rendering of the face I will use this opportunity to think about the differences between knowing the face through digital means and knowing the face through craft. My work is situated in two clinics treating cleft lip and/palate patients in Stockholm and Asunción. Although digital renderings of the face were to the team’s disposal, no tools that revealed digital data points were used during the surgery or orthodontic intervention. Rather experience based perception and analogue tools were used; the surgeon judged the gradient of their cut by modelling with a scissor, sketched midlines by knowing the landmarks of the face, touched the face, and shaped the face with tools like hammers, wedges, and chisels. Building off M’chareks and Shramm’s work on the face as multiple (2020), I want to explore the differences between the face as a digital byproduct and the face as a crafted artefact. I argue that thinking about the face through different modalities and especially between the digital and “not-so-digital”, offer new ways to unpack the face and what it does.