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- Convenor:
-
Shubh Gupta
(Jawaharlal Nehru University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel examines how digital platforms, RWAs, and neighborhood apps reshape urban governance and everyday vigilance. It will explore how the resident-driven surveillance, data infrastructures, and social sorting across Global South and Global North takes place.
Description
Across cities worldwide, neighborhood associations and resident collectives are becoming micro-polities that deploy digital tools—right from CCTV grids and visitor-management apps to WhatsApp alerts. To govern mobility, security, and social membership. In these “digitally gated communities,” everyday communication platforms increasingly merge with surveillance infrastructures, generating a new mode of citizen-driven vigilance.
This panel solicits conceptual and empirical submissions that investigate how platform-mediated community governance alters power dynamics, trust, exclusion, and everyday life. We emphasize the Global South, where the principles of gated communities converge with platform capitalism, informality, labor hierarchies, and socio-cultural stratification. Insights from Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs) in India and Africa demonstrate how security infrastructures and messaging groups facilitate lateral monitoring, civic responsibilization, and algorithmic boundary-making, influencing perceptions of belonging, suspicion, and visibility.
We especially want to invite work that looks at how digital systems create power imbalances, new ways of sorting people into groups, and changes the ethics of watching and being watched in everyday life.
This panel adds to the academic discussion on platform urbanism, infrastructural governance, data justice, decolonial privacy, and the techno-politics of the neighborhood by applying STS frameworks to community-led monitoring. Its goal is to show new ways to look at the interactions between citizens, the government, and platforms that affect modern public life.
This is an open panel that will accept abstracts for presentations in the areas of qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, and experimental STS.