Presentation short abstract

Digitalisation is transforming both markets and government in India, alongside rapid urbanisation and persistent informality. This study examines how workers in the informal economy navigate this changing landscape, with a focus on two occupational groups, street vendors and waste pickers.

Presentation long abstract

Digitalisation has transformed both markets and government in India. This shift has occurred alongside rapid urbanisation and persistent informality. While there is growing interest in its implications for urban governance, labour markets and social structures, less is known about how workers in the informal economy are navigating this changing landscape. This study focuses on two such groups, street vendors and waste pickers. Street vendors occupy a unique position with legal recognition under the 2014 Street Vendors Act but continue to face constant harassment and displacement. In contrast, waste pickers are acknowledged under the 2016 Solid Waste Management Rules, but lack statutory protections and are excluded from formal waste management systems.

This paper examines how digital infrastructures interact with workers’ integration into urban planning, policy and legal status, to shape their access to space, livelihoods, and social protection. A survey of workers across Delhi and Ghaziabad is complemented by interviews with stakeholders including government entities, unions and CSOs to provide systemic perspectives.

The findings highlight the importance of a rights-based approach for formalization and digitalisation in India. The effectiveness of digital tools depends not only on their design and implementation, but also critically, on the legal and institutional systems that accompany them. The lack of legal recognition and collective action are key barriers for waste pickers. Specific challenges in the effective leveraging digital initiatives for both occupational groups include low digital literacy, low awareness, lack of continued assistance, fragmented implementation, adverse impacts of registration targets, and rent-seeking behaviour by authorities.

Presentation short abstract

El auge descontrolado de centros de datos está planteando desafíos para diferentes territorios. En esta ponencia se presentan los impactos detectados, proponiendo “digitalidades alternativas” para una transición digital ecosocial desde investigación, movilización, prototipado y desarrollo normativo.

Presentation long abstract

A través de las experiencias investigadoras de las autoras/autores, y su participación en un litigio estratégico frente a la expansión masiva de centros de datos hiperescalares, se presentan los múltiples impactos y la necesidad de un replanteamiento técnico, jurídico, económico, ecológico y social del modelo desplegado por administraciones públicas y grandes corporaciones tecnológicas en Aragón, Castilla la-Mancha, Cataluña, Madrid o Extremadura.

Desde la confluencia entre academia, práctica arquitectónica, activismo medioambiental y movilización social, se recogen propuestas para el replanteamiento de nuestras vidas e infraestructuras digitales. Estas “digitalidades alternativas” se plantean desde, al menos, tres escalas: primero, desde la relativa a los usos digitales cotidianos en tiempos de auge de la IA generativa; segundo, desde el rediseño de las infraestructuras; y, finalmente, desde una escala global, norte-sur global y de concentración de datos y capital.

Se exploran la permacomputación, el ecofeminismo de datos, la computación frugal o con límites, como prácticas concretas de decrecimiento digital, así como la reconsideración de los paradigmas de accesibilidad constante, la baja latencia y la alta resolución. A través de prácticas y saberes asentados en software libre, redes sociales libres y soberanía digital, se muestran investigaciones de campo, acciones y prototipos llevados a cabo tanto por las autoras/autores como por movimientos sociales, que propondrán infraestructuras concretas. También se recorren las posibilidades de la desconcentración territorial y el desescalado de centros de datos. Se propone el paradigma de la “suficiencia digital” frente a la eficiencia y se discute la propia titularidad y naturaleza de los datos.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing on literature and interview themes, we reveal a central paradox: digital participatory mapping tools in conservation can disrupt community power dynamics and revitalise cultural and intergenerational knowledge, all of which is shaped by digital design and participatory processes.

Presentation long abstract

Over the past two decades, the use of digital participatory mapping tools in conservation has advanced in design and accessibility, reflecting a shift from digital technologies applied to Indigenous Peoples and local communities to those increasingly co-designed and used by them. Their application can range from responding to external threats to supporting community-based resource management to facilitating rights-based approaches in conservation. However, despite growing prominence and proliferation, the impacts of digital participatory mapping tools on traditional and scientific knowledge, alongside cross-cultural collaborations, remain underexplored. Drawing on thematic literature and semi-structured interviews (n=20), our study identified some negative cases in which digital participatory mapping tools impacted community power dynamics and traditional knowledge transfer. Simultaneously, we found that such tools can also bridge traditional and scientific knowledge systems to foster intergenerational learning and cultural revitalisation, which can enhance community empowerment in conservation practice. These benefits are tied to both the tool and the participatory process that accompanies them, including co-design, facilitation, and digital capacity building within communities. All of which is vital to strengthening cross-cultural collaborations and braiding knowledge systems to the benefit of communities and equitable conservation. The objective of this presentation is to highlight the synergies and obstacles of digital participatory mapping as it interfaces with knowledge, people and place in conservation.

Presentation short abstract

What role might social media have in mobilizing values and fostering actions for the environment? The digital age demands new frameworks to better understand grassroots environmental practices within hybrid contexts, where the boundaries between the digital and physical are increasingly fluid.

Presentation long abstract

Digitalization is transforming the ways in which people experience, value and care for nature. Yet, there is still little understanding on how social media content facilitates indirect nature experiences and influences notions of care for nature. We introduce a novel framework to investigate how social media can be a space of both opportunity and risk to mobilize values for environmental stewardship. We propose that social media offers complementary pathways for environmental stewardship by fostering care, knowledge and agency. Yet, the potential is limited by the socio-environmental, political and technological affordances that shape how digital nature interactions are portrayed and made meaningful. We analyze social media posts across three major social media platforms (X/Twitter, YouTube and Weibo) and three major languages (English, Spanish and Mandarin). Our findings show that even though nature appears often in the feed, and in over half of the posts includes an expression of relational value, stewardship action is reported slightly. We identify that aesthetic values dominate in the digital sphere and are less likely to co-occur with stewardship action, whereas values related to stewardship principle and ecological literacy are more likely to co-occur with reported stewardship action. These are valuable insights for the communication strategies of environmental initiatives and individuals and collectives engaged in grassroots practices. By challenging the widespread notion that social media leads only to nature disconnection and a decline in environmental stewardship, we hope to inspire discussions and raise new questions on the role of social media platforms in advancing the socio-ecological transition.

Presentation short abstract

The communicative practices of an autonomous women's collective in India demonstrates the patriarchal and epistemic power asymmetries they face in media making. Simultaneously they demonstrate the strategies to subvert such power to claim expertise about environmental justice.

Presentation long abstract

Alternative media is increasingly a strategic tool in place-based movements and environmental conflicts seeking justice for their communities and for their ecology. This paper examines how Maati Collective, an autonomous women’s collective in Uttarakhand, India uses alternative media to share Indigenous and Dalit women’s perspectives on environmental justice and development alternatives. Such ecosystem women have barely any representation in mainstream media and in decision-making spaces despite their lives being socio-spiritually linked to ecosystems. Therefore, alternative media use is a strategy to claim environmental justice – distributive, participatory and recognition justice. Alternative media is closely aligned with the goals of environmental justice because of its focus on citizen participation and democracy, giving voice to counter-hegemonic concerns Foxwell-Norton, 2015). By focusing on women’s navigation of power asymmetries while using alternative media, this paper examines “How do grassroots narratives challenge (or reproduce) the narrative of the digital divide(s)?”.

Maati’s experience demonstrates a constant push and pull of power. Women challenge deeply patriarchal norms to enter media making through strategic collectivisation. They also negotiate epistemic injustice from media and funding collaborators with more cultural capital than them. Alternative media is simultaneously a tool to subvert these forms of power, because it enables them to position themselves as knowledge experts of bio-cultural diversity and of transformative initiatives. By addressing power asymmetries in media use, this research encourages alternative media and environmental justice movements to actively include more narratives from indigenous and Dalit women on environmental justice and alternatives to development.

Presentation short abstract

We present interim results for the development of a relational database that integrates theory, observation, and expert knowledge to encompass digitalization typologies that challenge linear digital frameworks, enabling analyses across grassroots transformation pathways, contexts, and practices.

Presentation long abstract

Grassroots transformative initiatives (GTIs) working toward environmental justice and biocultural diversity are believed to be increasingly operating through digital infrastructures, yet their digital practices remain poorly documented.

This paper will present the interim outcomes of a methodology, within the framework of the DIVERSE project, for constructing analytical typologies that integrate initiative identity, transformation pathways, spatial traits, and digitalization patterns within a coherent relational database architecture. Moving beyond categorical frameworks that position GTIs as passive technology adopters along a linear digital divide, our approach recognizes digital practices as relationally co-constituted with transformation goals, spatial infrastructures, and organizational capacities.

Our methodology combines systematic literature review with empirical analysis of GTI websites, iteratively refined through structured team consultation. We expect that this process will help document the tension between standardization (enabling comparison) and contextual specificity (capturing situated experience). The tentative database architecture, which will still undergo rounds of participatory development and updating, will make visible the trade-offs, enablers, and barriers that GTIs navigate in their digital praxis, while accommodating multiple data sources - from secondary documentation to primary interviews.

We argue that database design is not merely technical infrastructure but encodes ontological commitments about how transformation happens. By treating digitalization as interwoven with identity, spatiality, and justice rather than as a separate sphere, our relational approach challenges digital divide narratives and creates analytical infrastructure for cumulative knowledge-building across diverse grassroots contexts, supporting both comparative scholarship and movement-led learning.