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- Convenors:
-
Lipika Kamra
(O.P. Jindal Global University)
Philippa Williams (Queen Mary University Of London)
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- Stream:
- Infrastructure
- Sessions:
- Thursday 17 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will focus on how digital imaginaries and technology are transforming the relationship between the state, corporations, technology and citizens, and the implications for democracy and development.
Long Abstract:
Utopian expectations that digital technology would deepen democratic life have long since been defied, from the Cambridge Analytica facilitated-election campaigns to the everyday uptake of WhatsApp for the circulation of extreme speech. Yet, the use of digital technology now increasingly impacts practices of the state across the world. Against this backdrop, this panel seeks to interrogate how digital imaginaries are transforming relationships between the state-corporate-digital-citizens and the implications for citizenship, governance and development.
The panel will host research and practice related to 'the digital' in the broadest sense and contribute to discussions on, but not limited to: i) the role of DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE in building 'smart cities', 'broadband highways', as well as the growth of a digital payments ecosystem and evolution of the biometric identity programmes; ii) how digital labour PLATFORMS AND PRACTICES are (re)shaping experiences of work and social relations; iii) modes of DIGITAL CONTENT and how the production, circulation and consumption of social media (re)produces and resists everyday life and politics; and iv) DIGITAL METHODOLOGIES which raise old and new questions concerning research practice and ethics. The panel seeks to challenge existing and apolitical conceptions of digital technology as a technocratic fix for poverty and raise critical questions about digital politics and the politics of the digital.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 17 September, 2020, -Aditya Ray (Open University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores ideas of self-identity, marginality, aspirations and agency amongst lower-middle youth in Pune, to reflect more broadly on emerging 'cosmopolitan subjectivities' in the contemporary era of digitalisation and the changing landscapes of socio-political consciousness in India.
Paper long abstract:
A general augmentation of life chances, accessibility to internet, smart-phones, media and communications technologies among India's youth have (together) opened-up new avenues of social interactions, and effected a realignment of their socio-economic and political realities as well as consciousness. This has arguably effected a change in the ways in which India's youth perceive society and how they participate in it (see Udupa et al. 2019). But is this change so different? How useful are labels such as 'neoliberalism' to understand youth subjectivities in digitalis(ing) India that is also witnessing the onset of new forms of socio-economic inequalities layered over older ones? This paper attempts to answer such concerns. The analysis in the paper emerges from prolonged ethnographic engagement with a cohort of lower-middle class youth engaged actively in the new services economy in Pune, an emergent Tier-2 metro in Maharashtra, between 2015 and 2017. The paper is structured in terms of thematic reflections on their work/life-course - touching upon ideas of young people's self-identity, marginalisation, aspirations and agency, to reflect more broadly on emerging 'cosmopolitan subjectivities' amongst young people in times of digitalisation, and the advent of new socio-political consciousness in India.
Philippa Williams (Queen Mary University Of London) Fatma Khan (London School of Economics) Lipika Kamra (O.P. Jindal Global University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines young people's lived experience of WhatsApp groups in contemporary India to explore the ways in which power structures mediate, constrain and shape voice and silence in online environments.
Paper long abstract:
Digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp have enabled more people in recent years to become involved in civil society activism, participate in formal politics, and even lead popular movements. However, digital technology, despite its progressive and democratic potential, is necessarily a tool enmeshed in power relations, and scholars increasingly argue that these digital platforms reflect the social hierarchies of the societies in which they are embedded (Miller and Horst 2012; Elwood and Leszczynski 2018; Gajjala 2012). This paper examines the politics of digital platforms and digitality from the vantage point of 'private' WhatsApp groups in India today. Based on ethnographic research conducted with students in New Delhi around the 2019 Indian national elections, we show how young people's participation in everyday political and politicised conversations is mediated, and at times, reconfigured by the relative novelty of the digital interface and the ordinariness of societal structures. Rather than simply perceiving the 'WhatsApp group' as a site of activism, inclusion and resistance for marginalised groups (e.g. Sen 2019; Omanga 2018), we explore the the ways in which power structures mediate, constrain and shape voice and silence online as well as the affective labour involved in these negotiations.