Paper short abstract:

In an age of increasingly digitised welfare programmes in India, attention to new or reinforced forms of precarity, remain limited. This paper focuses on how 'new forms' of precarity, particularly around gender, extend historical continuities of exclusion among precarious urban citizens.

Paper long abstract:

In an age of increasingly digitised and automated welfare programmes and services across diverse global contexts, attention to new or reinforced forms of precarity and unequal citizenship outcomes that arise, remain limited. These 'new forms' of precarity, particularly around gender, extend historical continuities of exclusion from 'analogue' welfare programmes among precarious people in cities, particularly women.They also deepen unequal citizenship outcomes among labour migrants and the urban poor.

Cities spanning the globe are undergoing rapidly evolving processes of digitisation in public infrastructure; bureaucracy and social welfare programmes, with visceral impacts on life at the urban margins. As regimes of digital service provision are rolled out with increasing speed, they are simultaneously contested as tools of neoliberal development and accumulation. 'Automated inequality' (Eubanks, 2018), 'forced digitisation' (Banaji, 2017) and 'data colonisation' (Couldry and Mejias, 2018) are some of the terms attributed to processes linked to the swift displacement of people from access to welfare systems, for example under programmes of demonetisation and biometric identification systems in India. On the other hand, the role of other forms of digital infrastructures that enable strategies of gendered resilience from below, for example through social media, has been conceptually isolated from understanding urban precarity.

In this paper, I ground understandings of the relationship the digitisation of the welfare programmes, unequal citizenship outcomes and embodied experiences, particularly around gender, in ethnographic work gathered in the Indian city of Delhi to understand the various ways in which digitisation enacts and resists gendered forms of urban precarity.