ICT, Intermediaries, and the Transformation of Gendered Power Structures

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are believed to hold much potential to empower women, both socially and economically, in low-income and rural communities. In this paper, we focus on rural women who mediate ICT use as telecenter operators in India and as helpers and enablers for family members in rural China. We explore under what circumstances they may be able to renegotiate existing gendered power structures. We argue that acts of reconciling or confronting these different spaces they inhabit can allow intermediaries to remake their own identities and positions in their community. This process, rather than the potential associated with ICTs, is where spaces for empowerment often lie

Introduction : human rights and legal pluralism : four research agendas

In this volume, we interrogate how human rights law and practice acquire meaning in contexts of legal pluralism, and influence interactions that are subject to regulation by more than one normative regime. Legal pluralism refers to the coexistence of more than one legal order in a particular field of social relations. The concept denotes a plurality of laws and/or mechanisms for processing disputes stemming from different sources of legitimation, such as the state, religion or custom, which operate within a same sociopolitical, temporal and geographical space... As in the case of human rights, legal pluralism also has a ‘ legal ’ and a ‘ social ’ face, or what we would call normative and empirical dimensions

Digitalisation and Transformations of Women’s Labour in Sanitation Work

The waste management sector has attracted the private sector in India. Taking the case study of a start-up in waste sorting and recycling, the essayexamines how technologies used in such spaces affect women's work. It finds that there is a shift in the perceptions of who engages in this work and how thework itself is experienced and seen. But it also cautions against the perpetuation of the gendered division of labour in sanitation work, particularly in roles thatdemand technical (often digital) literacy/competence

Online, on call: : the spread of digitally-organised just-in-time working and its implications for standard employment models

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non-standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT-related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.Peer reviewe

A feminist action framework on development and digital technologies

This document is a guiding framework on gender, development and digital/internet rights. Borrowing from feminist theories that bring together conceptions of gender justice and economic justice, it seeks to tease out the issues and positions for feminist advocacy on digital technologies and the internet.1 As the warp and weft of all social systems change with the indelible mark of the internet and digital technologies, there is a destabilisation of norms and rules. This is true for national and global institutions – from trade, commerce, financial markets, work arrangements, etc. to social and cultural arenas of communication, media and knowledge. The flux we are witness to can be harnessed by agile feminist action into a productive space that can mark a departure from traditional norms that define social power. But for this to happen, feminists need to claim historical knowledge and build an informed framework of analysis and action. So far, a strong civil and political rights framework has led feminist actions in the digital realm. Using the normative compass that feminist conceptual tools on development offer, digital rights activism must promote an idea of gender justice that accounts for the lived experience of women at the margins of the mainstream economy. This calls for a composite approach that underscores the indivisibility and interdependency of social-economic and civil-political rights. 1 This writing draws from the work of Third World feminist networks like Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and insights from personal engagement in the internet policy arena through the work of IT for Change, the organisation that the authors are associated with. This document intends to bring to feminist advocacy and action the conceptual and analytical building blocks of such an approach. It examines the substantive aspects of women’s economic, social and cultural rights, offering a new point of departure to the old idea of the “right to communicate”, bringing to the fore the idea of “cognitive justice”. Outlining why and how women’s rights in the network age requires a new conception of the right to access digital technologies, the right to knowledge and the right to development, it spells out the key “asks” in terms of national and global policies. The final section, on the directions for feminist advocacy, provides an indicative cartography of issues and spaces for action.Ford Foundatio

Exploring capability and accountability outcomes of open development for the poor and marginalized: An analysis of select literature

Open development concerns the application of digitally-enabled openness to radically change human capability and governance contexts (Davies & Edwards, 2012; Smith & Reilly, 2013; Smith, Elder, & Emdon, 2011). However, what openness means, and how it contributes to development outcomes is contested (Buskens, 2013; Singh & Gurumurthy, 2013). Furthermore, the potential of open development to support positive social transformation has not yet materialized, particularly for marginalized populations (Bentley & Chib, 2016), partly because relatively little is known regarding how transformation is enacted in the field. Likewise, two promising outcomes – the expansion of human capabilities and accountability – have not been explored in detail. This research interrogates the influence of digitally-enabled openness on transformation processes and outcomes. A purposeful sample of literature was taken to evaluate outcomes and transformation processes according to our theoretical framework, which defines seven cross-cutting dimensions essential to incorporate. We argue that these dimensions explain links between structures, processes and outcomes of open development. These links are essential to understand in the area of Community Informatics as they enable researchers and practitioners to support effective use of openness by and for poor and marginalized communities to pursue their own objectives

Gender Inequalities in Tech-driven Research and Innovation

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This volume explores why, despite numerous programmes, women continue to constitute a minority in tech-driven research and innovation areas in the Nordic countries. Putting the spotlight on the lived experience of women, the authors make an invaluable contribution to global debates around the mechanisms that maintain gendered structures in Research and Innovation, from academia to biotechnology and IT