The future of care work: towards a radical politics of care in CSCW research and practice

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) have long studied how technology can support material and relational aspects of care work, typically in clinical healthcare settings. More recently, we see increasing recognition of care work such as informal healthcare provision, child and elderly care, organizing and advocacy, domestic work, and service work. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored long-present tensions between the deep necessity and simultaneous devaluation of our care infrastructures. This highlights the need to attend to the broader social, political, and economic systems that shape care work and the emerging technologies being used in care work. This leads us to ask several critical questions: What counts as care work and why? How is care work (de)valued, (un)supported, or coerced under capitalism and to what end? What narratives drive the push for technology in care work and whom does it benefit? How does care work resist or build resilience against and within oppressive systems? And how can we as researchers advocate for and with care and caregivers? In this one-day workshop, we will bring together researchers from academia, industry, and community-based organizations to reflect on these questions and extend conversations on the future of technology for care work

MAPPING THE SPIRITUAL SENSORIUM: AN ACCOUNT OF RELIGION AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN NORTHERN INDIA

The question of religion and its location within contemporary history is at the heart of this paper. While engaging with the after effects of the modernity project in post- colonies, much has been written about the peculiar and often conflicting shape that nationhood took in countries like India. Religion often serves as a site to confront and respond to the changes ushered by Modernities in State policies on education reforms, conjugal conduct, entertainment and other domains in India. It is then, necessary, to probe the role of religion as a social force in forming the public sphere and also to ask whether the binary of religion/science or religion/modernity holds. At the same time, new(er) forms of religious participation involving the consumption of religious media objects have evolved. These “micro-practices” of faith, sharing, belonging and affinity through consumption also pose a serious challenge to the notion of religion as transcendental only. Drawing on the framework of “aesthetic formations” or dynamic communities bound through sensorial experiences, as explained by Birgit Meyer (Meyer 2009), I attempt to map religious practice across Hindi speaking peoples from northern India and the diaspora to discover the throbbing parallel life of spiritual practice through decades in the post-colony

The Encyclopedia Must Fail! - Notes on Queering Wikipedia

16 pagesThis essay draws on experiences of Wikipedia editing in the context of projects aiming to make Wikipedia more diverse and globally relevant. It offers reflections on some of the tensions, struggles, and solutions to make an intervention into contemporary knowledge making practices

Studying Intersectional Challenges in Gig Work: Lessons From the Global South

Presented online via Zoom on November 11, 2021 at 12:30 p.m.This event was co-hosted by CHIWORK.org.Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher at the AI Now Institute and an adjunct professor at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University. Her new work extends to studying the cultural labor and subjective decision-making by global South data annotators in order to train AI/ML systems.Runtime: 54:37 minutesWith the rise and proliferation of gig economy platforms providing ride hailing, food delivery and other app-based services on-demand in major urban centers of the world, there have been major transformations in work and life globally. Gig platforms have certainly disrupted and redefined the discovery and allocation of casual work through algorithmic management, creating grave concerns for regulating the future of work. Simultaneously, especially in the global South, gig platforms have also emerged as important avenues for gaining temporary paid work and socio-economic mobility for low income individuals, women and migrant workers. Drawing on over five years of ethnographic research with a variety of stakeholders in the gig economy including workers, managers, consumers and regulators, my work shows how platformization produces heterogeneous effects on the lives, livelihoods and productive and reproductive capacities of different individuals in urban India. This talk will draw on multiple case studies of gig work to show these heterogeneous effects and how everyday technology practice also informs platform design in return. I will also offer some considerations for HCI scholars looking to study the effects of emerging technologies in global South settings

Platform-Living: Theorizing life, work, and ethical living after the gig economy

Gig Economy platforms such as Uber, Ola, Zomato among others have proliferated across urban centres of the world and transformed the ways in which people access mobility, food, care, and other services necessary for daily life. These platforms have primarily been studied from a (digital) labour perspective to understand how the rise of “gig work” or app-based piecework has transformed labour participation and the conditions of daily work for thousands across the globe. Gig work and broadly platform work have been hailed as the ‘Future of Work’ as well. This dissertation draws on four years of ethnographic research on platform participation across India, the UK, and the US to offer the first theorization of ‘platform-living’ beyond the conception of platform work. Responding to the predominantly economistic focus on platforms as markets, the dissertation expands what constitutes as ‘matters of concern’ to the questions of social practice, urban infrastructural politics as well as the investigation of moral enactments within the platform society. The dissertation’s conceptual direction derives from the understanding that an exclusive focus on platforms qua markets misses out the ways in which social networks, builtenvironment, urban ecologies as well as local political constellations shape the materialization of platforms in local contexts. In that sense, there are multiple platform economies and they are constantly being worlded by the contexts that they unfold in. To that end, as the dissertation shows, it is imperative to understand platforms as social, material and ethical objects, not exclusively in terms of how they shape the daily work of ridehailing drivers and food delivery workers but rather by looking at the ways in which they get inserted in the larger landscape of everyday life. The dissertation argues that the emplaced notion of ‘platform-living’ inspires a generative and tactical approach to platform politics and regulation going forward

Platform-Living: Theorizing life, work, and ethical living after the gig economy

Gig Economy platforms such as Uber, Ola, Zomato among others have proliferated across urban centres of the world and transformed the ways in which people access mobility, food, care, and other services necessary for daily life. These platforms have primarily been studied from a (digital) labour perspective to understand how the rise of “gig work” or app-based piecework has transformed labour participation and the conditions of daily work for thousands across the globe. Gig work and broadly platform work have been hailed as the ‘Future of Work’ as well. This dissertation draws on four years of ethnographic research on platform participation across India, the UK, and the US to offer the first theorization of ‘platform-living’ beyond the conception of platform work. Responding to the predominantly economistic focus on platforms as markets, the dissertation expands what constitutes as ‘matters of concern’ to the questions of social practice, urban infrastructural politics as well as the investigation of moral enactments within the platform society. The dissertation’s conceptual direction derives from the understanding that an exclusive focus on platforms qua markets misses out the ways in which social networks, builtenvironment, urban ecologies as well as local political constellations shape the materialization of platforms in local contexts. In that sense, there are multiple platform economies and they are constantly being worlded by the contexts that they unfold in. To that end, as the dissertation shows, it is imperative to understand platforms as social, material and ethical objects, not exclusively in terms of how they shape the daily work of ridehailing drivers and food delivery workers but rather by looking at the ways in which they get inserted in the larger landscape of everyday life. The dissertation argues that the emplaced notion of ‘platform-living’ inspires a generative and tactical approach to platform politics and regulation going forward

They are like personalized mini-Googles : Seeking Information on Facebook Groups

Our study reports on everyday life information search (ELIS) practice using Facebook Groups. While previous research has examined social Q&A in the context of status message question asking (SMQA) on Facebook and Twitter, we discuss how people step outside their personal networks to find answers to questions while staying within the Facebook environment. We investigate two popular Q&A Facebook Groups in the city of Bangalore, India and ask why people turn to Facebook Groups for the information needs, the nature of costs of using these groups for information search, and how Groups are groomed to host social Q&A practices. Our findings suggest that Facebook Groups can be popular venues for information search because of its structural features as well as the networked sociality that it engenders