IT for Change's blog

This post was a response by Anita on the discussion, Women, Citizenship and Participation: Beyond the Politics of Exclusion in the Gender Community e-mail list of Solution Exchange, India 

It brings in some elements that pertain to the structural changes effected by digital technologies and the emergent information society, based on our work at IT for Change (http://www.itforchange.net/). We work on the interfaces between the current techno-social architecture of society and development, focusing broadly on the thematic areas of gender, governance and education.

Of deep significance to the changing politics of state-citizen relations is the impact of digital technologies on society.  The emerging public sphere complicates governance structures, claims-making processes, representation and participation as well as the very nature of deliberative democracy. These changes are gendered, and require a rethinking of women’s citizenship and rights.

IT for Change, through its Centre for Community Informatics and Development (CCID), have been working with the sangha women of Mahila Samakhya Karnataka (MSK),  to enable them to use Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) in their endeavours. The idea has been to embed ICTs within the heart of their struggles for citizenship, so that the agenda is not to have some stand-alone experiment with technology but to explore what kinds of processes can bring about a quantum change in the way they anyway make their claims and chart their struggles for gender justice.

The results of a 5 year long engagement with MSK and MSK sanghas has been a phenomenal journey for us – demonstrating why digital technologies need to be ascribed a certain meaning and deployed with a certain vision if our goal is to enable women to assert their rights.

Women have been running community telecentres; gone on air discussing the gram sabha and the elections; they have demanded that CCID work with them on garage production videos. This helps them talk to their communities about how to get a bank loan; why adult literacy camps are life changing; and how young girls can be part of the process of social transformation (and not just wait to be married off). The informational culture of questioning and of transacting power through knowledge brokerage (that is not the usual commercial model but based on equity and social justice considerations), have led to cascading changes – a new legitimacy for women, who were rather peripheral to the everyday life of the community.  It makes for a new local socio-economic reality as well as a new political status for these women.

We have learnt much about how there is empowerment and there is empowerment; one version that challenges status quo and brings into local discourse the disturbing question of power and the other that builds upon local elite structures to enable just as much trickle-down as will keep the dominant structures happy.

Our model has taught us that ICTs are the harbingers of citizenship. They are the ‘summum bonum’ of social inclusion in the information society, so long as the emerging local informational democracy – with women’s radio programs, women-run telecentres and women’s appropriation of video as a meaning-making tool – can be nurtured through an ethical digital system that wants democracy and social justice.

What do we mean by this? IT for Change in its global and local work has come to realise that the propensity of new technologies within dominant frameworks seems to promote a version of short-term empowerment that in fact consolidates the social power of the elite. I want to bring to the table two strands of thought that can add contemporariness to the upcoming PRIA seminar on 08 September 2010.
The Informational State:

We need to deconstruct and understand better, the nature of the neo-liberal state, which is also the informational state.  State power is consolidated through informational systems that promote techno-managerialism in governance, rather than an increased transparency that may seem apparent.  E governance is less about transparency and institutional reform, and more about Management Information System (MIS) that is deemed gender neutral. Which is why, the telecentres run by MSK women is qualitatively different – it is about institutionalising a culture of information that can privilege the marginalised.

Despite efforts to promote women’s participation in implementing e-governance schemes, the cooption of women in such strategies is built more or less on the idea of the neo-liberal state, which would like to see women as consumers of information and as economic agents at the fringes of public private partnerships (PPPs) as telecentre operators. Any empowerment that occurs is purely incidental in many mainstream ICT efforts. While the rhetoric of inclusion through the digitisation processes in governance seems to suggest potentially easier and greater access of the marginalised to entitlements, the centralised managerialism in these projects leaves out any possibility for a localised institutional design. Where is the room in these efforts for a simple video that talks about what schemes the local social welfare department has for the dalits or a simple radio broadcast on the meaning of a gramsabha. Marginalised women’s access to public resources and participation in the public sphere needs to be enhanced for their active citizenship and can be enhanced through ICTs, but not if the design is a top-down make-what-you-will kind of model that pushes for information commoditisation through a pay-for-your-rights approach.

Flagship information and digitisation projects seem to ignore cultural issues around identity and privacy. The information state repositions freedom, rights and regulation from the vantage of macroeconomics and value-chains, which undermines rights of rural and tribal communities while privileging corporate “rights”.  Solly Benjamin wrote about Bhoomi (land), and pointed how all the information out there about land holding in the public domain is rather useful for land sharks.

The informational state needs to be grasped for the complexity it unleashes into a hyper-politicised society like ours. Framed within a political system whose nexus with media and local elite structures transforms governance into a murky terrain that is impossible for the marginalised to negotiate, the informational state can fossilise older power structures and create new exclusions. The MSK women have had to deal with vested interests in the panchayat and in the local infomediary structures who have tried many tricks to silence them. It is the power of the sangha and the backing of the Kelu Sakhi radio program that the sangha women run that allows for a counter-power for the women to deal with the cultures of patriarchal and casteist repression.

The main conclusions of Sandra Braman’s book on the informational state may be relevant and even revealing – power seems to get more centralised in the informational state, which  “increasingly knows more about individual citizens but, on the other hand, the individuals know less and less about the state”.  The use of digital technologies can limit, instead of broadening, the possibilities for significant participative democracy, where the conceptual focus is more on what has been critiqued by other researchers as the shift from deliberation to push-button- and point-and-click- decision systems that give legitimacy to authoritarian leadership that manipulates public opinion.

The citizenship of women and their relationship with institutions of the state in the emerging governance systems are predicated upon various preconditions – at the least it depends on how the information design treats public interest, women’s accessibility and capability. Such a design must be open to enable citizen rights and freedoms, invest in the literacy women need to read and decipher the grammar of new informational cultures. Women do decode the digital with great ease but to be citizens of the informational statę,  they need time and resources to understand how also to evolve corresponding digital cultures.

Therefore, even with the promise of e-governance for inclusion and transparency and access to public information, the logic of the informational state needs to be seen as embedding risks that are hidden and historically unprecedented.

The changing nature of democracy

The active citizen cannot get more active today; welcome, the information society. Especially for women, the ability to storm into the public sphere and be part of public discourse does open up the possibility of new everyday practices in citizenship. Through access to local media spaces, creating media that brings into the public realm perspectives and practices and rationalities that challenge the mainstream, women are able to redefine social action. Voice, agency and assertion are transformed through digital space and certain pluralism arises in the nature of gendered discourse. This can be enormously liberating for marginalised women and a step towards inclusive citizenship, but we need again to be alert to the changes to the very institution of democracy in the era of e-voting, face book-citizenship and public hearings of social issues on TRP-obsessed, corporate-owned media channels. Each episode of social discrimination appears and disappears from the digitally mediated public sphere with a routine that is deeply disturbing. Participation acquires a new meaning in spaces that are wide open, unmediated and ostensibly egalitarian; you can be a citizen journalist and tell your story now, in fact you need not even be that! Authenticity counts most, plurality is possible now, and it does not matter that in most public platforms – from e-lists to online consultations to seductive appeals on FM to send your vote by SMS, - every private rationale is equally valid.  Digital openness enhances participation no doubt, but with a logic that is not necessarily based on representative or deliberative democracy but rather, on self-interest and corporate profit in the absence of governance mechanisms that can intercede to support active deliberation and a consensus based on ethical frames.  ‘Public’ platforms online are controlled by corporates that arrogate to themselves the right to perform adjudicatory functions. First, in such ‘democracies’, the marginalised are not represented. Secondly, current legal, policy and institutional arrangements do not extend to online spaces to mediate power and communicative asymmetries.

Even if it seems like the discussion here is not so pertinent to the women about whose rights most of us may be concerned, the horizon of social change directly and indirectly incorporates the digital in a deep and meshed way. In most developing country contexts, informationalism and digitisation are at the forefront of governance reform. What may be feudal and dysfunctional is at the risk of being replaced by a new age system that renders redundant all our studies and researches by complicating reality in profound ways. Democracy is not only the mess we are used to; it is reshaped by the new geographies shaped by the digital that are transnational, trans-local and hence as exciting for the tyrannical structures they bypass as they are perilous for the post-democratic influences they bring in the form of undecipherable and ungraspable practices of the new digital elite.

Talk on “Locating Gender Politics in the New Techno-Industrial Complex” by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin, Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women’s Studies, Miami University-Ohio, USA

Date: Jul 23, 2010 (Friday)
Time: 4 p.m.
Place: CIS – The Centre for Internet and Society No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage Bangalore 560 071 Phone: 080 – 25350955

CIS – The Centre for Internet and Society, CSCS – The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, and IT for Change are hosting a lecture “Locating Gender Politics in the New Techno-Industrial Complex” by Lisa McLaughlin, PhD, Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women’s Studies, Miami University-Ohio, USA, on Jul 23, at 4 p.m. at CIS.

Dr. McLaughlin will address the gendered ties that bind the “new global governance” to the “new information economy”, with a focus on women, work, and information and communication technology.

Dr. McLaughlin is spending two months in India (June and July) to work on a joint research project with IT for Change titled, “Women’s Enterprise and Information Technology”. The study explores ICT policies and practices that seek to integrate women entrepreneurs, especially from the informal and small business sectors, into formal and global markets. She is also part of the Advisory Group of the research program “Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society”, coordinated by IT for Change. This initiative aims to explore the the concept of citizenship, and use citizenship as a framework to understand gender issues implicit in the ‘Information Society.’

Bio

Lisa McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1993
M.A., University of Iowa, 1985
B.A., University of Iowa, 1983

Dr. McLaughlin is an Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women’s Studies at Miami University-Ohio, USA. She teaches undergraduate courses in media and society, global media, and gender and media. She also teaches graduate seminars in feminist media theory, global media, technology and culture, and media governance. Her research has been published in scholarly journals including as Media, Culture and Society, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Critical Studies in Media Communications, and Sociological Review. She is the author of two forthcoming books, one titled Global Communications and the Public Sphere and the other titled Keywords in International Communications. She also has worked as an academic journal editor and is founding editor, and current co-editor, of an international journal titled Feminist Media Studies. Her research interests include feminist studies, critical theory, gender and information work in the knowledge economy, and global communications governance.

IT for Change’s new research project entitled, “Women’s Enterprise and Information Technology” with Dr. Lisa McLaughlin from Miami University-Ohio, will explore ICT policies and practices that seek to integrate women entrepreneurs, especially from the informal and small business sectors, into formal and global markets. Data collection is currently underway in three sites located in three Indian states: Karnataka (AWAKE), Gujarat (SEWA) and Kerala (Kudumbashree).

Photo: Pavan K J

A two day photo exhibition was organised in the villages Hosavaranchi (on Jun 7-8) and Attiguppe (May 31-Jun 1), in Mysore district, to showcase to the community the learning of adolescent girls who participate in the ‘Kishori Chitrapata’ (Adolescent girls’ expressions on the video screen) Project, a collaborative intervention of IT for Change, ‘Mahila Samakhya’ (Women of Equal Value) Karnataka, a women’s empowerment intervention of the Government of India, and UNICEF. The project aims to empower them through Information and Communication Technologies like videos, audio recorders, digital camera and computers.

The event was attended by community leaders and organised by ’sangha’ women who manage the ‘Namma Mahiti Kendra’ (Our Information Centres), also established by IT for Change in partnership with Mahila Samakhya. Sangha women are the support structure for these adolescent girls to facilitate their learning.

Kaveri, Manjula, Reetha are some of the 15-20 year old girls from rural areas who had to drop out of school to go for sheep grazing, to marry or to take care of the household, among other reasons. Their mobility was restricted to a couple of streets in the village due to their condition as girls and their belonging to a certain caste. Over the course of learning photography through digital camera, they shot pictures in other places, including agriculture fields and upper caste streets and homes. With the involvement and the support of the community, these girls started a process of re-visiting their own place as well as their role to show their realities through photos and videos.

Adolescent girls (kishoris) from rural villages in Mysore district were trained in audio and video content to be used to promote contextual and participatory learning process among them. A photo exhibit revealing the perspectives of their communities is being organised by IT for Change in Attiguppe village on May 31-June 01, 2010 and Hosavaranchi village on June 07-08, 2010. The event is part of a project implemented by IT for Change in Mysore in partnership with Mahila Samakhya, Mysore and Sarva Shikshana Abhiyan, with the support of UNICEF. The main goal of the project is to empower young girls from rural communities using ICTs.

With about 10 days left for the deadline on pre-proposals for the Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society Program, we are rather hopeful that there will be in the next few days, a steady email flow of applications. Indeed, the past month after the launch of the Program has been exciting. We have had discussions with many organisations and scholars and feel rather affirmed by their interest in the Program. Having the Project advisors come on board was the first pat on the back; the issue of gender and citizenship in its indisputably organic link with the digital space that we all inhabit is an area that southern feminist scholarship needs to immediately look at.

We know that the global south is indeed a highly contested concept, but it certainly is a metaphor that fills much of the conceptual vacuum when we discuss the standpoint of women from developing countries whose social locations make them vulnerable and exploited even as we move on the space ships of post-modern global existence that are post-human in their digital avatars. For many women, the context of the emerging world may be far removed from the information society, in the lack of their personal access to gizmos and the Internet. But ignoring the more pervasive, rapid and complex developments of the social reality of our times that are created through technology and its intermixing with social processes, would amount to the proverbial head in the sand, as social change overtakes development vision and the strategic response necessary in defining social justice and gender equality agenda commensurate with our times. The women in Mysore district we work with may be illiterate, but their lives are embedded in the wider process of institutional changes that new information and communication architectures are crafting. It is not only the heavily romanticised mobile phone that seems to create new excitement in their lives. The changing contours of state transactions through e-governance, the changes to work organisation patterns and employment trends a few miles outside of their villages, their affair with peer to peer video related processes that we were responsible for engineering and its insidious impact on their identity and solidarity as poor women and the shot in the arm that these videos have given their creatively wicked tactics to educate men about gender equality.. are all part of what has been an evolutionary space of the digital world that they belong to.. whether or not they have even seen the computer or surfed the Internet.

So coming back to the proverbial ostrich, why do some of us feminists want to deny this domain of study – of the information society – as relevant to deeper feminist quests? Why is there a rather widespread trend to see technology as tools that enable or interfere with daily life and not as a semantic transformation that alters society and relationships? And if indeed some others among us do acknowledge that there is something here that is deep, why dont we see the obvious – the desperate need there is for theory building across many arenas of gender and development and perhaps, (and on this i have had some insightful conversation with Lisa McLaughlin, one of our advisors), for a grand theory of development, social change and the gender equality question.

Not that without development intervention we don’t see autonomous sparks of action catalysed by technology. Only today i saw an email about a book called SMS Uprising that documents how mobiles are alchemists of social protest . But the heart of the matter is that as they are, technological super-systems tend to consolidate power. Today, the flows of domination and of resistance are different – like the Himalayan tributaries that change course once in a while signalling something deeply disturbing. The smaller sub-systems, at our local levels are constantly having to respond to the whims and ways of the ‘network’ (if you have not read Castells, please do), which in its essence has seen a capitalist surge that is unprecedented and the birth of a surveillance and highly paranoid patriarchal state. This means, the spunky and inspiring women in Mysore who we work with are perhaps doing what they will with their mobiles and their limited access to computers through their NGO, but how they will be able to turn the tide – or as it is in this case, reign in the propensities of the network so that it works for them is the BIG question. Can the smaller sub-system and its members survive and how will they subvert the network’s tendencies to totalise?

This is therefore a moment of reckoning for southern feminist scholarship. How are we reinterpreting the categories that we so passionately employ in our analyses – democracy, livelihoods, sexuality, citizen rights, entitlements, subversion, institutional accountability, global governance, solidarity, voice, agency, participatory development etc.- to be alive to the change under our noses that is so profound ? Are we willing to look at the emerging public sphere, the idea of space, the notion of the collective, the meaning of autonomy and choice – in relation to the information society?

Well, this Program seems to create a space for this kind of exploration. I have learnt a lot form the conversations I have had with women friends in the past month from across Asia. From the cooption of citizenship in the version of citizen-journalism promoted by TV channels, the fanciful preoccupation of Gen X politicians with e-development and its mutants, the structured ignorance of male policy makers in many of our countries who are busy with discussions on broadband (as if it is about wires and not about communication); the convenient conversion of many a public good into private goods through the doors that markets in the digital space are adept at opening, the confounding contradictions in our societies that arises with the strategic use of digital spaces for coopting women into retrograde and fundamentalist action to the ballooning spaces controlled private interests that paradoxically concern the arena of ‘public’ interaction like Face Book and Google, and the active censorship of anything remotely concerning the word ’sex’ by some governments, the issues ready to be explored from the standpoint of gender and development are innumerable.

This Program hopes to be able to attract committed scholar activists who believe there is in this Program some potential for influencing feminist practice and social policy.