Beyond the widespread economic and access-centred approach to ICTs, this think piece addresses the need to think about ICTs as a social phenomenon which impacts each of us, whether we actively use ICTs or not. ICTs have an important emancipatory potential for marginalised populations, and especially for women, as they allow…
empowerment
2010
IT for Change was invited by the Journal of Community Informatics to guest-edit a special issue on gender and community informatics, which presents articles from various countries across the world and discusses how information and communication technology have a transformatory impact on gender relations. Please read the journal here.
2009
This article, published in the Economic and Political Weekly (3 October 2009), is a report of the consultation on the 'Misuse of Communication Technology and Its Linkages with Violence against Women' held in Trivandrum (India) in March 2009. The article advocates that policy choices need to avoid narratives of fear around…
2009
Reflecting on the status of women in the past two decades at the consultation organised by Mahila Samakhya Karnataka on 7 March 2009, Anita Gurumurthy articulates a trajectory for gender and development, through the lens of historical phenomena like neo-conservativism and the transnational mobilisation of women, using specific examples such as the…
2009
This three-day event, called ‘The Daughters of Fire’, was organised by Vimochana and the Asian women’s Human Rights Council in July 2009 at Christ University, Bengaluru (India). The presentation focused on the theoretical framework examining media-related constructs and critiques of the 'new' public sphere through the lens of…
2009
Paper presented for the Commission on Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues of the World IT Forum (WITFOR). The presentation emphasises the gender gap not just in terms of connectivity to the internet, but also access to the sophistication of ICTs. Identifying various factors detrimental to women's interests, it also critiques the closed nature of…
2009
This paper was written for Plan International's Annual Report, entitled 'Because I am a Girl'. For girls and young women, especially in the global south, ICT access and its effective use provide new avenues in their journeys towards economic empowerment. This paper unpacks some typical myths about ICTs, gender and empowerment in order to…
2009
Anita Gurumurthy wrote a note for the Sakhi-Jagori Consultation on 'New technologies and new forms of violence against women and girls' that took place in Trivandrum (Kerala, India) on 27-28 March 2009. The note identifies emerging debates around personhood and privacy, on the one hand, and normative structures in emerging…
2009
This document was an input into the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) High-Level Intergovernmental Meeting on the Review of Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action.
It aims to use the powerful lens of the 'information society' to define the emerging priorities for analysis…
2008
This collection of papers comes out of a project undertaken as part of the regional activities of the World Summit on the Information Society's (WSIS) Gender Caucus. To strengthen gender advocacy during the WSIS processes, it was felt necessary to analyse in detail whether and how ICTs do, and can potentially, bring about…