Research papers

2020

Schools and educational institutions have tended to use proprietary software applications: software that is not sold, but ‘licensed’, by the vendor. Here, the institution is only a ‘user’, and neither owns the software nor has any control over it. Over the last decade, however, the Indian public school and higher education systems have made…

2020

This is the third issue paper, written by Anita Gurumurthy, for the Feminist Digital Justice -- a collaborative research and advocacy initiative of IT for Change and DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era).

The platform economy -- dominated by a few firms -- is extractivist,exploitative,and expedient. It is based on an…

2020

In the past, Open and Distance Learning (ODL)  was primarily conducted through snail mail where institutions sent reading and other materials to learners. With the advent of Internet and related digital technologies, this has gradually changed. This paper explores how a free and open digital technology like MediaWiki, and Wikimedia open…

2020

IT for Change's paper on 'Breaking Up Big Tech: Separation of its Data, Cloud and Intelligence Layers' for the Data Governance Network argues that traditional competition frameworks are inadequate to addressing the rapidly building digital power concentration. These need to be combined with perspectives from technology governance that focus on…

2020

The advent of a digital society is fundamentally transforming our social and economic relationships. The nature of the dominant model of digital society means that global digital corporations – based in the US, and some in China – are dictating the terms and shaping the global socio-economic architecture for the new digital era, with very…

2019

The percentage enrolment of children in government schools overall, is declining every year and that of private schools increasing, as the statistics collected by the Government of India indicate. ‘Private’ has become a buzzword for ‘quality education’, or at least to making a claim to be better than ‘government’.

 

Privatisation of…
2019

Digital technologies have generated unprecedented ways of being and doing, dramatically changing the social and economic order. Recoding human subjectivity and social interactions, they recast power relationships. Gender relations are centrally implicated in this shift to a networked sociality where the online and offline must be understood as…

2019

This is the report of an exploratory field research on the machinations of gender-based cyber violence, carried out in 2 locations in the state of Karnataka between October 2018 to January 2019 {as part of our Righting Gender Wrongs Project}. It captures the experiences of 335 women in the state of Karnataka and presents an in-depth account of…

2019

Women’s engagement with online spaces has become news in Kerala, yet the seriousness of the violations of women’s rights online has not sunk in as far as the authorities are concerned. This report on women’s access and presence in cyberspaces in the state {as part of our Righting Gender Wrongs Project} is based on mixed-method research in five…

2019

This is the report of an in-depth field research on gender-based cyber violence that was carried out between October 2018-March 2019 across 1 metropolitan city and 3 peri-urban areas of Tamil Nadu {as part of our Righting Gender Wrongs Project}. Through surveys, focus group discussions and interviews with informants, it examines the…