Research

Technologies that map women’s bodies and reproductive choices are a site of patriarchal control and surveillance while simultaneously creating an illusion of choice or autonomy for users. This report recognizes and examines the ways in which the absence of safeguards for sensitive and personal data and information disproportionately targets…

The platform model has emerged as a game changing force, transforming economic activity across key sectors. Platformization as the process of such a shift towards new modes of production and exchange serves as the pièce de résistance of global economic organization in the…

This article was first published in Firstpost.

A mass exodus from Twitter over to open-source microblogging community Mastodon is in the news, and it’s not the first time that users have responded to social media’s opaque content moderation policies in this way. Calls to #deletefacebook abounded after the Cambridge Analytica scandal…

Most people still see data as ordinary knowledge or information best subject to 'open access' regimes. This is also the moral basis for the advocacy of free global flows of data. It is an argument that many, if not most, civil society activists worldwide often fall prey to.

This research paper attempts to develop a theoretical basis for…

Digital and data technologies are not merely tools or enablers of development; they are the scaffolds of a new social paradigm. As data flows through a more and more interconnected planet, the capture of network-data spaces by corporate and state interest recasts opportunity structures, heightening inequalities between, and within, countries.…

Progress towards every single sustainable development goal (SDG) of Agenda 2030 also hinges on the effective deployment of digital technologies. In Global Governance Spotlight 4|2019, Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami from IT for Change explain the importance of so-called digital ecosystems to catalyse inclusive sustainable development. In…

Education has been accepted as a project for social and political transformation, with the development of each individual not only for her economic gains, but also for building a just and humane society1. It also needs to promote awareness and build agency for sustainable development…

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…

Every once in a while, there is the high optics drama about a woman celebrity or public persona who has been trolled, and then, predictably, the dust settles. But make no mistake. This is but the proverbial tip of an iceberg that is ballooning.

The internet-mediated world presents a contradiction of a magnitude and complexity that…

In this article published in the Economic & Political Weekly (12 January 2019), Amrita Vasudevan revisits current debates on the liability of internet intermediaries in India, in the context of violence against women online. 

Read the paper here.