Research papers

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…

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…

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…

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’.

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…

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…

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…

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…

This report aims to investigate the current gaps in protection suffered by users of the platform economy in Europe and to propose legal solutions. The research particularly focuses on the inequalities (understood as information asymmetries affecting the weak party) and unfair practices experienced by end-users (consumers) and providers (workers…

Parminder Jeet Singh published a research paper as part of the Data Governance Network project titled, ‘Data and Digital Intelligence Commons: Making a Case for Community Ownership’, questioning the ‘open access’ paradigm for data and developing a theoretical basis for asserting community ownership of data.

Read the paper here.