Ranjitha Kumar will be attending the ILO’s 8th Regulating Decent Work Conference in Geneva. During the three-day conference, along with SEWA’s Salonie Muralidhara Hiriyur, Ranjitha will be making a presentation on a research study titled, ‘Re-imagining the Platform Firm: Lessons and Design Blueprints from SEWA’s Data Trust Experiment' on 11 July 2023.
Against the threat of digitalization enabling and mutating existing precarities at the cost of women informal agricultural workers from the Global South, this research study, in collaboration with SEWA Cooperative Federation examines two questions: (1) How socio-economic trust, emerging from a cooperative mode of production, can challenge the skewed labor-capital dynamic, and (2) What kind of alternative data systems can be created by imbibing the socio-political phenomenon of trust into SEWA’s current process of building a worker-designed and worker-led data cooperative through democratic co-design, with the aim to resist the extension of Big Tech into Global South food systems.
The study highlights the need for techno-design to be informed by socio-economic narratives, and the intricate process of executing the often-cited digital commons contextualized by the digitalization challenges of the Global South.
Know more about the presentation and take a look at the conference agenda here.