Presentations

Anita Gurumurthy was at the 2007 Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) Conference held on 15-16 December in Bengaluru (India). She participated in a panel discussion on 'Meaningful Research for ICT and Development'. Her presentation highlighted the dominant meanings ascribed to ICTD theory both in discourse and practice. It posited an alternative to ICTD inquiry as a study of power and offered constructivist epistemology towards an ICTD research agenda that would embrace activist and bottom-up resistances.

This paper, presented at the United Theological College (Bengaluru, India) on 14 December 2006, points out that ICTs are reshaping personal and institutional relationships and the new public reality that ICTs have helped create need to be seen as a new site for feminism. The author discusses the recent depoliticisation of gender and the consequent obscurement of the agenda of feminist struggle.

This presentation was made at the DataQuest Seminar on 'Making e-governance happen' on 3 March, 2005, in Chennai (India). It focuses on the governance reform mandate of e-governance, and highlights the dangers in vesting decision making powers on national e-governance with technology departments. An assessment is made on processes and institutional structures for enabling governance reform aims of the e-governance strategy in the country, specifically exploring the single-point contact model for service delivery.

This paper was presented at the Femme Globale (Berlin, 2005). It briefly traces the development of the information society from the Beijing Conference in 1995 to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) 2003 and 2005, and women’s situated roles in this development.

This presentation was part of the panel discussion on globalised media and ICT systems and structures and their interrelationship with fundamentalism and militarism organised by Isis International-Manila during the 2004 World Social Forum (Mumbai, India). The author contends that the global economy supported by ICTs stands upon the intersection of the crumbling proletariat of the North and the off-shore proletariat of the South, as seen in issues of labour, media and militarism.

Anita Gurumurthy made a presentation about India's status as a knowledge economy at the 2004 World Social Forum on 18 January in Mumbai (India). The paper strongly critiques India’s excessive emphasis on building an IT-savvy human resource pool, which has resulted in the diversion of resources away from the much more crucial expenditures on literacy and primary education. These are not just development goals in themselves but a must if the digital divide is not to widen rapidly.