Making Place Matter: Doing Area Studies in a Digitally Connected World
1210 Heller Hall (271 19th Ave S Minneapolis, MN 55455) and livestream.
What does it mean to locate digital technology design or use in a region in the globally connected world we live in? Early tropes about digital technologies — and the information society they were supposed to result in — were often premised on the idea that these technologies brought with them the death of distance, and equally, an erasure of place since their effects were presumed to be universal. In the years since, social studies of digital and information systems from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary perspectives have highlighted the importance of location, path dependence and situated practice. At the same time, critical engagements with space and place, across the Social Sciences and Area Studies, have warned against treating sites as neutral, isolated or bounded. Taken together with the global value chains that underpin the digitized economies of today, the challenge before us is how to study digital technology design and use as located in a particular history and geography, but also in relation to other places, while seeing place itself as power laden. How may we approach this as a problem-space? In this talk, Dr. Srinivasan draws on her research on the politics of information, digital exclusion, and culturally mediated access to digital technologies and gig work in India to suggest ways to methodologically situate digital technologies in a place ethnographically, while recognizing how they are shaped by broader global forces and power relations.
About the Speaker
Janaki Srinivasan is Associate Professor of Digital South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research examines the political economy of information technology-based development initiatives. She uses ethnographic research to examine how gender, caste and class shape the use of such technologies. Her work has explored these interests in the context of Indian digital inclusion initiatives focused on community computer centers, mobile phones, identity systems and open information systems. Some of this work appeared in her recent monograph, The Political Lives of Information published by MIT Press in 2022. Janaki’s ongoing work on the politics of informational and digital exclusion focuses on issues of privacy and the algorithmic control of labor. For the past several years, as co-investigator on the Fairwork India team, she has been involved in researching and advocating for change in the precarious working conditions of gig workers in India.