Hybrid SSN seminar with Anushree Gupta, Monday at 14:00 AEDT, 8:30 AM IST
SSN Info
Thank you ‘Someone’: Platform Collectives as crisis infrastructures in the Southern city
Online platforms played a key role in formulating a response to the COVID-19 pandemic in India. In this talk, I will discuss findings from my doctoral research project, wherein I undertook an ethnographic study that traced platform-based voluntary relief efforts in Hyderabad, India. Drawing on volunteers’ narratives and experiences, combined with digital ethnographic material collected during the peak pandemic years (2021-2023), my research examines the formation of Platform Collectives—a new conceptual category that describes the socio-technical assemblages constituted by platforms, their users, and the critical objects circulating within their networks. The term encapsulates a two-way relationship between platforms and collectives, as platforms become infrastructural for urban collective life in southern city contexts, and networked collectives platformise everyday urban life.
In this talk, I will discuss three specific cases where volunteers deployed platforms to collaborate and coordinate the effort to provision key critical resources—food, medical resources, and information—during the crisis. For each of these cases, place-based social practices, combined with digital platforms’ technical affordances, enabled volunteers to facilitate life-saving relief work—remotely yet locally-embedded, asynchronously yet just-in-time—at various levels of effectiveness. My analysis builds on theoretical perspectives from Infrastructure studies, platform studies, and urban studies to conceive these networked collectives as relational entities, produced incrementally and cobbled together as makeshift infrastructures that facilitated survival during a crisis. Through this, I highlight the critical need to pay attention to place-based knowledges, situated practices, and contextual realities that render platform collectives as infrastructures in a uniquely southern urban sense.
Speaker Bio
Anushree Gupta is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IITH). Her doctoral research employs multidisciplinary lenses to understand platformization and the tectonic digital shifts that have reshaped collective urban life in the Global South since the pandemic. Drawing on perspectives from Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, Platform Studies, and Southern Urban theory, her research traces the intertwined trajectories of platformization and urbanization amidst multiple ongoing and interlinked crises. Through this work, she draws attention to the emergent forms of networked collectivity and possibilities for collective action, premised on an ethic of care, in and around the platform economy.
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Carina Truyts