The 3rd session of the Gender, Technology & Law series, co-organised by LSTS and FRC, under the title: “All Watched Over By Aunties Of Loving Grace: Safety as Surveillance in India”, will take place on 11 December 2019 at 10:00-12:00.
This lecture will be given by Nayantara Ranganathan, who is is a researcher and lawyer working on the politics and culture of technologies. Previously she was exploring questions of what it might mean to have a feminist politics of data at the Internet Democracy Project, where she developed work related to freedom of expression, surveillance, net neutrality and the gendered use of the internet. She co-conceptualised Gendering Surveillance, a project on exposing the gendered nature of surveillance in the Indian context. She has been working with groups in India to explore how digital technologies are affecting fights for social justice. She also co-founded ad.watch, a project on political advertising on social media.
Gendering Surveillance is a project that surfaces continuities between existing systems of social control and new technologies of surveillance. The questions it raises are: What can be learned about surveillance from gendering it? And what do these insights imply for the intensification of surveillance in the name of safety, inclusion, welfare delivery and other benevolent justifications more broadly? In this talk, Nayantara will unpack how this plays out amidst an economic turn pushing for extraction of greater dividends from data, and amidst a sociopolitical turn with the ongoing consolidation of power by dominant hindutva forces. She will then talk about how this feeds into the question of what might a feminist politics of data mean. For more information: http://genderingsurveillance.in