PoLAR 2022 Sriraman Affective Activism and Digital Archiving Relief Work and Migrant Workers during the Covid‐ (original) (raw)
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India Forum, 2020
Baees/22 March (the day of the 14 hour ‘voluntary’ lockdown) and Chaubees/24 March (the beginning of the longer nation-wide lockdown) were permanently imprinted in the minds of migrant workers as the hard date after which they could be certain of nothing. A month into the lockdown, migrant workers were creating trails of paper, video and other artifacts, not merely to index their distress and lay claim to what was promised, but also to set up complex and paradoxical visual narratives of violence and gratitude. In this article that straddles the journalistic and the academic, we explore how the CoVID 19 lockdown in India cast migrants within emotional, auditory and documentary regimes of making and producing proof. We show how migrant workers ended up archiving much more than was required by these regimes under the shadow of a neo-liberal state and became witnesses to unfolding violent truths. Alongside this, we also argue that government agencies, NGOs and social activists often differed in how they solicited and processed ‘proof.’
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The paper analyses how the Nepali state imposed its sovereign power on the Nepali returning migrant workers from India during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the deployment of border security forces, the state resorted to arbitrary detentions of these workers, leaving them stranded at Nepal-India borders. They were no longer wanted in India while being rejected and excluded by the state. To demonstrate the state's exclusionary bordering practices, we used the concepts of 'biopolitics' (Foucault, 1997), 'necropolitics' (Mbembe, 2019) and 'bare life' (Agamben, 1998). We employed visual methodology and the content analysis of the publicly available media reports and photographs pertaining to the interceptions of the migrant workers stranded at the Nepal-India borders when trying to enter the country. We contend that the attempts of some returning migrant workers to swim across the Mahakali River to enter Nepal were acts of agency and resistance in the face of the state's brutalities.
Counting to be Counted: Anganwadi Workers and Digital Infrastructures of Ambivalent Care
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer InteractionVolume 6Issue CSCW2, 2022
Data collection on the population is a key mode of public health management in the Global South. This information is seen as a means to improve health metrics through welfare programs. In this study, we examine the changes brought about by an ICT-based Real-Time Monitoring System to the infrastructure of a welfare program and the nature of work of Anganwadi workers in India. Anganwadi workers, traditionally serving as daycare providers and community health workers, are increasingly being asked to serve primarily as data collectors for the new digital system. We ask the question 'cui bono?' to this system by drawing attention to the precarity of Anganwadi workers whose care-work is standardized through this app for 'efficient' monitoring by the Indian state but remains contingent on their relationship with the local community and ability to mobilize resources on the ground. Using auto-ethnographic and interview methods, we find that Anganwadi workers are caught between conflicting demands of state bureaucracy and the situated nature of their care work resulting in forms of ambivalent care. We find that the real-time monitoring apps intended to collect data for efficient delivery of state services end up serving the state's need for performing care through data rhetorics produced at the expense of the professional and personal well-being of the workers, and arguably the communities they serve. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.
The JMC Review: An Interdisciplinary Social Science Journal of Criticism, Practice and Theory VOL V , 2021
The paper seeks to understand visual representation and the 'othering' of migrant workers in the time of pandemic. Digital technologies have made visibility expansive and at the same time, created spaces of contention for people to express their views in multimodal forms. Internal/ urban migrants refer to a floating population that comes to the cities in search for work. The plight of the migrant workers after the announcement of lockdown in India caused indignation among people witnessing the visuals who, in turn, tried to raise consciousness by employing various protest methods, both online and offline. The representation of migrant workers is explored at audiovisual forms, the imprint it left on the individual and community psyche, the resemblance, connotation and juxtaposition with other visuals when they had to return to their hometown with lockdown and no government (state/central) aids. The differential treatment regarding safety measures and resources given to people exposed the class divide existent within the country. The article seeks to explore the meaning making of injustice symbols regarding the migrant workers during the lockdown and their iconic significance with the new modes of protest repertoires on behalf and by the migrant worker.
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Contemporary South Asia, 2013
In 2008, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster in India undertook a 500-mile march to New Delhi, protesting a long history of governmental neglect of the survivors of the event. This is one episode of a 25-year-old organized international campaign that continues in the present. This article examines the ways in which three bodily substancesblood, hearts and ketoneswere produced and circulated through the 2008 protests. Placed within a broader history of substance-politics in the region, this article suggests that these protests produced an imagination of bodily substances that surfaced messy contradictions that became difficult for the Indian State to disregard. This article also shows how these protests distanced themselves from the cynicism attached to similar modes of corporeal activism in the contemporary Indian landscape. In sum, this article traces the production of an activist corporeal counterdiscourse that, for at least a time, contaminated the procedures through which the Indian State disregards the health of its marginal citizens.
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This essay focuses on the Indian migrant crisis in the context of the state's handling of the pandemic. It argues that the migrant situation in India pries open 'problem spaces' that, if attended to, reveal how many of the now normative solutions for governing and containing the virus are exceeded by bodiesof migrants in particularthat cannot be kept safe by solutions in place to check the contagion. The essay first raises questions about the unequal distribution of 'saveability' in the Indian context (but this can also apply to others). It asks who cannot be included in the frame of 'human life' that underlies the solutions offered for protecting lives in the pandemic. Second, the essay offers a description of the migrant crisis in India that has ensued in the pandemic. Following that description, the essay focuses on three problem-spaces or aporias that the pandemic has pried open and that call for a more politically complex, contextually sensitive, and humane response to the management of the virus: unequal temporalities, the dilemma of im/mobility, and the challenge of recording death.
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Cinéma & Cie, 2024
Video activism is an essential tool of communication for global uprisings. Particularly in countries where media is tightly controlled by officials, video activist content allows for the visibility of marginalized struggles, instantly disseminating their demands, actions, and encounters with state violence. Moreover, the visibility of such realities contributes to shaping communal emotions and strengthening collective resistance. However, in the over-saturated web environment, these images lose their contextual significance amidst the constant sharing which demands our attention. Consequently, the need to organize these images and provide them with an identity within the framework of social struggles, acts of resistance, and the pursuit of justice they represent becomes increasingly crucial. In this context, digital and autonomous archiving initiatives do not make sense of the surplus of internet images but also act as a counter-practice that challenges the states' official archiving practices and its claim of monopoly over history. The digital archiving practices of activist groups wrest control away from established institutions, enabling the dissemination of alternative histories through images. As a result, these archives preserve the experiences of social groups ignored by official ideology and foster the proliferation of grassroots practices. Furthermore, the video activist archive emerges as an alternative infrastructure that supports the growth of community networks, activism, and protest cultures. This essay will centre on a study of bak.ma the digital media archive of social movements that was created in Turkey following the massive urban protests in 2013 known as the Gezi Park protests. It seeks to examine how this archive constructs a national memory beyond state-approved knowledge and practices, achieved through decentralized and collective data collection that restores control of protest movements to the people. Additionally, this essay will also shed light on the challenges inherent in autonomous initiatives, encompassing issues like censorship, funding, labor and sustainability.
Indian Journal of Human Development, 2021
This article explores the role of non-profit organisations in mitigating crisis for the urban working poor during the pandemic in India. We focus specifically on the humanitarian crisis around the interstate migrant workers that resulted from the Indian government’s efforts to contain the pandemic by imposing a nationwide lockdown. Through in-depth interviews with leaders of non-profit organisations in India, who were actively engaged in relief work during the migrant crisis, we explore the role of poverty and inequality in exacerbating the pandemic’s impact. Our findings indicate that multiple dimensions of inequality combined to aggravate the effects of the lockdown on interstate migrant labourers in India. The government’s initial apathy towards this vulnerable group, delay in addressing the unanticipated consequences of the pandemic response, and its ineffective crisis management efforts resulted in a humanitarian crisis in the country concurrent to the pandemic. In this context...