Book Talk – Janaki Srinivasan at the Critical Computing Group, University of Toronto

Date: 30/11/2022

About the talk: Janaki Srinivasan has been invited to give a glimpse of her book “The Political Lives of Information”

Abstract:

Information has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. This talk will examine the political implications of the idea of information for poverty alleviation. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on three cases from India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, the provision of government information in computer kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—the talk will counter claims that information is naturally and universally empowering. It will demonstrate, instead, how the production and leveraging of information — and its very definition — are shaped by caste, class, and gender.

For more on the talk, visit https://sites.google.com/view/uoft-critical-computing/seminar-series/janaki-srinivasan?t=hmHnrA6Qobi2kQiqRLphWA&s=09

 

 

CITAPP at IIIT Bangalore is an interdisciplinary think-tank set-up to focus on the policy challenges and the organizational demands made by technological innovation. Of particular interest to the Centre is how technological advances, along with institutional changes that harness the legitimacy and the powers of bureaucracies and market, address the needs of underserved communities.