SSN Seminar ‘Platform Collectives as crisis infrastructures’ with A Gupta

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Join this hybrid SSN seminar "Thank you ‘Someone’: Platform Collectives as crisis infrastructures in the Southern city"

Join the SSN for a hybrid seminar by SSN Visiting Scholar Anushree Gupta (Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad). Anushree will be joined in conversation by Wannita Takerngsaksiri of the Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative at Deakin, and David Giles from Deakin anthropology. The seminar will be chaired by the SSN’s Timothy Neale.

Please register for either an online or in-person ticket. The seminar will be livestreamed here. Please login with a Google or YouTube account to take part in the chat.

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.

Discussant bios

Wannita Takerngsaksiri is a research fellow at A2I2, Deakin University. Her research focuses on practical applications of AI, bridging the gap between industry and academia, particularly in software engineering. She has published in leading venues such as ICSE, ICSME, IST, and JSS, demonstrating the design and evaluation of code generation tools.

Dr David Boarder Giles is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University. He is a political and economic anthropologist interested in urban ethnography, consumption and waste, homelessness, decentralized networks, and anarchist counterpublics. He is the author of A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities. He is currently working on a project that explores homeless encampments and a populist backlash against them.