Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
About Anushree
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. Through this work, she explores 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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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Anushree's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Patch-“working” the Field: Methodological Reorientations During a Global Pandemic
I began my doctoral journey right before the pandemic set in. My project was going to critically examine the notion of “technology for social good” within the hyper-charged tech startup and innovation ecosystem in a rapidly digitizing India. I wanted to examine how top-down imaginaries rooted in technocratic governance regimes were shaping emerging communities of practice and cultures of technology-based entrepreneurship. Deeply inspired by Ho’s (2009), Irani’s (2019), and Gupta’s (2024) ethnographies, I hoped to develop my research similarly through an in-depth investigation of techno-entrepreneurial cultures from within and examine their capture of the public imagination for charting pathways to economic growth and social mobility. The idea was to try and uncover the finer threads that were weaving the tapestry of neoliberal development in what would later be deemed as “pre-pandemic” India. Enter the pandemic and the paralyzing lockdown in March 2020 that brought “normal” life to a screeching halt. (read more...)
Ladies ‘Log’: Women’s Safety and Risk Transfer in Ridehailing
*A note from Co-PI Noopur Raval: The arrival and rise of gig-work globally has ushered in a new wave of conversations around the casualization of labor and the precarious nature of digitally-mediated “gigs,” ranging from online crowdwork gigs to digitally-mediated physical work such as Ubering. Gradually, scholarship has extended beyond North America and Europe to map the landscape of digital labor in the global south. These posts that make up “India’s Gig-Work Economy” are the result of one such project titled ‘Mapping Digital Labour in India,’ where four research fellows and a program manager, me, have been studying the dynamics of app-based ridehailing and food-delivery work in two Indian cities (Mumbai and New Delhi). This project is supported by the Azim Premji University’s Research Grants program. In this series of posts, the research fellows and I offer reflections on pleasure, surveillance, morality and other aspects woven into the sociality of gig-work (read more...)