Chapter 22
Messy Empowerment
Mapping Digital Encounters in the Margins
Anita Gurumurthy and Deepti Bharthur
The Margin and the Paradigm
The global digital paradigm has ushered in a distinctly new technomateriality. Extractive data regimes have given rise to new economic structures and social realities (Morozov, “Silicon Valley Was Going to Disrupt Capitalism”). Even the so-called unconnected are scaffolded in by either the surveillance state or surveillance capital.
What emerges today, in lieu of older understandings of the digital divide, is a “networked margin” (Shah, “Networked Margins,” 9) where people and communities exist not wholly outside of a digital paradigm but rather relegated to the edges of the network society. As data architectures bear more decisively on their social and economic futures, the constituencies existing on the fringes of the digital are integrated into the global data regime that can potentially disenfranchise them even further (Arora, “Bottom of the Data Pyramid”; Eubanks, Automating Inequality), effecting an “assimilation by duress.” And yet, differentiated levels of information fluency and proficiency, rooted in antecedents of income, age, educational levels, gender, and location (Graham, De Sabbata, and Zook, “Towards a Study of Information Geographies”; World Wide Web Foundation, Women’s Rights Online), continue to act as key axes of inclusion/alienation, determining who gains from the promises of the connected world.
Women and young girls in the Global South bear the brunt of such pervasive datafication, marginalized as they are from both development opportunities and access to resources and rights, all of which are getting restructured in ways beyond their comprehension and spaces of resistance (Gurumurthy, Chami, and Billorou, Gender Equality in the Digital Economy).
Given the mutating grammar of the social structure and the limited possibilities for agentive action for those at the margins, digital humanities (DH) can offer unique tools and methodologies for empowerment, when taken as a framework of development intervention through digitally enabled models of learning, doing, and creating. It can allow those at the margins to claim space, voice, and agency in contextually relevant ways and effect processes of social change. Through learnings from a year-long technopedagogy program Dhwanigalu (which means “Voices” in Kannada) undertaken in 2016 and aimed at rural adolescent girls in Karnataka state in southern India, we explore how locally rooted DH interventions can create meaningful opportunities for agency, leadership, and civic engagement for marginalized constituencies. Much of the material and narratives presented here is available on the project website (http://www.itforchange.net/prakriye/).
Situating Dhwanigalu within the Practice of Digital Humanities
The phenomenon of DH has been a moving target for practitioners and scholars alike. Having shed its “big tent” approach (Svensson, “Beyond the Big Tent”) to move toward an “expanded field” of understanding (Gold and Klein, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, 1), DH has constantly sought redefinition, negotiating a slippery and sometimes contentious slope between theory and praxis (Magis, “Manual Labour”).
Given its origins in literature and English departments within the Global North academy, DH has historically concerned itself with computational and data-based projects and interventions in traditional humanities research (Risam, “Beyond the Margins”; Sneha, “Digital Humanities in India?”). Today, the practice of DH has come to include a larger spectrum including, among others, media artifacts, archives, bibliographies, repositories, indexing, modeling and tagging tools, data-based analytics, and games. The focus on “designing,” “building,” and “making” (Ramsay and Rockwell, “Developing Things”; Ray Murray and Hand, “Making Culture”) resources, products, and artifacts, as opposed to pure discourse and critique, is what distinguishes the DH agenda, where what is “built” has the ability to “both reify knowledge and communicate it” (Stan Ruecker, as cited in Ramsay and Rockwell, “Developing Things,” 77).
Thus, “tech” in and of itself cannot be and should not be considered the final goal of a DH intervention. Any practice of DH must be able to advance and enhance the goal of pedagogy (both within and outside the academy) and strive for “public impact” (Spiro, “This Is Why We Fight”). Secondly, interventions that are aimed at aiding the acts of cultural criticism and meaning making must be able to identify and challenge the dominant neoliberal flows and interests in the larger digital landscape (Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”). It has to be acknowledged, for instance, that resource-heavy or technocentric approaches to “doing” digital humanities or centering a particular idea of innovation do not necessarily gain the desired traction, especially in Global-South contexts (Fiormonte, “Digital Humanities from a Global Perspective”).
Ray Murray and Hand (“Making Culture,” 144) observe how “the contours of the discipline necessarily shift with both geographical and intellectual location, and theoretical practice emerging in the global South has to adapt to different infrastructures, languages, and technologies.” In the Indian context, digital humanities have been referred to as “less a unified field than an array of convergent practices” (Sneha, “Digital Humanities in India?”). Scholarship and preliminary mapping exercises undertaken around DH in India note that DH practice here extends beyond traditional academic enquiry, and is also very often located outside of the academic space (Ray Murray and Hand, “Making Culture”).
In situating our particular intervention in subsequent discussions, we borrow from Gold and Klein (Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, xii) the idea that the practice of digital humanities is but “one part of a larger expanded field of socially oriented work—work that is informed by the digital, but extends beyond it.” As we discuss later, the domain of information and communications technology (ICT) in development (ICTD) has been a significant influence in shaping techno-interventions, practices, and pedagogies in the field.
The Context
Digital literacies and skills are globally recognized as vital to engaging with the economy and world at large and important for young women, especially from marginalized groups (OECD, “Skills for a Digital World”). Building digital capabilities implies much more than basic literacy: young people can leverage the transformative power of digital technologies only when they are equipped with a range of digital skills (ITU, ITU Council Contribution). Research across the world (Downing, “Virtual Youth”; Hanckel and Morris, “Finding Community and Contesting Heteronormativity”) reaffirms how guided approaches to access can enable young people to tackle alienation, build self-esteem, and discover their voice.
Most statistics available online on rural youth in India today are not very revealing of how the axis of gender plays out. There is a dearth of studies on how young girls from rural and periurban communities participate online and how such participation can be deepened. What we know from market research indicates that there is a prevalence of “push” models privileging smartphone-driven mobile internet cultures where social media and viral infotainment become the dominant forms of online engagement (Jain and Sanghi, Rising Connected Consumer). Research in small pockets also reveals what is generalizable—that surveillance by the household and community does act as a major deterrent preventing girls from freely participating online (Kovacs, “Chupke, Chupke”). While the proliferation of smartphone-based internet has been significant in rural areas of India, with competitive pricing plans on 4G connections making basic data plans affordable for many (Opensignal, “State of Mobile Networks”), women’s access to devices and connections continues to be limited or heavily policed. Of course, it cannot be ignored that the global “online” today, dominated as it is by large transnational platforms and their profit-making interests, is a far cry from the open and inclusive space it was once imagined to be. But even within these “walled gardens,” so to speak, it would seem that young women often find themselves facing barricades against entry and access to equal opportunities. Even the limited avenues that do obtain only seem to reify existing gendered and other social hierarchies (Gurumurthy, Bharthur, and Chami, Platform Planet).
In this context, numerous “build it and they will come” approaches to digital literacy and training, and to technology immersion, have emerged as a form of course correction. The hypothesis of “emancipation” in these efforts follows from a simplistic logic behind putting technology in the hands of the marginalized. A gamut of efforts comes under this approach, informed by particular development discourses and agendas embodying some form of this universalizing technosolution. From initiatives such as Indian Girls Code, that attempt to launch girls on mainstream STEM careers, to Google’s internet Saathi, aimed at providing digital skills to rural women in India, to the Indian government’s efforts through the National Digital Literacy Mission, there has been a proliferation of efforts by the state, market, and civil society to integrate women and young girls into the digital paradigm. Folded into the educational project of extending tech in schools and to other platforms, these efforts are marked by their focus on “careers, employability, access and efficiency” (Shah, “Networked Margins,” 106). As has been noted, though, many such initiatives, which seem to show promising results in the short term, often do not live up to their stated objectives in the medium to long term (Unwin, “Why We Don’t Really Know Very Much”).
From our location as development practitioners invested in transformative change at the grassroots, it was evident to us from the beginning that the emancipatory potential of efforts at digital inclusion for rural adolescent girls could not be limited by the gadget-centric, “quick and dirty” allure of smartphone-based web use; nor could it be seen as a purely vocational undertaking in the form of “skilling.” Dhwanigalu was thus born as an innovative initiative, focusing on building leadership and capacity among marginalized young girls. Combining elements of design thinking, creative technopedagogies, and gender training, the program focused on allowing young girls to explore, express, and ideate in a safe and inclusive environment and formulate their subjectivities. Using learning modules and digital-inclusion exercises, we built a range of critical literacies and higher-order skills that could facilitate a deeper and more proactive digital engagement for young girls in both online and offline modes.
This intervention mainly targeted adolescent girls in the age group fourteen to seventeen. Our past experience with gender interventions in the same area had shown us that this was the time when girls were likely to face a lot of pressure at the household level to discontinue their education and/or enter into marriage. The program was implemented with eighty-five young adolescent girls in four villages of Hunsur block, Mysuru district, in the state of Karnataka in southern India. Supported by a small grant, the program could afford access to a repository of digital technologies such as handheld digital cameras for photography and videography, and also tablets, provided on a rotating basis through the information centers located in each village where the program was rolled out.
These information centers, part of the ongoing field interventions through the community informatics division of our organization, IT for Change, and its field center Prakriye (“Process”: set up in 2005), were used as the venues for training. Between March and August 2016, facilitators from Prakriye worked with the girls, establishing rapport and engaging them in conversations on gender norms, gender scripts, gender roles, and the status of women and girls in the community. Over a period of one year, rural adolescent girls participated in this program and captured their local development context, both physical-material and subjective-experiential, through various digital and digitally aided methodologies. Digital methods in this intervention allowed nonjudgmental intersubjective explorations of identity and created channels for asserting agency and citizenship.
Drawing on process documentation and focus group discussions with participants, this chapter maps and analyzes the “messy” terrain of empowerment, where subjects navigate fluid boundaries governing a remote policy space, the arena of local governance and everyday social structures of power, to exercise choice. By placing this locally rooted digital intervention against the larger digital paradigm, within which the margin is implicated in particular ways, we try to understand how and where context-driven digital pedagogies succeed in effecting social change that is relevant and situated in the local, and what challenges they face in the process.
Digital Encounters
We will look through the lens of “encounters” here in order to understand how communities at the networked margin participate across multiple scales in the digital paradigm. “Encounters” refers here to “everyday engagements across difference” (Faier and Rofel, “Ethnographies of Encounter,” 364). Deploying such a framework allows us to understand how a given engagement brings “discrepant stakes and histories together in ways that produce new cultural meanings, categories, objects, and identities” (363). In this conceptualization, rather than using grand categories such as capitalism, globalization, culture, or geography as frameworks to understand a given digital process, we understand such categories to be produced through digital encounters that are simultaneously local and global, virtual and physical, bringing together datafied individuals and the digital things that make up network-data structures.
Studying the sociology of digital encounters therefore means unpacking the complex and messy subcultures of the digital, as individuals become folded into global data assemblages as digital subject-agents.
Places are always socially produced through those who inhabit them, work in them, politicize them, and imbue them with specific cultural meaning (Margaret Rodman, as cited in Low, “Towards an Anthropological Theory,” 22). Building on this idea, we argue that as with all encounters, digital encounters do not unfold in a fixed, preconceived notion of location. The concept of “embodied space” underscores the “importance of the body as a physical and biological entity, as lived experience, and as a center of agency, a location for speaking and acting on the world” (Low, Spatializing Culture, 94); also that “it is through embodied space that the global is integrated into the inscribed spaces of everyday life where attachment, emotion, and morality come into play” (37).
In reading these ideas together, we are able to offer here a conceptualization of digital encounters that unravel in embodied spaces and temporalities. As the site simultaneously of global structures and locally rooted subjective experience, digital encounters represent a prism to examine development discourses in various ways. The subject-agent’s entanglements with the digital paradigm, whether as part of the network-data assemblage or through a process of technocapacity building, may be intermittent, but they can bear significantly on development choices and outcomes.
We refer here to “first-order” or “strategic life choices,” where a given individual is able to use resources, agency, and achievements to make decisions that are “critical for people to live the lives they want” (Kabeer, “Conditions and Consequences of Choice,” 3). In the case of Dhwanigalu, we examine the digital use cultures that the program spawned, the discernment it imparted about the digital, and how participants experienced a sense of choice.
Analysis
Building a Locally Informed and Situated Intervention
Over two decades of working with Prakriye, we had seen how the specific caste, class, geographic, and gendered locations of young girls in these villages presented huge barriers to their overall development. Girls from poor lower-caste households had to discontinue school, were married early, and faced mobility constraints and the threat of violence in public spaces. These problems have been compounded by the withering away of spaces for women’s leadership in the geographies of Prakriye’s work, with mobilization for sociopolitical empowerment giving way to a collectivization led by microfinance. An inevitable casualty has been the political agenda of cultural transformation, also reflected in neglect of the rights of girls in the local public agenda.
Outside of designated institutional spaces of formal learning, which are sparse, girls in these villages also face a paucity of safe and supportive spaces for critical thinking, decision making, and articulation of goals. High moral anxiety about girls’ freedoms in general, fears about their safety and societal disapproval, have also meant that girls cannot claim or use public spaces in the village to assert their basic right to mobility.
In designing the technointervention that would be Dhwanigalu, it was important for us to not only think through and problematize given wisdom about technology-enabled development and digital inclusion but also be aware of such “knowns” about the local-global social contexts in which we operated, while always being able to identify and maximize opportunities for subversion.
Technomateriality is not experienced only in the development discourses of the state or the economic logic of the market, nor even in the real materialities that stem from access infrastructures or lack thereof (both personal and systemic), but also on-ground institutional choices that mediate, extend, or delimit digital opportunities. The overall lack of choice and autonomy among adolescent girls needed to be factored in for the digital encounter to be meaningful. The program intervention could not afford to be divorced from the material conditions of its subject-agents or to disregard the very real constraints they faced.
Negotiating with families for girls to join the program proved to be a delicate and fraught process. Funder-driven paradigms of technodevelopment create temporally and conceptually bounded frames, with “deliverables” and “targets” of what is to be achieved through an intervention. Despite the aura around the digital and its aspirational associations, a moral panic about girls’ access to digital technologies has increasingly gained ground (Lingam, Bhallamudi, and Rao, Adolescent Subcultures and Smartphones). Parents did recognize the opportunity that “digital literacy” could usher in for their daughters’ social mobility, but they had reservations about the potential negative fallouts. Facilitators from Prakriye had therefore to downplay the “rights-based” approach that was written into our program design and position it more neutrally as a digital literacy program in order to get parents to buy in. Despite the obstacles, recruitment for the program was highly successful. While the grant monies were budgeted for only twenty-five participants, the interest and eagerness displayed by parents and participants prompted the facilitators to enroll eighty-five girls into the program. We also made a conscious choice to privilege girls from Dalit backgrounds, the traditionally marginalized castes.
Needless to say, local deficits in infrastructural access, including lack of connectivity and limited electricity, had to be taken into account when thinking through the modes and methodologies of techno-interventions. Given the small grant for the program, the girls’ real-time access to digital devices could be for short durations only. Outside of the program, the girls had limited or no access to these technologies, as none of them owned individual smartphones and had only sporadic access to devices in the household, usually monopolized by male members of the family. Technological interventions through Dhwanigalu, operating in this paucity of infrastructure and resources, thus had to be embedded in relation to the limiting contexts of rural realities. This meant thoughtfully adapting low-tech approaches that could succeed within the given context, rather than opt for interventions that called for intensive investment in time and resources. In most places, the program was conducted in offline mode, except for a few sessions at the school or the information center. To address the sheer lack of digital pedagogic content and tools in the local language, Kannada, facilitators used archival content from Prakriye and also developed curricular resources to suit the objectives of the program.
Outcomes of the Technopedagogy
Dhwanigalu and its technopedagogies enabled adolescent rural girls to rethink gender roles in their given contexts, and to problematize deeply internalized social structures. Discussing concepts such as the right to mobility, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and legal provisions for gender justice in the Indian constitution were critical to the program and ensured that the intervention would not be limited to mere “enskilling,” but could give the girls practical takeaways relevant to their aspirations. Through role playing, facilitators helped girls gain insight into how choices could be negotiated—whether about marriage, continuing college-level studies, or taking up employment in the city.
Ideas of gender justice were also embedded into the technopedagogy of the program. One of the first assignments the girls were given as part of the training was to take photographs. They were given training on simple digital cameras, with basic pointers on framing, lighting, and photo composition, and assigned exercises to capture their village on camera. In one instance, they were asked to take pictures of men and women at work, in order to understand, through a technologically mediated vision, their everyday contexts and the way gender plays into them. The documentation of men and women at work provided a useful segue to engage in discussions on gender roles. Most of the pictures would show men at construction sites or in the field and women cooking or washing vessels. The photographs were later used as a way to discuss how occupations are gender-coded. We observed that when taking pictures of women milking cows or working on tobacco farms, the girls could astutely parse out how, while women provided the labor—tending to and miking cattle, doing farm work—it was often the men in their households who would take the produce to the market and who exercised control over the earnings. In other instances, a girl would pick a subversive subject to photograph, such as the sole female petty-shop owner in the village, who did not sell cigarettes or tobacco products. They observed how this meant that men could not congregate in front of the shop, and how therefore it was a safe space for women and girls to frequent.
The activity afforded girls a chance to engage hands on with technologies that had hitherto been beyond their access. In focus group assessments after the program, the girls told us how in the initial stages they had a certain fear and awe about the digital, noting that they were afraid to even touch or hold the cameras and tablets for fear of dropping them. However, they reported feeling far more confident once experience of the devices had become normalized in the course of training. An important theme that also came through the focus group discussions was the girls’ desire for self-representation through digital media. They greatly enjoyed taking selfies and photographs of friends and families, and many emphasized being able to take and share selfies as one of the primary things they would like to do if they ever had their own smartphone.
The degree of “friction” or “smoothness” with which a digital encounter unfolds will depend on how different the converging contexts are. This was observed while using video learning resources during training. Girls would watch videos, either preloaded onto the tablets or at screenings at the information centers. This would be followed by open discussions where the trainers would explain the video and ask questions to spark conversations. We observed that localized narratives of women’s empowerment—such as the story of a girl rallying the support of women in the village to stop child marriage—received a positive response from the girls, while others which portrayed more complex narratives, like a film that used gender bending to portray women as aggressors and men as victims, invoked mixed to negative responses. The girls found it discomfiting to see images of women drinking alcohol or engaging in aggressive behavior, and believed it was wrong for women to behave in such fashion. Facilitators attempted to assuage the uneasiness through conversations about how “morality” could be gendered too, a conversation which, we observed, had only limited success, as girls had internalized strong ideas about “loose behavior.” Facilitators would take a nuanced approach in such conversations to ensure that institutionalized violence in patriarchal structures was problematized, and women’s and girls’ right to liberty and mobility was emphasized.
Artifacts created by girls at the end of the program—photo essays and digital stories—focused on critical explorations of civic engagement. For instance, by visually documenting the state of public amenities and infrastructure in their villages, nonworking street lights and overflowing drains, the girls were able to present evidence at the gram sabha, a formal village assembly, and argue with civic agencies for immediate action. Additionally, the gram panchayat, the local governance body, showed interest in public viewings of the girls’ digital stories and discussion about them. These exercises afforded critical explorations of self and society through the digital, enabling the growth of locally specific, subject-centered, rights-based perspectives, that in turn spurred reflections on choice and agency. While deeply attuned to the immediate constraints and challenges, the girls were able to identify and bargain with support systems within the same context. For one, emboldened by a greater understanding of their rights and entitlements, they began to actively visit the panchayat office to access services such as processing scholarship applications and obtaining documentation to apply to schools and colleges. All high school girls who attended the program also decided to continue their studies.
Understanding the law on the prevention of domestic violence resonated very strongly with some of the girls. One of them proudly reported in a video interview about how she had gone up to her father and warned him against physically assaulting her mother. “I told him, if you do it, I can report it to the police,” she recounted.
Four girls who wanted to go to college had to bargain hard. The parents had misgivings, especially since some of them had been threatened by an insulted panchayat member, who had taken umbrage at the screenings of dysfunctional village infrastructure at the public forum that the girls had convened. These were very difficult conjunctures for the program that needed to be negotiated through persuasion. In this case, the parents did ultimately consent to the girls’ appeals.
Yet even as we stood by the girls and their desires and aspirations, we also had to recognize the limits of what we could do. While the interventions could help girls negotiate with their families to pursue higher education, we found that when it came to decisions about early marriage, the program was ill equipped to address such structural challenges. Parents, many of them migrant farm workers who remained away from home for extended periods, candidly said in discussions with facilitators that while in principle they would like to be more supportive of their daughters’ wishes and independence, the high incidence of sexual violence in the village urged them to be pragmatic. For them, an unmarried daughter was a liability, since they could not guarantee her safety, while getting her married would ensure she was in the safe custody of her husband. These cultural rationalizations were part of the reality that could not be mitigated through a limited program-based encounter.
Conclusions and Reflections
Imagining the Local as Embedded and Embodied
Within a guided program of digital encounters, where differing cultural contexts converge, the expansion of agency and choice cannot be understood as a zero-sum game. Within the conditions of their embodied materiality, set against the curated field of the program intervention, subject-agents articulate choice and assert agency in multiple ways that may not fit conveniently into positive narratives of programmatic success. Interventions through technodevelopment, especially in matters of gender, often proceed with an outsider’s optimism about subject-agents and their roles, assuming a simple linear movement from “oppression” to “emancipation” that technology is deemed to effect. We seldom hear of what happens to people after the pilot programs have ended or the pushbacks to empowerment that predictably end up as one step forward, two steps back (Batliwala and Pittman, Capturing Change in Women’s Realities).
Even the most successful local interventions may sit uneasily in relation to local culture. Institutional actors who may earlier have publicly expressed support, or even played a positive role in enabling an intervention, can turn hostile if there is a real threat to the status quo. Conversely, it is also quite possible that the home, the last bastion of female empowerment, might transform radically to create the spaces necessary for girls to appropriate new opportunities on their own terms, especially owing to the digital encounter. Identities are highly contingent, seldom fitting neatly into the “ally or adversary” dichotomy that underlies developmental interventions for gender justice. Thus, identities demand constant assessment and negotiation.
Western epistemic traditions in building technocapacity have often packaged the articulations of social change in the Global South in overgeneralized and culturally essentialized readings of gender and other structural antecedents of location: “Fathers prevent daughters from going to school,” “Local government institutions are dominated by the male elite, who are unsympathetic to women’s concerns,” and so on. In contrast, Dhwanigalu shows us that the relational canvas of social change is constantly moving. Through digital encounters, it is possible to destabilize the status quo and create new meanings, capture aspirations, reshape everyday common sense and civic consciousness, and realign gender relations at a very personal-political, as well as a public-political, level. This is not to deny the all-powerful role of normative prescriptions in the lives of women and girls but to put the spotlight on the digital-human space as transformation-in-motion.
The Data Regime in Encounters
While Dhwanigalu has demonstrated how locally relevant digital interventions can be significant, it remains to be seen how such interventions can offer a challenge to the global technoscape. Seen through the lens of digital encounters, this reveals a complex reality of multiple actors, differential power and knowledge hierarchies.
While DH has succeeded in forging for itself a suitably “alternative” identity within the (largely Global North) academy, and has evolved far beyond its beginnings as purely computational experiments in the humanistic disciplines, it is now increasingly confronted with a new digital marketplace where the room for alternative meanings, narratives, or social relations outside the value chain of the digital economy is rapidly shrinking. Possibilities for subversion, alternative readings, and democratic resistance continue to be limited, and communities may not be able to resist surveillance capital and its discontents without enabling conditions and external support. Digital humanities as a field will need to continue to engage with this important question.
Though varying in their socioeconomic profiles and geographies, the villages where Dhwanigalu was implemented are today part of the Indian state’s data regime. The state and its panspectronic apparatus are part of the space that configures a digital humanities intervention. Since the rollout of the Digital India initiative in 2014, there has been an effort to move all governance functions, services, and transactions to a digital platform, using the biometric-enabled unique identification number “Aadhaar” as a form of authentication, including for welfare entitlements. Through their mandatory enrollment into the biometric unique identity Aadhaar database, citizens of these villages are part of a state-controlled data assemblage that is indispensable to their claim making, even though the process has not been without hiccups.
For the adolescent participants in the Dhwanigalu program, encounters to enroll for Aadhaar may not have registered as an encounter per se, but citizen subjects of datafication find their digital presence or absence impinging directly on their critical life choices (Nayar, Posthumanism). State efforts to streamline public administration through data-based infrastructure are often perceived by marginalized communities as a necessary “claim” that brings legibility (and hence legitimacy), something that our work in the information centers bears out. Being drawn into the assemblages of the state’s digital intelligence may simply be Hobson’s choice for the most disadvantaged, but digital interventions do create dilemmas for facilitators in terms of the changing nature of citizenship and the undermining of certain rights for those at the margins. While Dhwanigalu prioritized citizenship literacy, it was not possible to take on the tasks of familiarizing the girls with the information architectures of government websites, through critical pedagogies that connected the idea of the self and its data imprints to the wider national debates on privacy and the digital ID project.
Locating the Body in Digital Humanities
By placing ideas of the body in relation to the personal, through lived experiences of mobility and space, and to the public through appropriation of local public spaces, the intervention was able to frame encounters through new meanings of body, identity, and self. The program afforded the girls many opportunities to explore their bodies and selves in meaningful ways through digital artifacts, to articulate aspirations and desires, and thus to exercise informed choice. The integration of SRHR components in the training was a direct response to the participants’ demands, where they candidly expressed the need for nonjudgmental counseling to help them understand their sexuality. Some girls proactively repurposed the program space and made room to use online sessions to seek information about sexuality and to discuss with the facilitators their deeply personal experiences, anxieties, and fears. This was definitely a positive development for the program, but it also pointed to the stark gaps in local support systems for accessing sexuality education or having open discussions around the body.
Social markers of caste and gender create multiple everyday exclusions that become referential in what is experienced as freedom. During the training sessions in digital photography, the girls had revealed their hesitancy to step into upper-caste lanes or to use the well near the village temple, since they could be pulled up for “being where they ought not to be” on account of their caste. Fathers of the participants had been mocked by upper-caste men for the girls’ forays into forbidden upper-caste spaces with cameras in hand—transgressions too important for upper-caste masculinity to let go without due censure of the lower-caste menfolk. Hence on a field trip to the city of Mysuru, the girls recognized the inescapable intimacy of village life where particular bodies are penalized for “being out of place,” and appreciated the unencumbered mobility and anonymity the urban milieu could afford them.
The time spent with the program has taught us that these back-and-forth negotiations with the social environment, gender, and caste are an essential means of enabling the subject-agents to sustain their embodied presence and politics within their locations. Recognizing this reality, the challenge for programs such as Dhwanigalu is to actively tackle the limitations of subject-agents’ locations. This includes challenging and actively working to address local masculinities and patriarchal structures that normalize the violence and control so inimical to young girls’ materiality. It also means mitigating the inhibiting forces of morality that lead to internalized shame about desire and sexuality, and opening up healthy dialogue and exploration. Guided technointerventions that also target adolescent boys and young men can, we believe, dismantle these toxic cultures in the long term and spur digital encounters toward greater choice and agency. These are ideas for the next phase of Dhwanigalu that we propose to embark on.
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