Curating Digital Lives for a Feminist Urban Future
13th December 2018, India International Centre, New Delhi
This workshop seeks to establish an alternative framework for curating the smart safe city. It aims to engender current smart city agendas through young women’s everyday experiences of navigating the city. It will present different perspectives of mobility and safety generated by young women through participatory maps, photographs, videos and WhatsApp diaries maintained over a period of time. In doing so, it explores how women on the margins view, understand, and ultimately navigate the city through information and communication technologies (ICT) accessed from low-cost (and often low-tech) mobile phones. It provokes us to think what safety means in a context where social media provides real time information on the dangers and freedoms located in the metro, bus, auto rickshaw, and walkways as well as the opportunity to express this in creative and poignant ways. It invites us to think how women living on the urban peripheries negotiate the ‘freedoms’ of moving in online space with the ‘dangers’ of going out into the city, or the limitations of engaging via digital technologies with the freedom of stepping out of one’s home. Through a convergence of artistic practice, digital media and architecture, this workshop will demonstrate the potential of a new kind of visual language of safety that is co-produced with the women. It will reveal the capacity of this language to move beyond existing data on gendered violence to highlight the gendered and socio-economic patterns of inclusions and exclusions brought about by a digital urban age.
As part of the United Nations #16DaysOfActivisim, we launched a hip hop song ‘Khadar ki Ladkiyan’ [Khadar Girls] co-written and co-produced with our participants at the event. See our Story Map of the process here.
Read the workshop concept note here.
Explore the event Wakelet with all of the Tweets before and during the workshop here.
Watch our workshop videos featuring our #GSCProject team members and workshop participants – project societal partners, academics, experts, practitioners and community stakeholders – who joined us on the day below:
Read the workshop report by Project Research Assistant Arya Thomas here.
Programme
MORNING SESSION
| 9.30-10.00 | Participants start arriving with tea and coffee served |
| Project Outline and Findings Chair: Kalpana Viswanath | |
| 10.00-10.30 | Dr. Ayona Datta (Principal Investigator), Reader in Urban Futures, King’s College London Gendering the Smart City: Curating Gendered Digital Life in the Margins |
| 10.30-10.45 | Dr. Padmini Ray Murray (Co-Investigator), Digital Humanities Course Leader, Srishti School of Art and Design, Bangalore Sharing and Making Digital Knowledge: Using Wikipedia |
| 10.45-11.00 | Arya Thomas (Research Assistant) WhatsApping and Rapping with Young Women in Delhi’s Peripheries |
| 11.00-11.15 | Rwitee Mandal, Safetipin (project societal partner) Gendered Safety Maps of the Unmapped Peripheries |
| 11.15-11.45 | Q & A |
| 11.45-12.00 | Break for coffee and tea |
| Right to Urban Technologies Chair: Padmini Ray Murray | |
| 12.00-12.15 | Sarita Baloni, Researcher, Jagori (project societal partner) Working with Youth and Technology in the urban peripheries |
| 12.15-12.30 | Swati Janu, Senior Designer, mHS CITY LABS and Lecturer in Architectural Design, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi Memory Cards and Vernacular Media |
| 12.30-12.45 | Krishna Menon, Professor, School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University Gender and the Smart City |
| 12.45-13.00 | Nayanatara Ranganathan, Manager, Freedom of Expression programme, Internet Democracy Project Surveillance-As-Safety in Hi-Tech India |
| 13.00-13.30 | Q & A |
| 13.30-14.15 | Lunch |
AFTERNOON SESSION
| Curating the City with Art and Architecture Chair: Ayona Datta | |
| 14.15-14.45 | ‘Khadar Ki Ladki’ launch of music video and Q & A with participants and sound artist Sunayana |
| 14.45-15.00 | Kruttika Susarla, Graphic Designer and Comic Artist The Personal is Political |
| 15.00-15.15 | Shveta Mathur, Visiting Faculty, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and Coordinator, Urban Design Studio Student Design Interventions in Khadar |
| 15.15-15.30 | Sameera Jain, Filmmaker, Editor and Course Director, Creative Documentary program, Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication, New Delhi About My Own City |
| 15.30-16.00 | Q & A |
| 16.00-16.15 | Break for coffee and tea |
| 16.15-17.15 | Roundtable Discussion on Gendering the Indian Smart City: Contexts, Challenges and Future Directions Moderator: Kalpana Viswanath, Co-Founder and CEO, Safetipin Janaki Abraham, Associate Professor in Sociology, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi Anjilee Aggarwal, Director, Samarthyam Sohini Bhattacharya, President and CEO, Breakthrough Mriganka Saxena, Founder, HTAU (Habitat Tectonics Architecture and Urbanism) |
| 17.15-17.30 | Final reflections and moving on to next phase of project Ayona Datta and Padmini Ray Murray |
Funded by: Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK
Co-convened by King’s College London and Safetipin, Delhi
Local partners: Jagori and School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi
Gendering the Smart City 