Anita Gurumurthy

2020

In October and November 2018, during the Great Indian Festival season in India, online retail giants — Amazon, Flipkart and Paytm Mall — sold goods worth $4.3 billion (Rs 29,947 crore), 43 percent higher than the last year.

Traders in physical retail must now reckon with the rather disconcerting reality of e-commerce. The press note…

2020

The human body is asserting itself more than as a performative spectacle on the streets. From Hong Kong to India, Catalonia, Lebonan, Chile and many more, the body is a signifier of bio-power and hope, defeating surveillance, courting arrest and deliberately seeking the system’s panoptic gaze.

The proliferation of protests suggests a…

2020

The glass is half full.

Voices of resistance to power are everywhere. Students and young people are taking to the streets; women are infiltrating public discourse; and the unlikely activist is joining popular uprisings. Social movements are rejecting tokenism and ‘woke-washing’ from corporations, demanding that governments deal with the…

2020

Four centuries after the East India Company set the trend for corporate resource extraction, most of the world is now in the grip of unbridled corporate power. But corporate power is on the cusp of achieving ‘quantum supremacy’ that social movements in the digital age need to understand in order to shift gears in their struggles. The quantum…

2020

This policy brief deals with the principles and framework to govern aggregate non-personal data as 'common pool resources'. Such an intervention is necessary in view of the large dividends acquired through the use of such data, the widespread de facto collection of data and its potential as a raw material for the development of Artificial…

2020

During a global discussion led by Brazil in 2014, India maintained that the internet is not merely an open, free, global commons that should remain untouched by major governmental control, but also a resource that needs to reflect the values of an ‘Equinet’ – a platform for commerce, e-governance, national security mechanism, to be achieved…

2019

Digital technologies have generated unprecedented ways of being and doing, dramatically changing the social and economic order. Recoding human subjectivity and social interactions, they recast power relationships. Gender relations are centrally implicated in this shift to a networked sociality where the online and offline must be understood as…

2019

This is the report of an exploratory field research on the machinations of gender-based cyber violence, carried out in 2 locations in the state of Karnataka between October 2018 to January 2019 {as part of our Righting Gender Wrongs Project}. It captures the experiences of 335 women in the state of Karnataka and presents an in-depth account of…

2019

This is the second issue paper, co-written by Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami, for Feminist Digital Justice -- a collaborative research and advocacy initiative of IT for Change and DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era).

In trade policy corridors, an e­-commerce agenda for women’s empowerment has been rapidly gaining…

2019

This is the first issue paper, co-written by Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami and Cecilia Alemany, for Feminist Digital Justice -- a collaborative research and advocacy initiative of IT for Change and DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era).

Digital platform companies have emerged as neo­-feudal overlords profiting from a…