Abstract:

My talk will be based on my 2022 book, The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India, which examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation in India. We live in a world that sees information as empowering and democratising. But how does information work in practice and who does it work for? The book examined three cases in India—the circulation of price information on mobile phones in a fish market in Kerala, government information in computer kiosks operated by a non-profit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore their divergent uses of information to support goals of social change. Drawing on the book and these cases, the talk will challenge claims that treat information as naturally empowering for everyone. It will use the alternative construct of an “information order”  to refocus attention on how caste, class, and gender shaped who got to define and leverage information in the cases it considers.