King's College London

This research funded by the Wellcome Trust analyses the politics of digital health labour within Covid-19 volunteer work in contemporary India. This is a historical ethnography situating such labour within the post-2000 neoliberal landscape of digitisation in health and developmental landscapes in India. Covid volunteers – across a spectrum of governmental, corporate, and civil society channels – created or worked with platforms, applications, social media to provide pandemic responses. While foregrounding life-saving aspirations of Covid-19 volunteerism, the research evaluates unequal, gendered, caste-based burdens, solidarities, differential access underlying digital platforms for pandemic aid.

Drawing on oral history, and Digital Humanities tools, this research delves into the politics of time in volunteer labouring sites. It compares the labour of marginalised, privileged and elite volunteers all of whom struggled to create and design time-sensitive and time-saving resources such as oxygen spreadsheets, relief apps, social media bots within the sites of relief work and vaccination during the pandemic. Volunteers from unequal social backgrounds also used digital platforms of crowdfunding and created social media communities around real-time medical data and resources.

Our research studies the power relations underlying the labour of providing timely pandemic data. It studies the relevance of India's global aspirations in creating Covid infrastructures, and their corresponding burdens of digital labour. Set within three sites, the labour of Covid relief communication, digital contact-tracing, and creating online vaccine access, this project involves fieldwork across seven Indian states and two countries (India and Indonesia). We will be working closely with several health organisations, worker unions, aid agencies, civil and digital rights activists to reflect their work concerns. Some of these important voices will be featured in a podcast that the research team will produce in collaboration with a podcast producer and audio editor.