Segregating in the name of convenience: algorithmic regimes of caste in contemporary urban India

• In Event: 21061 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Labor and Workplace Dynamics

Abstract

Contemporary Delhi is undergoing rapid socio-spatial transformations powered by gig platforms that mediate access to crucial services and urban governance outcomes. In these infrastructural roles, platforms regulate marginality and difference, enabling convenience and quality of life for a few at the cost of others. Gig platforms, therefore, occupy a long lineage of modern infrastructures in Delhi (and India) that regulate the social, spatial, and affective order of caste under the guise of modern values like convenience or improvement. Despite the vast scholarship on India’s gig economy, questions of caste and how platforms restructure urban geographies have received limited attention. This paper addresses both these gaps through a multi-sited ethnography of three platform-led experiments of urban living in contemporary Delhi: (i). salon-at-home services; (ii). Contactless silent deliveries, and (iii). 10-minute grocery deliveries. From rendering gig workers’ bodies as sites where the affective orders of caste are algorithmically negotiated and disciplined, to controlling the flows of goods and people within and across neighborhoods to manufacture a sense of boundary, security, and convenience for elite consumers, platforms reinforce segregated geographies (Safransky 2020) and racialized times (Jamal 2008, Sharma 2014) in numerous ways. These caste-based sensorial and spatial practices attain invisibility and legitimacy when algorithmically mediated and shrouded within logics of comfort, ease, and convenience for the consumer. Caste, in turn, functions as an invisible social infrastructure that legitimizes and propels platform-mediated service delivery. Drawing on scholarship from key fields like STS, critical urban theory, and critical caste theory, this paper makes interdisciplinary interventions to unpack how processes of racialization and platformization interact in postcolonial cities.

Author

• Abhishek Sekharan, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor