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Platforms: Guiding the Agendas of Flexible Production in Transnational Development Work

Fri, May 26, 14:00 to 15:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua Salon F

Abstract

Platforms need not be in digital bits. They have a vibrant offline life as well as a template for organizing loosely coordinated activity, particularly in urban India. Entrepreneurs organized co-work spaces as "platforms" to enable flexible, creative development work. Designers created toolkits and guides as "platforms" to stimulate design-centered sanitation work. These middle-class actors imagined platforms as a way "enable" and "catalyze" -- to pool resources and structure loosely coordinated activities around an organizer's agenda.

The paper focuses on one case, set in context of other cases of platforms during a year of ethnographic fieldwork in the development sector in Delhi, India. The focal case is that of a design studio who created a design, activism, and development festival to shape the terms of development activities in Delhi. The festival as platform enabled them to build networks and shape a vocabulary, like a "network forum" (Turner 2006:72). However, the logic of platforms extended beyond the network forum. A platform allowed the studio to discover partners with affinities, rather than beginning with partners and then forming networks and terms. Also, the logic of platform allowed the studio to earn reputation as a generator of certain forms of development innovation.

Platforms were particularly useful as an organizing model in a milieu of neoliberal developmentalism. Development was a taken-for-granted project among India's middle class (Mankekar 2015). The liberalizing Indian state increasingly relied on coordinated but diverse private sector and NGO activities to do the labor of development (Kohli 2006a; Kohli 2006b; Kudva 2005). This is the context in which platforms become particularly useful as means of guiding loosely coordinated partners along rough vectors of progress.

These properties of platforms as a concept for offline organizing in India share many properties with the politics of digital platforms as a mechanism for stimulating innovation among outside actors in line with the platform organizers' interests (Plantin 2016; Gillespie 2010). These commonalities across domains of technology production and civic life call for an investigation of the common logics and institutional practices that produce contemporary understandings of democracy, progress, and public labor.

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