Ethnography attends to relations among people, practices, and the technologies that mediate them. Central to this method is the duality of roles ethnographers navigate as researchers and participants and as outsiders and insiders. However, the rise of digital platforms has introduced new opportunities as well as practical and ethical challenges that reshape these dualities across hybrid media environments spanning both online and offline contexts. Drawing on two case studies of VRChat and WhatsApp, we examine how ethnographers employ diverse tactics to study both enduring and emerging socio-cultural issues of race and caste, particularly those that form what are often called publics. We propose emergent relationality as a key analytic for understanding the mutual shaping of ethnographers, platforms, and publics. In this work, emergent relationality offers registers for analyzing how positionality and hybrid media environments constitute and condition what can be accessed, articulated, and made public.

Recent work in HCI has shed light on structural issues of inequality in computing. Building on this work, this study analyzes the relatively understudied phenomenon of caste in computing. Contrary to common rhetorics of ‘castelessness,’ we show how computing worlds in India and Indian diasporic communities continue to be shaped and inflected by caste relations. We study how, when and where Dalits (formerly ‘untouchables’) encounter caste in computing. We show how they artfully navigate these caste inscriptions by interpreting, interrupting and ambiguating caste and by finding caste communities. Drawing on the life stories of 16 Dalit engineers and anti-caste, queer-feminist and critical race theories, we argue that a dynamic and performative approach to caste, and other forms of inequality in HCI and computing, emphasizes the artfulness and agency of those at the margins as they challenge structural inequality in everyday life. Lastly, we suggest practical ways of addressing caste to build more open and inclusive cultures of global computing.

Data collection on the population is a key mode of public health management in the Global South. This information is seen as a means to improve health metrics through welfare programs. In this study, we examine the changes brought about by an ICT-based Real-Time Monitoring System to the infrastructure of a welfare program and the nature of work of Anganwadi workers in India. Anganwadi workers, traditionally serving as daycare providers and community health workers, are increasingly being asked to serve primarily as data collectors for the new digital system. We ask the question 'cui bono?' to this system by drawing attention to the precarity of Anganwadi workers whose care-work is standardized through this app for 'efficient' monitoring by the Indian state but remains contingent on their relationship with the local community and ability to mobilize resources on the ground. Using auto-ethnographic and interview methods, we find that Anganwadi workers are caught between conflicting demands of state bureaucracy and the situated nature of their care work resulting in forms of ambivalent care. We find that the real-time monitoring apps intended to collect data for efficient delivery of state services end up serving the state's need for performing care through data rhetorics produced at the expense of the professional and personal well-being of the workers, and arguably the communities they serve.

Twitter is increasingly important for political outreach and networking around the world. While electoral politics and social relations in India are heavily organized by caste, a broader rhetoric of castelessness among upper-caste politicians has led to the eschewing of caste publicly to appear strategically secular. This has rendered caste dynamics more implicit than explicit. Social media, often cited as a tool for inclusion, offers a unique look into the networks of covert exclusion. Our study analyzes three structural properties of the Twitter network of Members of Parliament in India - influence, bridging capital, and mutual connectivity, to understand how caste manifests as social capital in the information economy. Our results show that those higher in the caste hierarchy are structurally poised for higher social capital through higher influence, incoming bridging capital, and higher propensity for mutual connections with other MPs in the network. Our study offers a methodological window into these invisible relations to show how structural advantages of Brahmanical supremacy are being co-produced and stabilized on social media at the highest level of politics.

The Hindu caste system plays an important role in the socio-political landscape of India. In recent years, Indian politicians have moved a lot of direct communication online. Social media is now an important space for the articulation and performance of their political positions. In this paper, we study ways in which the political performance of caste relations can be captured from the online connections and messaging of parliamentarians in India. We run tests of odds ratios among the members of LokSabha (lower house) of India to find the extent to which their engagement is insular to their own caste group versus other groups. We observe that in the LokSabha network, Members of Parliament (MPs) have higher odds of getting retweeted by others whose caste is the same or closer to their own in the caste hierarchy. The findings of this research shed light on an understudied, yet critical, social relation of caste in the study of political behavior on social media.