Behavior change and improving health literacy based on normative ideals of motherhood is a dominant paradigm to address maternal health challenges. However, these ideals often remove women's control over their bodies overlooking how the bodily experiences of pregnancy are socially and culturally constructed. We report on 27 interviews with pregnant women and nursing mothers in rural and semi-urban areas of South India, and six focus groups with 23 frontline health workers as secondary data. We explore how the embodied pregnancy experiences are influenced and negotiated by the socio-cultural context and existing care infrastructures. Our findings highlight how the ways of seeing, knowing, and caring for a body of a pregnant woman through often conflicting norms, beliefs and practices of medicine, nourishment and care actively shape the experiences of pregnancy. We open up a space for novel opportunities for digital health technologies to enhance women's embodied experiences and pregnancy care infrastructures in the Global South.

The death of Indian film star Sushant Singh Rajput at the peak of the COVID lockdown triggered chaos on the news cycle in India with a range of conspiracy theories that led to a witch hunt of sorts, and the hounding of several entertainers and public figures in the months that followed. Using data from Twitter, YouTube, and an archive of debunked misinformation stories, we examine the drivers and consequences of social media outrage in this case. We analyse these patterns from the framework of conspiracy and astroturfing and contextualize our findings to the socio-political background currently prevalent in India. Primarily, retweet rates on Twitter suggest that commentators benefited from talking about the case, which got higher engagement than other topics. Moreover, we report evidence of political hands in the way the discourse has shaped online, but more importantly that the story bears warnings for the shape and impact of witch-hunts in the backdrop of a fractured media environment. In conclusion, we consider the effects of Rajput’s outsider status as a small-town implant in the film industry within the broader narrative of systemic injustice, as well as the gendered aspects of mob justice that have taken aim at his former partner in the months since.

Propagation of misinformation on various social media platforms is a common occurrence, especially around political events, religious beliefs, and public health. Fact checked articles, which investigate the credibility of dubious claims online, provide a reliable source of debunked misinformation. However, existing (older) fact checked articles remain an underutilized resource for understanding patterns in fake stories. We propose the use of Question Answering (QA) for analysing fact checked articles for systematically extracting metadata, potentially useful for downstream tasks such as misinformation detection, using a range of simple to nuanced questions. We find that the method gives us a context-specific understanding of common patterns and themes in misinformation, which is especially important in the Global South, where misinformation is layered with propagandist underpinning. Our findings suggest that this method can be extended by fine tuning on any event specific data set of fact checked articles to yield more robust and accurate results.

Frontline health workers are the first and often the only access point to basic health care services in low-and-middle income countries. However, the work and the issues frontline health workers face are often invisible to the healthcare system, with limited resources to assist them. This study explores the work practices, challenges and roles of frontline health workers in community health with particular focus on pregnancy care in South India. Drawing on the notion of maintenance and articulation work, we describe the maintenance work of frontline health workers maintaining, anticipating, reconciling, and supporting care infrastructures beyond data collection practices. Our findings highlight how socio-cultural practices, perceptions, status, and existing systems influence maintenance work practices. Based on our findings, we suggest moving beyond the focus on training and performance to design CSCW tools to support the maintenance work of frontline health workers as 'system-builders' to make healthcare infrastructures work in community health.

Women political workers adopt a range of tactics to navigate the hyper-masculine space of electoral politics in South India, both offline and, increasingly, online. Using interviews and observations over three months of election campaigning, we examine women's outreach work in online and offline adversarial spaces through the lens of Michel de Certeau's, The Practice of Everyday Life, which examines the "tactics" through which people negotiate change and everyday challenges in daily situations. We find that the everyday logistics of election work have changed significantly, and that these bring up two important ways in which "tactics" framework is helpful - first, in the changing ways in which representations need to be managed, as political work requires an interactive digital public face, and second, in ways that which online interactions need to be managed as new and increasingly demanding forms of communication are necessitated for effective voter outreach.

In this mixed-methods study of political discourse, we study the affordances of Twitter in the context of free speech in India. We critically examine specific cases of the legal prosecution of free speech and the use of extreme speech in attacks on people to document the risks to citizens when they engage in antagonistic online discourse, particularly against the state or political institutions. We follow this up with quantitative study of the use of extreme speech through 477 hashtags used by a random sample of thousand political actors on Twitter and find that politicians are rewarded, through higher retweet rates, when they engage in extreme or uncivil messaging. We contextualize these findings to the postcolonial history of India and the laws and institutions that enable differential consequences for engaging in various forms of speech. In conclusion, we propose that the affordances of new ICTs like social media need to be carefully considered for their unintended consequences, and that functional access to free speech may differ dramatically based on one's access to institutions.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, there has been a massive amount of misinformation both related to the condition, and a range of linked social and economic issues. We present a mixed methods study of misinformation debunked by Indian fact checking agencies since January 2020. Alongside this, we present an analysis of what politicians in India have been discussing in the overlapping period. We find that affective issues dominate misinformation, especially in the period following the lockdown in India. Furthermore, we find that communal prejudice emerges as a central part of the misinformation environment, something that is reflected in the political speech around the same period.