Globally, governments have rapidly accelerated digitalization of their welfare systems, promising better connectivity, outreach, and regulation through the adoption of big data, AI and algorithmic regimes. However, these promises have produced paradoxical effects, conflating connection with control and surveillance. Located at the intersection of Social Work, Disability Studies, Anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies, my ethnographic project examines the digitalization of disability welfare systems within the context of neoliberal austerity and digital governance in India. Drawing on recent work on big data and algorithms, I ask what effects these interconnected technologies have in creating new digital regimes, disabled subjectivities, and citizen-state relations. I examine how the promise of connectivity and efficiency through digital governance generates contradictory experiences of differential inclusion, surveillance, and digital precarity for disabled people and marginalized communities. In doing so, my research highlights the need to integrate a digital justice perspective in social work education, advocating for the voices and rights of marginalized communities within emerging digital landscapes. Whilst harnessing the potential of digitalization, social workers must simultaneously safeguard minoritized groups from algorithmic harms and biases, datafication and financialization. By extension, my research prompts us to design curricula that proactively engages with the prospects and challenges of digitalization that are rapidly upending social welfare policy and programs. Navigating these paradoxes would require us to create interprofessional collaborations, wherein social workers can spearhead initiatives for justice based technological solutions by collaborating with communities and tech professionals alike.

Authors:
Vandana Chaudhry, the City University of New York, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Vandana Chaudhry is an associate professor of Social Work at the College of Staten Island at the City University of New York. She specialises in disability justice, microfinance, and digital regimes.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule

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