 Good afternoon, good morning and good evening everyone and welcome to the COVID from the Margins event, kindly hosted today by the Merckmann Klein Center for Internet Society at Harvard University. Needless to say, we are extremely excited to be here with you today, celebrating what is a big accomplishment, a book, that has the ambition to be much more than simply a book in the library. So it is an editorial project, but really what he wants to do and what this session wants to achieve today is to actively inviting everyone, all attendees, all of us, hit and variably hit and concern understandably by the COVID pandemic to make room for another way of thinking and understanding and narrating the COVID pandemic. One that takes as a frame of reference the margins of society. So those of us that are typically out of, you know, privilege, that are suffering the worst consequences of this crisis, which is or start the list as a health crisis, but very quickly became a social, economic, cultural and very personal crisis for us. Oh, so my name is the funny Milan, and I am an associate professor on new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. And what I would like to do, well, I'm one of the three editors of the book, you're about to meet the others and to meet three amongst the 75 awesome authors that we marshal for this master adventure. And I'm one of the community builders that facilitated, if you want, this conversation on COVID from the margins. As you can imagine, what we try to do here, it's actually something that cannot be achieved by one person alone, nor by a group of 75 people, no matter how awesome. In fact, what you just started starting is a conversation, precisely by, as I said, making room for wearing different lenses, different colored lenses to see reality from the point of view of those suffering from inequality, poverty, injustice and discrimination. So what I'm going to do before passing the baton, passing the word on to my co-editors and then to our, our authors that I'm going to introduce in a minute, is to tell you something about the origins or if you want a long journey of COVID from the margins. So this book project, which is by the way also a blog, or what I would say, primarily a blog. So it was 2017. And you remember maybe those beautiful days in which we would have live meetings, live conversations, hugging people and sharing drinks in the sun. It was Cartagena de Indias in Colombia and Emiliano Treré from Cartagena University, whom you're going to meet in a minute, and myself were invited to organize an event in the outskirts of the of the International Association of Media and Communication Research. So an academic organization that gathers scholars of media and communication, that travels around the world, or used to travel around the world to organize big gatherings of like-minded people at an event in Colombia. And we were invited to do something on big data. It was a very, very broad invitation. And what we decided to do was to create a very cozy space, a workshop that quickly took up a life of its own, and it was entitled Big Data from the South. And the South for us was a placeholder, it was a metaphor, it was a proxy for not only the geographical South as in the global South, but also for a number of pockets of inequality and discrimination that resist and thrive, unfortunately, also in developed, on the so called developed society. And that's where how and where the adventure of Big Data from the South started. It's an academic experimentation, if you want, which, however, has always been very mindful of trying to also adopt different language and try to keep accessibility of our discourse on the horizon, which is why we organized events, academic special issues, journals, stuff like that. But also we are still very beautiful, very lively block, which is deliberately multilingual. And multilingualism for us is very important because we think it's also good not only to make room for other ways of seeing the world and describing the world, which is what languages are, different culture, different mindsets, but also because we wanted to reproduce to some extent the level of, you know, uneasiness that people at the margins feel and experience on a daily basis when, for example, we hold our conversations exclusively in English. That was Big Data from the South. It kept on going on the background until the pandemic hit. And then when the pandemic hit, we quickly realized that the way the pandemic was narrated was from a very, very insular point of view. I mean, firstly it was China, then it was Italy, and the three editors of the book by the way are Italians living abroad. So we notice how, you know, of course you're concerned for your own community, but there's a much more that did not show up. There was much more that was actively silenced, in part because there were no data, just to give you a sense. When it comes to Africa, at the beginning of the pandemic, only two countries out of the 57 in the African continent had the ability to test for COVID. Therefore, of course, if you have no data, you have no problem. If you have no problem, you have no empathy. If you have no empathy, you have, for example, no aid, no vaccine that reach Africa, right? So we decided to create a sub-blog called COVID from the margins, COVID-19, sorry, from the margins. And the blog kept, you know, got a life on its own, became very attended. We started publishing in many different idioms. You know, even idioms that we don't speak like Chinese, for example, looking for, you know, like helpers all over the place to help us to edit the material. And at some point, we decided that there was so much richness there, so much to stories and voices from the margins that we wanted to give it also a sort of, you know, memory for. And that's how the book was born. It's probably open access, free to download. You can even order your free printed copy while supplies last. And that's what we celebrate today. As I said, it's just the beginning of a conversation with by no means the end. We did cover, you know, wealth of different communities at the margins, also empowering them to write their story. But I mean, this is just the beginning of a conversation. And no book project, no matter how thick can actually cover it all. So we hope that you eventually decide to join us in this collective endeavor. And now without further ado, I would like to introduce who is with me today. Unfortunately, we cannot have all 75 authors, you know, with us, we are doing a lot of presentations and we always invite different people. And today with us, we have, and I invite them to turn on their cameras so they can wave by you. We have Emiliano Treire, one of the editors of the book from Cardiff University. We have a second, the editor of the book, Silvia Masiero, the University of Oslo. And then we have three of the authors. We have Diego Cerna Aragon. It's going to take you to Peru. Irene Poetranto, that is going to take you instead of two, some part of Asia. And finally, we have Shyam Shkrizna, that is going to take us to India. We try to, you know, maximize some diversity, although there's course a lot more than we can talk about. Without further ado, I invite Emiliano to the floor. Thank you. Thank you very much, Stefania. And it's really a pleasure to be here. And thank you so much for the, for providing the space for us to present this book to the Bergman Clients Center. I cannot imagine a better place to present this. So many themes that resonate with what is being done at the center. So part of the, of what we did with the book was also envisioning some concepts, some conceptual tools that could somehow frame and that have been at the same time inspired by the contribution of the book at the same time. So I'm going to talk briefly about, about two of them. And the first of them is, as you will see here, well, the concept of the margins. So when we, when we started to think about these sort of spin off of our blog, the concept of the margin seemed like a really great fate. So we use the margin as I'm sorry, we use the margin as a kind of a shortcut to speak of complex dynamics of power inequality, because processes of a symmetrical access to material and symbolic resources shape differentiated and unequal access to the public sphere. I'm using here the word of somebody, a friend actually, and a scholar, a Colombian scholar, Clemencia Rodríguez, that inspired us in this case to apply the concept of the margins to think about data and to think about datafication and the ways through which datafication impacts communities on the ground. So we see the margins as a complex side of struggle, where these challenges, the challenges of datafication unfold in different ways from the mainstream, where particular data constellation, ecologies, territories original and unexpected territories might emerge and might thrive. The margins are able to convey for us, and this is something that resonate, as I said before with the contribution from the book, with this idea of periphery, this idea of stories that come from the periphery, and it's able to capture the significance, the resurfaceness and the unexpectedness, which is for us pivotal of these data related practices. Now, if you have the, like me, if you're lucky enough to have also the printed copy that Stefania was showing, you will know that in the book the margins have become the margin at the singular, but this was by no means something that we did at the conceptual level, this is just something that happened. So if you're lucky enough to have it, you have a kind of limited edition kind of paper copy of that, but we want to use the margins because we want to maintain the plurality of it. So we think in margins in plural terms, just like we think in plural terms, when we use souths in our network, in our research initiative, and in our publication, plural, different south, not bounded to a kind of geographical conception of the global north or the global south, but as also a proxy for resistance. So we find and we can find multiple souths also in the north. In this way, also the margins retain this plurality, this multiplicity. And the second concept that we mobilize is that of data poverty. We find that many of the contribution to our book and to our blog that exceed the one that we were able to capture, to frame within the book, more than evoking ideas of data colonialism or that relying on that, which is by it's a it's a great concept that it's it's for for understanding some processes. But for understanding the ones in the book, many times, words as inequality and poverty were more used and data poverty has to do with the very same existence of people on the map of concerns. Because this oversight occurs because the policymakers increasingly rely on calculated publics in order to make their decision and to allocate resources, in this case, health care and vaccines, as we are saying, as we are seeing now with the vaccine rollout. So being data fight during COVID-19 might be for many disempowered marginalized groups, actually a conditions in Equanon, an essential requirement of survival and care. So for us, data and poverty and for the contributors of the book, it's it's a it's a powerful concept because it requires situating any analysis of the impact of datafication in relation to specific contextual contingent harms that it might impose on people and communities on the ground. So it has that specific powerful contextualization, context specific nature, which we find that it's it's really something that is needed in critical data studies. And it's really something that we hope to have achieved with with our blog and with the COVID-19 from the margins book. So after these two powerful lenses to understand COVID-19 and the data fight society, I will pass the baton to the other co-editor Sylvia in order to finish this and to and to proceed with this with this presentation. Thank you very much. Right, thanks very much Emiliana. And I'll also proceed to introduce the community to a third theme in in our book, which is that of the datafication of anti poverty programs. And I'm delighted to have today with us Irina Shiam and Diego, whose contributions in different ways relate to this third theme, and especially Diego is going to tell us about deified social protection in Peru. Before I complete the theoretical overview of our of our book of the of the theme structure, our book, I'd like to just complete our picture by giving you some data. And also this gives me the occasion to tell you after my short intro to data and process, we are going to have a quick wake for questions from you in the virtual audience to which we are really looking forward. And so about our book, Stefania Emiliana have already given a strong theoretical introduction to what the book did. I'm going to throw some numbers in. So we have a total of 47 contributions from a total of 75 authors, quite impressive per se, we would say, and we realized through the process of building this this edited collection in five different languages, as Stefania said, not all languages that are free editors actually speak. There was quite an editorial force here. And all I'm going to do is just to put such numbers in the context of indeed producing this book. So producing this book as a decolonial process very much by design. So we thought in a project that seeks to narrate the untold, the silenced stories of this pandemic, such a project had to be open access and accessible to all. And such a project had to be multi lingual, as Stefania is powerfully illustrated. And so is the book that emerged from indeed our blog. And so is indeed the ongoing project of the COVID-19 for the margins blog. So very quickly on the same process. So it all started from a call for blog posts on our on our blog in May 2020, very much seeking narration of the silenced stories of the pandemic. We I must say, as the blog was conceived, we weren't really sure what we would have found in terms of such narration globally. What came out of this, and I'm delighted to have three of our again, authors illustrating part of such stories today, is a collection in five overarching themes that we found very much as threads across the contributions in the book. Themes being starting very much from the notion of counting in the pandemic and who is counted and who is not in the first pandemic of the data fight society. We didn't have a second theme dealing with new inequalities and vulnerabilities. For example, those that she is going to deal with today regarding gig workers in India. A third theme relating to data fight social policies that the ego is going to expand on. And two more themes one relating to technological reconfigurations and policy changes in the pandemic. And a final theme relating to solidarity networks that emerged in the pandemic situation. So as a final thread, adding to data poverty and data at the margins that Emiliano introduced, very much a final theme here is what changed in terms of policy. So in terms of social policies, a concept that we found really useful here is that of datification of social protection programs. So how social protection has changed in a data fight society and how COVID-19 has determined the distribution of subsidies and the algorithmic identification of people entitled to such subsidies very often and I know Diego is going to expand on that today in a asymmetrical way. So we found and I close here my short introduction very much a notion of informational injustice here. How is subsidy distributed? How is information in possession of governments and entities distributing subsidies combined in order to determine who is entitled and who is not? I finish with this question and this is where I close my short introduction with many thanks to you virtual audience. And yeah, and that's where we yield for a short question wake before giving the world to our helpers. Thank you very much Emiliano and Silvia for providing so much food for thought in such a short time. As you probably know, the audience, Italians are known to speak way too much and way too fast. But in this case, I can assure you that it is in fact really enthusiasm for the topic and this urge that we fail to make room for a different ways of understanding and narrating the pandemic. Do you have any friends? As you know, our amazing Robin who is helping here in the background put also in the chat. Please submit your questions through the Q&A tool. Do you have any question doubt? Is it all clear that you want to actually raise some other concern as it relates to understanding the pandemic from the perspective of the margins? We're all ears. I don't see hands raised. Am I correct? Counting to three, if there's none, then we give the word to even more substance talking about how exactly the pandemic happened in this margin specifically that we're going to look at as a placeholder and a metaphor for, in fact, many other margins that are described in the book, but also those that we could not include in the book. And you know, they still need to be told or they've been told elsewhere. So then I don't see anyone coming forward. So I would like to ask Diego to join us and take us to Peru. I mean, in this pandemic days, any occasion for any trip is in my perspective really welcome no matter how symbolic it is. Diego, please. Sure. Thanks, Stefania. And thanks Emiliano and Celia for the opportunity. Let me share my screen. Okay. So I'm going to talk very briefly about the case of Peru and this is more like a commentary based on our previous research that I did with a couple of colleagues on the data file system of social assistance that exists in Peru. So what happened in Peru in the wake of the pandemic between March and May? So initially there was a big response by the government and they declared a national emergency quarantine. But given the nature of the population in matters of labor, a lot of people live in informality and people live with their daily earnings or weekly earnings. And so decreeing a national emergency meant that some people didn't have money for go by in their normal lives. So this of course was noticed by the government and they they tried to address this by giving a subsidy. But this subsidy was not universal. They used the household transit and system or SISFO in Spanish to give this subsidy to what they define as vulnerable population. And of course the debate in media was mainly concerned with what means to be vulnerable in Peru. And they mainly concentrated on the economic definition of what means being vulnerable. But the thing is that there was a deeper problem with using this type of system. And the thing is that the system was designed for social worker program and specifically for a logic of making public spending more efficient. So the logic there was an automatic logic for people requesting being for being included in these social worker programs. It's not like everyone has the data updated regularly. So there was a of course there was a great problem with the quality of data that was available in this database. And of course as you may imagine that by the moment of the emergency that there was a poor data and it was not updated. So the consequence of this was that the money did not reach the people that was in need. Right. So there was among multiple consequences there was a max exodus of people living in the cities because they didn't have the money enough to sustain themselves. And there were subsequent modifications about to the subsidies that they were never really actually universal. That was some of the demands of some activists and other parties. So as you may see there were mobilizations across the country. People living in the cities. People saying we have to live the cities because we don't have any money. We have been inside our houses for a number of weeks and we have to pay our savings and now we don't have any more money to live with. So a couple of lessons that I think we can learn from this terrible experience. The first one is what are the consequences of addressing a public crisis as a social crisis as it was using technologies devised for public other building programs that have this logic of we are trying to make public spending the more efficient possible. Is that these targeting technologies are designed not to give money to everyone but they are designed to restrain spending just exactly the opposite of what you want to do in this kind of emergency. And they want to filter people out of the benefits that the government gives to people. And they also rely on precarious practices of information collection that are like endemic in countries with precarious states. So by definition I think these technologies render people invisible. They are not designed for this kind of emergency that they were used for instead of like giving universal subsidies as some people suggested. And the second lesson that I want to touch upon is about being visible in the south. So many times in data studies we hear concerns about privacy and surveillance and those are of course just if they are really important topics. But in the south we also have this concern about data poverty that Stefania and Emiliano touched upon previously and they also wrote an article on it. That is that we have this concern about our data not being good enough for assisting people in need. And that sometimes actually being visible to the state is a privilege for some people. And that's also people, other people don't have that privilege and they suffer the consequence for it. And that's it for me. Thank you very much. I will pass the bottle onto the next presenter. So hi everyone. My name is Irene Portronto. I'm a senior researcher with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Thank you to Stefania, Sylvia and Emiliano for inviting me to be here today and also to contribute to the book of course. And thank you to the Berkman Centre for hosting this event. I will share a few highlights and lessons from writing this chapter looking at the COVID-19 impact and it's COVID-19's impact on marginalized communities in four countries, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines. So in the article, my co-author Justin Lau and I we discussed the effects of different government COVID-19 measures. In particular, we looked at its impact on migrant workers in Singapore, the LGBTIQ community in South Korea in Seoul specifically and on rural and Indigenous peoples in Indonesia and the Philippines. And we chose these four countries because we thought it'd be a nice contrast showing the stark differences between two countries that are known to be developed in Asia, which are Singapore and South Korea versus countries that are perhaps known to be less developed such as Indonesia and the Philippines. And so by contrasting these two sets of countries, we thought that it would be interesting to shed light on the impact of different measures that governments have pursued to curb COVID-19. So I'll just share a few highlights here. So in terms of our findings from Singapore and South Korea, so as you may know, Singapore and South Korea are, you know, they're tech savvy countries, they're highly connected to the internet, have very high internet and smartphone penetration. And so it's of no surprise that they use a lot of visual tools when it comes to combating COVID-19 in their countries. So in Singapore, we and South Korea, we saw both governments deploying things such as apps, so digital contact tracing apps. Singapore even used Boston Dynamics as robot dogs to patrol parks to ensure that people are physical distancing. And South Korea became famous for using a variety of tools to facilitate contact tracing from using CCTV surveillance footage to using cell phone location data, even to people's credit card purchases. And Singapore has also issued wearable devices for seniors, for example, to help facilitate contact tracing. However, from our research, we found that a lot of these technical solutions, right, all of these fancy tools that both governments rolled out to help combat COVID-19 really was they were not inclusive in Singapore. So at around the beginning of March, they reported zero deaths and I think only around about 200 COVID-19 cases. But then, you know, soon after around early May, they reported 23,000 COVID cases, 90% of which were linked to migrant workers who were living in crowded dormitories. So migrant workers have been really crucial to Singapore's economy. And because they don't make a lot of money, at least not in comparison to what, you know, the typical white-collar Singaporean workers make, they often live, you know, like 20 people in an apartment sharing only one bathroom, which of course makes, you know, proper health and sanitation procedures impossible and physical distancing also impossible. And furthermore, migrant workers don't typically own the latest smartphones, you know, for the contact tracing apps to work. And migrant workers have just generally been largely ignored by the Singaporean government. And so it was no surprise that they were treated as an afterthought in the government's COVID-19 strategies. And of course, it resulted in this huge spike of cases in early May in South Korea, in contrast. And so there was a huge cluster of COVID-19 outbreak that occurred in a district, an entertainment district called Itaewon in Seoul, South Korea. And that district, that area of the city is also popular with the LGBTIQ community. And as I mentioned before, South Korea has very sophisticated contact tracing strategies, but they're also, at least at the beginning of the pandemic, excessively disclosed people's information, personal information when they're when they're reporting an outbreak. And as a result, you know, you have people who already fear the stigma emanating from, you know, catching COVID-19 or being suspected of having COVID-19, but also the stigma associated with being part of the LGBTIQ community in a, you know, generally conservative country such as Korea, South Korea. And so what ended up happening was when news of this Itaewon cluster of COVID-19 cases broke out, we saw an increase in online attacks and offline harassment as well against LGBTIQ persons. And these people ended up being blamed for the pandemic as well. And eventually, the South Korean government learned to scale back the amount of personal information that are disclosed to the public when it comes to reporting cases. But that was a tough lesson to learn and severely impacted those in the LGBTIQ community in Seoul. In contrast, we looked also at Indonesia and the Philippines. And what we are seeing there is that the impact of COVID-19 is really even more pronounced when it comes to marginalized communities, remote communities, because they already have inadequate health services. They don't have running water and all the basic necessities to live that are fundamental to our human rights. Mining sites, in particular, mining sites, they've become, they became a vector for the spread of COVID-19. With the risk of infecting local communities and Indigenous peoples with very small population, and so they're already vulnerable to extinction. And when you, you know, add COVID-19 on top of that, you know, it becomes really dangerous for these really rural communities. So I'll give two examples. So in Indonesia, we looked at the U.S. owned Grassburg Mine. So the Grassburg Mine is owned by the American company Freeport. It is the largest copper and gold mine in the world. And they've really waited a long time before they suspend services, before they suspend mining operations, when the COVID-19 outbreak began. As a result, there was a cluster of about 150 cases in mid-May. And if you can imagine, the Papua region is about double the size of Great Britain, with 4 million people. And yet they only have five hospitals designated to treat COVID patients, and only two isolation rooms that meet the WHO standards. And so people, those who are living in local communities, were really concerned that Freeport wasn't suspending operations in the Grassburg Mine, because obviously it's a really profitable mine in the midst of a global pandemic. And then finally, we looked at an area, an island called Humonhon Island in the Philippines, where there is a mining site to mine chromite ore. And even though the local authorities there had imposed a COVID-19 lockdown, the government still allowed a China-bound ship to dock there in order to pick up some shipment of chromite ore. And this is a concern, because Humonhon Island has no health facility, no sea ambulance, and no functioning community hospital. And so if the community was infected by COVID-19, it would decimate the local populations. And what we're seeing in both cases in Indonesia and the Philippines is that even though the local communities really tried to protect themselves from outside transmission of COVID-19, so they imposed lockdown, government still allowed all these operations to take place, overriding the local communities' wishes, overriding even national lockdowns that were in place, all in the name of allowing mining operations to take place. And in fact, they even dispersed protest against these mining operations using COVID-19 lockdown as an excuse, the irony there. And so just to conclude, I think we all are aware here that the fight for COVID-19 must be conducted in a transparent and rights-respecting manner, and in ways that are inclusive of local communities, because even though we are all impacted by COVID-19 today, we are not impacted by COVID-19 equally. So I will end there, and I'll pass it on to the next presenter. Thank you. Okay. So yeah, I'm Shyam Krishnan, and I'm a doctoral candidate at Royal Holloway University of London, and I'll be talking about the experience of food delivery workers during the pandemic in India. This comes from my qualitative research interviews and observations done in the coastal city of Chennai in South India. This was done just at the start of the pandemic. In fact, I engage with food delivery workers who depend on apps like Zomato, Swiggy and Uber Eats for people not aware of India. These are the delivery rule and delivery rule-like apps that are available in India. And I also undertook an auto ethnography working as a part-time food delivery worker. I signed up to two of these apps and to directly experience the algorithmic and data elements which were possibly difficult to observe in any other way. In the last few days of my work as a food delivery worker, I had the opportunity to see how the pandemic response was shaping up. I used that as a starting point to have a follow-up conversation with some of my interview contacts and to understand how platform tactics were shaped and the treatment of workers kind of materialized the pandemic bore on. These issues that I detailed here have been highlighted broadly by the workers themselves in multiple cities and during protests. What you see in the photo is a protest in Chennai. Okay, research has already shown that for gig workers as platform workers are called broadly food delivery workers and cab drivers that are based on app-based ordering of services with customers are called gig workers. In this case, food delivery workers, we know that research says things have not been good even before 2020 and 2020 just brought on more more of a problem for them. The pre-pandemic gig worker already had to contend with physical risk such as navigating heavy traffic on road or facing unfair income levels on their daily work atmosphere. But as soon as the pandemic set in, what we saw was that the platforms actively shifted the additional health risk of sanitation and social distancing that we all expect as part of the pandemic daily living to the workers. So this became not only an issue of health for them, but also became an issue of financial liability because when the platforms ushered the so-called contactless deliveries, it is the workers at the front-facing entity of the platform who have to make sure that that assurance is brought to fore. This assurance of safety was given to the customer so they can continue to buy from these platforms. The safety but comes at a price where the worker had to put in additional time and effort just to be able to make sure that the customer is happy just as they were before the pandemic. For instance, the platform promises what is called safe packaging. It is the worker that needs to make sure that the restaurant complies with that safe packaging, even though it is made as a promise by the platform. And this comes with it unpaid labor and even actual physical packing of these packages by the workers. In one case, I did the packing as you can see in the photo. On top of this marks and gloves, as it became normal during the pandemic, landed us a responsibility for the worker. The platforms did not necessarily continue to support it as we would expect. The workers during all this also had to undergo what is essentially biopolitical and algorithmic surveillance. Everything from their body temperature was displayed on the app. They were asked to undergo a process-oriented check of whether they were considered safe in how they handled their food, even though their own safety was not assured in any other way during that process. And with the pandemic conditions supposed to go on for probably at least a couple of years more, this unpaid labor and the deepening of the surveillance that we see is set to become the new normal. So challenging this at this point becomes quite important. And the platforms as we see already have a very tenuous relationship with the workers. They are already cast as not as employees, then they consider self-employed partners. But I consider the platform in the pandemic also to have what is essentially a Jekyll and Hyde problem. They seek to occupy both the role of being a disruptive market innovator where they are fast-moving software entrepreneurial ventures that want to respond to the market's needs. But they also seek to emulate a benevolent charity by seeking donations to support their non-employee workers. So it is a very interesting space that they want to occupy. For instance, the major players in Chennai in food delivery responded quickly to the market need by introducing grocery delivery for their customers. Again, this meant that the workers themselves had to queue up longer or pack larger consignments for the customers, but without any assurance of equivalent and the fair increase in wage for their extra effort. And equivalently, the platform also tried to be, you know, play a more benevolent role, at least as a PR notion where they sought by aggressive marketing donations from the customers themselves for the worker because the workers in, you know, by their own statements wherein getting paid enough, even though ironically they're not getting paid was because of the platforms. The platforms continue to position the workers as heroes and saviours because they provide essential services of groceries, you know, during the pandemic. But when the donations landed, it was the platforms which decide on which workers get funded. So there was still some sort of control and power relationship that was maintained there. The workers themselves felt that these tactics only ensure the commercial future of the platform and not the individual workers themselves. So clearly this is a place very ripe for regulation. While there are social safety nets that are in discussion, none of them actually break into this idea that the platforms can occupy a space where they say we are going to provide labour but we are not employers, right? So they kind of abdicate the responsibility to majorly the workers who do unpaid labour and invisible labour to keep the customers happy, but they still aren't able to claim the rightful level of wage that they are supposed to get. And this is getting worse during the pandemic because what was once only restricted to informal employer-employer relationship that we would find in a place like India now is becoming digitized and aggregated as the pandemic moves on. So routine surveillance and the kind of the reporting of the health checks of the the riders, the workers will be data-fied and then become part of their algorithmic profile for the future. So that is kind of the normal that the pandemic is pushing through for these workers. That's basically what they have and you can find more in my recent paper if you're interested. Happy to talk through. So thank you so much to all the presenters, in particular the authors that agreed kindly to join us today because if you edit a book, it's a book of stories and it's always much better to have the people experience or research the stories directly to have a say. I would like now to invite all of the speakers who join us today to come forward and unmute themselves and especially put the camera on. Thank you so much. And it's time for Q&A. We have 10 minutes to sort it out and make the word about applies. So here's your chance to ask questions to these wonderful people. I see there's one by Catherine. Do you want Catherine to speak? Probably you can't actually not do that. Sorry, I'm confused about I've been in too many meetings today. It's already even here in Europe. So Catherine congratulates us on the wonderful effort. Thank you very much. It's much appreciated. And she reminds us that Clementia Rodriguez offers the idea of citizen media and work. I remember you or those who might have missed it. The Clementia Rodriguez was quoted by Emiliano as one of the inspiring voices on our choice essentially to go for the margins as a frame of reference, as a flexible, you know, very spacious if you want frame of reference. But Clementia reminds us Catherine as an expression. So she contributes idea of citizen media as an expression of counter media, so resistance, right? So she asked to our speakers, did you find examples of data creativity or data resistance alongside data poverty in the cases he shared? Now, before giving the word to anyone, you know, the three speakers who want to say something, I'd say that there is an entire session in the book that explores that. In fact, it's the biggest part of the book, because precisely because there's a lot of, you know, untold, sad stories of the margins that need to be, you know, brought to the surface. But there's also an amazing creativity and solidarity and resistance to the margins also in the fringes of society, and that allows actually all these people to thrive and survive, no matter what happens. So anyone wants to contribute an example for Catherine? I can actually. Please, Silvia. Yes, it's just referring to section five of our work that has Stefania Reifersley mentions, relates directly to examples of solidarity and resistance in the pandemic. I think we can talk on many. So for example, we have a case from Argentina in the section five that details solidarity networks built through instant messaging in order to fill the institutional voids. So in order to counter those, for example, to those households in poverty that are not reached by the social protection schemes that Diego talked about with reference to Peru. So that's one case. And we also, we also can't forget that the pandemic unfolded at the same time as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, of course, in June 2020. And we do have several examples also in the blog of resistance enactment through the social media during the Black Lives Matter movement that overlapped directly with the oppressions witnessed during COVID-19. So I think all I wanted to say is that the book is a collection of stories of invisibility, but also a collection of stories of resistance. And I think the section that Stefania mentioned, the section five, it's a big indicator that is the thickest and it's a big indicator of hope. So that's my sort of reaction to Catherine's comment. Thank you, Silvia. I'm looking at whether everyone else, anyone else wants to add something. Looking at the book to be reminded, in fact, of all the many stories that we have here, Emiliano. Just to say, I mean, you have said it, thanks, Catherine, for your words. Coming from you, it's really satisfying. And there are like two dynamics that Stefania and Silvia already highlighted. And it's always, I think, resistance is conaturated in every kind of dynamic that we have seen our authors document so many ways of resisting this. It's kind of with, you know, from the margins, but at the same time, the creation of solidarity, so points to the alternative uses of technology and data for other kinds of aims, for other kinds of needs, for other kinds of words that they want and we want to inhabit. So I think that this point really resonate with Clementia's citizen media research, you know, the way our research in Colombia can connect to other parts of the world is just amazing. And the way it can resonate with many contexts. So in a way, it's a book about multiple contexts, but it's also a book about diversity, but also connections through all these diverse contexts. So contextualization doesn't need to be fragmentation. It can be some kind of rich plurality of pluriversal reality, as we call it, using Artur Escobar lens. So yeah, I think that the reference to Clementia is also really appropriate to talk about resistance and alternative forms of solidarity, creativity, and different appropriation of data. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I would like actually to add a little, you know, add only literally to the issue of resistance and thinking also what can academia do, you know, to contribute, not only to voice and give space and make room for thinking and broadcasting resistance as we have done in this book, but also try to, you know, implement it ourselves, you know, I try to resist and contribute to ongoing efforts from the space of privilege or, you know, variably privileged space that we occupy in academia. And I do so actually with a great example, which is probably the most creative, the most unexpected in the book, which comes from a group of astronomers, people studying stars in Brazil. And it's a it's a contribution called or by I'm counting on the fly, but I think like seven or eight different people, not all of them in academia. And they tell the story of how, you know, there was a group of astronomers in, in an area of Brazil, in the village of Aldeia Verde in Brazil, where that was supposed to, you know, they were there prior to the pandemic to study the stars or whatever astronomers do, you know, we have India studies scholars, we don't actually get that, but we're certainly very fascinated and very respectful of their work. And then the pandemic hit. And they realized that what they were doing was, in fact, so partial and so marginal, you know, way in the grand scheme of things that they actually redirected change some of the destination of the funds that were made available to them to work with local communities in particular local indigenous communities to, you know, as they say, to use astronomy as a tool to face COVID-19 induced isolation in the indigenous village of Aldeia Verde in Brazil. So there's probably a lot that we can do, but we hope that this example is a great inspiration, not only, you know, for all of us doing humanities and social sciences, but also for those that maybe are in different disciplines, but nonetheless, they contribute from, you know, the position of privileged adult and academia occupies without, of course, you know, forgetting that there are also many academics and not privileged, but, you know, in general, people who have the luxury of studying the social reality are, you know, we're not the relatively privileged. So I see that we're actually getting to 7 p.m. here in Amsterdam and 1 p.m. in Boston. So I don't know whether if there's any other question or any other, you know, input that comes from Irene, Diego? Just to kind of add on, you know, as a kind of the academic responses also looking, you know, as you mentioned in the example of astronomy, I think broadly media and communications or critical data studies are, in my case, management information systems, right? So we are looking too much into one set of users sometimes, so much like the astronomy issue. There are quite a lot of data adjacencies that kind of are thrown up in a situation like pandemic that we are not aware of. So, or rather, we don't think in the research process. One thing that came up on how solidarity is built up is the people who are packing the managers or the workers in the ails of grocery shops are now responding to how gig workers who deliver those at every level. And that's not being captured in some of the many of the conversations that we have. So the pandemic has actually brought that solidarity on. So it'll be interesting to see how this kind of changes. And on this very enlightening comment, but especially, you know, reason to hope and keep dreaming for, you know, of a better world, even in pandemic times, I guess, we bring this session to a close. Once again, I would really like to thank our speakers, the authors, and the editors, but especially our host for today, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard University for having us. We encourage you to download the book, distribute, share it. That's what this book is for. And please consider contributing to the ongoing conversation on the blog from whatever corner you want to write and in whatever idiom you want to express yourself. Thank you so much for being with us. And I wish you whatever you are a good afternoon, good morning, or good evening. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you very much. Bye bye. Thank you, everyone. Bye.