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The Power of Information -- Of Frameworks, Methods and Sites -- Framing Information: Origins and Conceptions -- Politics Denied: Constructing Efficient Markets with Mobile Phones and Price Information -- Politics Bracketed: Crafting Informed Citizens at Village Information Centers -- Politics Made Explicit: Creating an Accountable State with Right to Information Campaigns -- Understanding Information with Information Orders -- The Political Lives of Information.

Mukul Sharma, Green and Saffron: Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. 2012. 318 pages. ₹ 795.

Information is increasingly hailed as a tool to achieve good governance. This dissertation challenges claims that naturalize the relationship between information and good governance. I argue that such claims are based on the reification of information as a well-defined object with intrinsic value and have shifted focus away from the relations, materials and practices in which information is embedded. The first goal of the dissertation is to examine the costs of reifying information in the domain of governance. I argue that "information" has to be unpacked and understood as a technique of governing that is involved in making, maintaining and shifting boundaries between a state and its population. The second goal of the dissertation is to examine the benefits of reifying information, where I argue that the reification and flexibility of information as a term have helped it rally support from a diverse range of organizations and individuals. I draw on a modified form of Bayly's "information order" to examine my first concern and address the second using the idea of a "boundary object." My analysis is based on two cases from India. The first is a set of campaigns led by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a political people's movement, that eventually led to a nationwide campaign for a right to government information. The second is a project established by Swaminathan Foundation, an NGO, that provided government information through Information and Communication Technology-based information shops. Based on ten months of fieldwork and archival research, I analyze how information was leveraged as a term, object and rallying point in the two cases.Addressing my first concern, I show how an information order was deployed as a technique of governing in the two cases. I argue that it helped maintain boundaries between state and population by dictating who could contribute to the creation of official records and rules, who could access documents and who was required to possess documents to make use of public schemes. But the information order was also challenged in both cases. I show that such shifts came about when the blurred nature of the state-population boundary or connections across it were leveraged, albeit differently in the two cases. MKSS organized political campaigns and lobbied with bureaucrats to change the interpretation and implementation of rules. In contrast, information shops strived to be apolitical. I show how an information shop and its operators, nevertheless, became involved in the creation and verification of social facts for the state; were drawn on as valuable resources for petitioning the state, and were deemed irrelevant in arenas where they chose to stay away from politics. By examining ideologically different initiatives, I conclude that the meaning, creation and use of information is situated in the practice of governing and that its circulation is always political irrespective of whether an initiative sees its work as political or not. In addressing my second concern, I show how the reification and flexible meaning of information helped the term act as a boundary object that brought in diverse supporters in both cases. I conclude by identifying the tension between the situatedness of information in practice and the universality of the term information in the two cases.

A central trope of the information society is that of 'information flows.' The implicit assumption underlying such a vision involves the removal of gatekeepers and intermediaries who are perceived to impede such flows. Drawing from field research on information circulation, trade, and money in rural markets in Myanmar and India, we show why intermediaries persist alongside information and communication technologies (ICTs) in trade and financial transactions in the 'Information Age.' We examine the range of roles, (human and non-human) actors, and material practices that are involved in conducting financial transactions, and we show the importance of historical legacies and politics in explaining why both cash and financial intermediaries persist in the digital age. Focusing on the different value that human and non-human intermediaries bring to financial encounters helps explain what characteristics make each resilient or replaceable in a time of change. By situating intermediaries and mediations in the social relations within which they operate, we bring back the role of power and politics – an element that is often missing in accounts focused on the unmediated and 'free' circulation of information using ICTs – in explaining processes of mediation and circulation.

Why do financial intermediaries persist, despite the promises of disintermediation that accompanied the diffusion of digital technologies?Through a comparative qualitative study of financial intermediation in rural markets in Shan State, Myanmar, and Kerala, India, we map out and make visible official and unofficial roles played by different types of brokers (traders, hundi, transport companies, etc.), and different financial tools (cash, gold, land, banks, etc.), and look at how information and communication technologies (ICTs) fit in the interactions between the two. ICTs and human brokers perform functions that are sometimes complementary, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes simply different from each other. In examining the range of roles that (human and non-human) actors and material practices that are involved in conducting financial transactions have, we show the central role that historical legacies and politics play in explaining why both cash and financial intermediaries persist in the digital age. Focusing on the different values that human and non-human intermediaries bring to financial encounters helps explain what characteristics make each resilient or replaceable in a time of change, and furthers understanding of which of the many functions embodied by humans can be replaced or supported by digital technologies, and which ones are likely to remain the domain of humans. We conclude that the "expertise" inscribed into technological artifacts such as mobile phones tends to be fixed, whereas human expertise can be more flexible and quicker to react to changing political or economic situations.

Historically, capitalism has been characterised by socio-spatial unevenness, and information capitalism is no exception. To that extent, it is relevant to ask who is served by 'development' projects in the information age? In the context of information and communication technology (ICT) deployments in development projects in particular, it is critical to ask: ICTs for whom? This article argues that the development of standards is an important factor in influencing who benefits from ICTs. While standards can deliver long-run aggregate benefits, the extent of benefits will depend on the trade-offs that standardisation entails. Since standards draw boundaries between those who conform and those who do not, there is a trade-off between aggregate benefits and the creation of individual winners and losers. There is another trade-off, between a narrow focus required for rationalising processes, and the need to retain wider context and diversity. In other words, the outcomes of the deployment of ICTs for development are shaped by these trade-offs and reflect the social contestation over the choice of standards.

Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives promise to make governments transparent, enabling citizens to participate actively in governance. Yet, empirical evidence suggests that OGD doesn't have the democratic impact that its advocates expect. Based on a 14-month ethnography of India's livelihood program, we argue that the assumptions underlying the design of OGD initiatives vary with citizens' social context. We show how OGD initiatives are state-centric in their design to make the functioning of the everyday state legible towards controlling corruption. However, citizens and social activists do not always share such an "anti-corruption" view in their engagement with the everyday state. Instead, they prioritise "getting things done", i.e. accessing the state's services. The state-centric OGD is of limited value to them due to its techno-official language and its emphasis on aggregate datasets. We suggest complementing state-centric OGD with citizen-centric OGD to enable the citizens to "see the state".

During COVID-19, countless dashboards served as the central media for people to learn critical information about the pandemic. Varied actors, including news organizations, government agencies, universities, and nongovernmental organizations, created and maintained these dashboards, through the onerous labor of collecting, categorizing, and circulating COVID data. This study uncovers different forms of labor and data practices—the work of "COVID data builders"—behind the construction of these dashboards based on in-depth interviews with volunteers and practitioners across the United States and India who participated in COVID dashboard projects. Specifically, we examine projects focused on marginalized and missing COVID data that aimed to show the pandemic's disproportionate and unjust impact. Through an investigation of data builders' encounters and experiences with missing COVID data in mediating the pandemic, we ask: What data problems did COVID data builders encounter? How did they produce missing COVID data while questioning its representational capacity? And lastly, what "alternative epistemologies of data" beyond representation do their data practices suggest? Through our analysis, we surfaced three types of epistemological ambiguities COVID data builders encountered within their datasets: disappearing and ephemeral data, obscuring data, and disregarded data. By highlighting these different epistemological dimensions of missing data, we conclude that focusing on the performative and infrastructural aspects of what makes datasets "work" builds a new vocabulary for addressing missing data beyond representation. We argue that the politics of counting COVID cases is grounded in the material and affective labor of confronting, navigating, and negotiating with data's epistemological ambiguities.