The Digital Labour of Covid-19 Volunteerism: The Post-2000 Political History of Medical Infrastructures in India

The research analyses the politics of digital health labour within Covid-19 volunteer work in contemporary India. This is a historical ethnography that situates such labour within the post-2000 neoliberal landscape of health infrastructures. Covid volunteers – across a spectrum of governmental, corporate, and civil society channels – created or worked with platforms, applications, social media to provide pandemic responses. While foregrounding life-saving aspirations of Covid-19 volunteerism, the research evaluates unequal, gendered, caste-based burdens, solidarities, differential access underlying digital platforms and applications for pandemic aid. Drawing on oral history, discourse analysis, Digital Humanities tools, this research analyses how volunteers influenced digital audiences' experiences of time during the pandemic. Volunteers from elite and marginalized social backgrounds used digital platforms to mould temporal perceptions of disease transmission, vaccine procurement, urgent information. This involved crowdfunding and creating social media communities around real-time data, ephemeral, time-sensitive medical data and resources. The research studies the power relations underlying the labour of providing timely pandemic data. This project studies the relevance of India within global Covid infrastructures, and their corresponding digital labour. Set within three sites, the labour of Covid contact-tracing, creating vaccine access, battling misinformation, this project involves fieldwork across six Indian states and two countries.