Preeti Mudliar

Human Computer Interaction (HCI), ICT and Development (ICTD), e-Governance, Design of Public Technologies, Gender and ICTs, Biometrics, Aadhaar, Food Security, News Processes, Gig Economy

Peer Reviewed Publications

(Links and pdfs of all work available on my website here)

2021. Preeti Mudliar.  Biographies of Biometric Devices: The POS Machine at Work in India's PDS. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. May 8-13. Online Virtual Conference (Originally Yokohama, Japan) (CHI'2021). 

2020. Preeti Mudliar. Whither Humane-Computer Interaction? Adult and Child Value Conflicts in the Biometric Fingerprinting for Food. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 25-30. Hawai'i, USA. (CHI'2020). 

2018. Preeti Mudliar. Public WiFi is for men and mobile Internet is for women: Interrogating politics of space and gender around WiFi hotspots. Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW’18) November 3-7, 2018, Jersey City, New York, New York. 

2018. Preeti Mudliar and Noopur Raval. “They are like personalized mini-Googles”: Seeking information on Facebook Groups. Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 

2015. Preeti Mudliar & Joyojeet Pal. Watching from an Arm’s Length, The Foreign Hand in Tamil Cinema. [Journal Publication]. In ‘Communication, Culture & Critique’ (April, 2015) 

2015. Preeti Mudliar & Nimmi Rangaswamy. Offline Strangers, Online Friends: Bridging Classroom Gender Segregation with WhatsApp. [Full paper]. SIGCHI, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 18-23, 2015, Seoul, Republic of South Korea. 

2015. Preeti Mudliar & Jonathan Donner. Experiencing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as a Participatory Medium, The case of CGNet Swara in India. [Journal Publication]. In ‘Mobile Media and Communication’, Sage Publications. 

2015. Preeti Mudliar & Joyojeet Pal. ICTD in the Popular Press: Media Discourse around Aakash, the “World’s Cheapest Tablet”.  [Invited Paper]. In ‘Information Technologies & International Development’, ICTD’13 Special Issue, vol 11, Issue 1, (March, 2015). 

2014. Stephania Castellani, Antonietta Grasso, Jutta Williamowski, David Martin, Rinku Gajera, & Preeti Mudliar. Supporting Sustainable Mobility with the Help of Work Organizations: Preliminary Requirements and Future Work. [Full Paper]. ACM India HCI 2014, 7 – 9 December, 2014, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

2013. Preeti Mudliar & Joyojeet Pal. ICTD in the Popular Press: Media Discourse Around Aakash, the World’s Cheapest Tablet. [Full Paper, Plenary session]. International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD)’ 2013, December 7-9, 2013, Cape Town, South Africa.

2013. Preeti Mudliar & Joyojeet Pal. Watching from an Arm’s Length: The Foreign Hand in Tamil Cinema. [Full Paper]. International Communication Association (ICA)’2013, Popular Culture Division. June 17-21, 2013, London, United Kingdom.

2012. Preeti Mudliar, Jonathan Donner, Bill Thies. Emergent Practices Around CGNet Swara: Voice Forum for Citizen Journalism in Rural India. [Journal Publication, Invited paper]. Information Technologies and International Development, Vol 9, Issue 2, ICTD’12 Special Issue, USC Annenberg Press. 

2012. Preeti Mudliar, Jonathan Donner, Bill Thies. Emergent Practices Around CGNet Swara: Voice Forum for Citizen Journalism in Rural India. [Full Paper, Plenary session]. International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD)’ 2012, March 12-15, 2012, Atlanta, USA. 

Book Chapter

2014. Preeti Mudliar. The Indian Bride who became Vice-mayor of Rost. [Book Chapter]. In Culture, Development and Petroleum: Ethnography of the High North (Eds. Jan-Oddvar Sornes, Larry Browning, Jan Terje Henriksen) Routledge Studies in Environmental Communication and Media.

Conference Presentations

2018. Preeti Mudliar. Breakdowns and Repairs in Aadhaar-linked Public Distribution Systems–Learnings from Rajasthan. Presented at the 2018 International Tech4Dev Conference, UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Development: Voices of the Global South, Lausanne, Switzerland. 27-29 June.

2017. Preeti Mudliar. Broken Data. Paper presented at ‘Lives of Data’. Workshop organized by Sarai-CSDS, New Delhi, (January 5-7, 2017). 

Report

2017. Preeti Mudliar. Rural India on the National Optic Fibre Network: What Happens Next? Policy Report on India’s NOFN project for The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy (December 21st, 2017) 

Speculative Fiction

2020. Preeti Mudliar. A short story titled ‘In Mangal's New World' was published in 2040: Utopias for a Digital Society. Ed: Benedikt Fecher. The book was published by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany.

2019. Preeti Mudliar. A short story titled ‘The Automaton’s New Clothes’ was published in ‘Drones and Dreams: A Speculative Sprint Story Collection’ on Artificial Intelligence Futures. The book was published by the Digital Asia Hub, Hong Kong on January 12, 2019.

Qualitative Research Methods

Social Media Communication

Advanced Human Computer Interaction

News Media Literacies

5. Gender Professionalization and Digital Platforms: The Case of Beauticians in India (Co-PI with Balaji Parthasarathy)

Funding Agency: Mobile World Capital Foundation, Barcelona

4. Online and offline livelihoods – An analysis of the impact of the gig economy on worker participation” (co-PI with V. Sridhar and Balaji Parthasarathy)

Funding agency: Azim Premji University Research Funding Programme (November 2019 – present)

3. Online Content Moderation Labor (co-PI)

Funding agency: International Labour Organization, Geneva (October 2018 – present)

2. Google Station WiFi user evaluation (PI)

Funding agency: Google (July 2017 – February 2018)

1.  Rural India on the National Optic Fibre Network: What Happens Next? (PI)

Funding agency: The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy (May – December 2016)

Links to all my news media citations and writings available on my website here

Press

2021. Book review of 'Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India' by Nafis Hasan in The Wire. Link here.

2021. Book review of 'Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India' by Chintan Girish Modi in The Business Standard. Link here

2019. My work on gendered access and use of public WiFi hotspots was covered by L’Actualite, a French-language public affairs magazine, based in Montreal, Canada. The article discusses women’s access and use of the Internet in India. Link here

Invited Talk

January 20, 2021. Invited talk at the monthly seminar series hosted by University of Bologna, Italy, on ‘Biometric Designs for Increasing Inclusion and Decreasing Corruption: Lessons from India’s Food Security System’

August 28, 2020. Invited panelist. MINRO-SAMVAAD discussion on NLP and Fake News. IIIT-Bangalore. Video here.

August 1, 2020. Invited talk at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University Visweswarya College of Engineering (UVCE, Bangalore) on “Enabling Technology to Shape a Humane Digital Society – Why does it Need Help? Video here.

April 22, 2020. Invited Q&A moderated by Bronwen Deacon of the Alexander Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany on the short story “In Mangal’s New World”. Videos here: YouTube and Facebook.

January 28, 2019. Samvaad Talk at IIIT-Bangalore on “WiFi in the Wild – Learnings from Non-users of an Infrastructure.” Video here.

November 30, 2018. Talk on Public WiFi is for Men and Mobile Internet is for Women. At Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), Bangalore as part of Talks@ATREE. Talk available here

News Articles

7. Sic transit gloria orkuti. May 12, 2019 in the Hindu Sunday Magazine. An article for the Sunday Hindu Magazine on the digital materialities and what it means for nostalgia in the context of Orkut, a social networking site that was popular among users in India and Brazil in the mid-2000s.

6. Offline Subjectivities of Online Women. February 12, 2019 in the CIS R@W blog. An essay for the The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore’s Researchers@Work (R@W) programme series exploring the social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, and aesthetic dimensions of the “offline”. I wrote about gendered access to public WiFi hotspots.

5. Taking WiFi Public. September 7, 2017 in The Hindu. An op-ed for The Hindu on TRAI’s policy move to make WiFi access as commonplace as chai. I argue for choosing gender inclusive spaces to host public WiFi hotspots. This piece appeared on September 7, 2017. 

4. The Border Runs Through Us. August 13, 2017. I write about encountering the reality of Partition in the Sunday magazine of the Indian Express in its Independence Day special for 2017. 

3. A letter from the library. December 12th, 2015. I received a letter from my library and found it a delightfully anachronistic and whimsical choice of communication – much like what libraries themselves are in the age of the digital. This article was featured by Citizen Matters, a Bangalore news platform that engages in some stellar local city journalism. 

2. Piku’s Invisible Friends. July 5th, 2015 in The Hindu Sunday Magazine. I wrote a thought piece on the film Piku wondering why women friends appeared to be absent from Piku’s on screen life. The article was featured in The Hindu’s Sunday Magazine. 

1. Strangers Offline, Friends Online. April 23rd, 2015 in The Hindu Business Line. A piece on the communication and friending behavior of youth based on ethnographic research I did in a peri-urban engineering college in Bangalore appeared in The Hindu Business Line.