Hello, I am a qualitative, ethnographic researcher
interested in questions of technology, work, and
culture.


Currently, I am a DPhil student and Felix scholar at
the University of Oxford. In my doctoral research, I
examine two questions. (1) How do food delivery
platforms use branding to aggregate users onto their
interfaces? (2)What are the experiences and
interactions of platform users buying and selling
food?


Prior to the this, I have worked as a freelance
researcher with the MIT Digital Currencies
Initiative, Microsoft Research, Centre for Internet
and Society, and BBC Media Action and at a
qualitative market research firm. I have also built
and taught undergraduate courses in Sociology and
Anthropology for students of design.


You can reach me at simiran.lalvani@gmail.com


Simiran lalvani

Publications

Delivering the night time economy
home: Nocturnal Labour and
Temporalities of Platform Work in
Working at Night.


Academic

Book chapters

Journals

Semi-academic

What happens in a platform office?
Futures of Work, Bristol University
Press.


Viral Care: Spectacles of Care as a
Substitute for Workers’ Rights.
Solidarity and Care blog by The
Sociological Review.


The Personal and Social Risks That
India's Food Delivery Workers Are
Taking During COVID-19. Digital
news publication The Wire.


Workers’ fictive kinship relations in
Mumbai app-based food delivery.
CASTAC blog, American
Anthropological Association.




Reports

CBDC: Expanding financial inclusion or deepening the divide? MIT Digital Currencies Inititative and Maiden Labs.


Click on the icon alongside to hear a Hinglish version of my essay on gig workers fictive kinship ties thatenable platform work.


For the CASTAC blog, American Anthropological Association.


Listen to an experimental audio about gig work in Mumbai and Delhi titled ‘Audioscapes of the Platform Economy.'


Built with Anushree Gupta and Sarah Zia as part of the Studying Platform Work project hosted at Anthropology News.

Multimedia

Publications

Led by the Hindi soap opera actor alongside, hear a panel discussion about platformization of work inside and outside the household.


4 researchers place their inquiries between echoes of television soap operas, new order sirens heard by platform workers and vernacular music cultures that travel to and emerge from digital platforms.


Hosted at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) annual conference.

Objects

A small gallery of common objects that I've re-made.

With a bag tailor in Bombay, I turned a nylon thaili, a popular fixture in markets, into a backpack.

Petis are commonly used for household storage and as a cashiers drawer. I painted a peti and stuck keys with no locks and use it as a small bag.

Re-made saree blouse fabric into double pleated trousers with a local men’s tailor (women’s tailors refused to stitch this style!)

Games to put
platforms in their
place

Part of the line-up at the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
funded Social Science Festival at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of
Oxford, November 2024.

Read more in this chapter: Lalvani, S. (forthcoming). Games to put platforms in their place. In Playing Politics: Media Platforms Making
Worlds. Sarah Pollak, Frans Willem-Korsten, and Alex Gekker (Eds).

Object
handling

Playing-cards
based role play

Attendees played the role of the
consumer, restaurant worker,
and delivery worker

What is common between: a
Paddington bear toy, toaster,
dumb phone, and smartphone?