Simiran lalvani
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 Univertsity of Oxford. My doctoral work is on the relationship between digital platforms and the labours and cultures of food.
Prior to the this, I have worked as a freelance researcher with the Centre for Internet and Society, Microsoft Research 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
Academic
Publications
Book chapters
Delivering the night time economy home: Nocturnal Labour and Temporalities of Platform Work in Working at Night.
Sexual Contracts of App-based Food delivery Work: an examination of social reproduction through feeding and being fed in Mumbai, India in Platform Capitalism and Crises of Social Reproduction (German).
Journals
The Moral Orders of Matchmaking Work: Digitization of Matrimonial Services and the Future of Work Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW1, 23 pages.
Moral Economy of the Platform Work. Asiascapes: Digital Asia. 9(1-2), 144-174.
Performing Gender, Doing Politics: Social Media and Women Election Workers in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Proceedings of the 2020 Internation Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development ICTD.
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.
Studying Platform Work in Mumbai and New Delhi, Centre for Internet and Society.
Multi-media
Publications
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.
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!)