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In this article, we investigate the socio-technical ecology of Twitter, including thetechnological affordances of the platform and the user-generated discursive strategiesused to create and circulate anti-Muslim disinformation online. During thefirst waveof Covid-19, right-wing followers claimed that Muslims were spreading the virus toperform Jihad. We analyzed a sample of 7000 tweets using Critical DiscourseAnalysis to examine how the online disinformation accusing Muslims in India was ini-tiated and sustained. We identify three critical discourse strategies used on Twitter tospread and sustain the anti-Muslim (dis)information: (1) creating mediatized hate sol-idarities, (2) appropriating instruments of legitimacy, and (3) practicing Internet Hinduvigilantism. Each strategy consists of a subset of discursive toolkits, highlighting thecentral routes of discursive engagement to produce disinformation online. Weargue that understanding how the technical affordances of Social Networking Sitesare leveraged in quotidian online practices to produce and sustain the phenomenonof online disinformation will prove to be a novel contribution to thefield of disinfor-mation studies and Internet research.

The rise of the digital platform economy, driven by technological innovation, was expected to be more favourable for women workers due to increased flexibility and autonomy, but the nature of work on these platforms has been found to be often gendered and precarious. This chapter builds a case for examining platform work from a marginal worker’s viewpoint. It establishes a relationship between feminist approaches and informality and discusses how women have always been structurally and socially more vulnerable to external shock, making them doubly marginalised. The authors map the global understanding and literature on location-based platforms and review it within the Indian context while paying close attention to low-income women workers and the socio-cultural and political challenges surrounding them. The workers’ concerns, opportunities and recommendations in relation to the platform architecture and the accompanied algorithmic management are investigated and an argument is made for a feminist approach to the design and development of location-based digital labour platforms.

Our article unpacks the emergent and dynamic relationship between learning needs and approaches and the evolving landscape of the gig economy in the country. This research seeks to comprehend the contextual collapse of generic, utility-driven, and structured educational models to create space for a personalized and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach to acquiring skills and competencies. We argue that the platformization of learning, user-generated learning resources, and peer networks of communication and collaboration enable this DIY model of learning. We interviewed 16 young digital designers (graphic designers and user experience (UX) designers) from three cities in India–Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. We complemented our interview data with social media ethnography to understand how young urban learners who work or aspire to join the gig economy design their learning experiences. Our goal was to understand how young artists who worked as gig workers or wanted to enter the gig economy defined education and learning in the context of the changing forms of employment and professional aspirations in the global South’s digitally connected and emerging market. Our analysis reveals the chasm between the rigidity of formal education and the future of work in India, including the evolving learning needs of young workers in a rising platform economy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers opportunities but also challenges for biomedical research and healthcare. This position paper shares the results of the international conference “Fair medicine and AI” (online 3–5 March 2021). Scholars from science and technology studies (STS), gender studies, and ethics of science and technology formulated opportunities, challenges, and research and development desiderata for AI in healthcare. AI systems and solutions, which are being rapidly developed and applied, may have undesirable and unintended consequences including the risk of perpetuating health inequalities for marginalized groups. Socially robust development and implications of AI in healthcare require urgent investigation. There is a particular dearth of studies in human-AI interaction and how this may best be configured to dependably deliver safe, effective and equitable healthcare. To address these challenges, we need to establish diverse and interdisciplinary teams equipped to develop and apply medical AI in a fair, accountable and transparent manner. We formulate the importance of including social science perspectives in the development of intersectionally beneficent and equitable AI for biomedical research and healthcare, in part by strengthening AI health evaluation.

This chapter builds on a UNHCR Innovation Service project in partnership with Erasmus University Rotterdam, supported by the Government of Luxembourg, where we examined the opportunities afforded by digital leisure for Venezuelan refugees and migrants in northern Brazil. The project aimed to assess the ways in which refugees and migrants use digital media for entertainment and the possibilities of these uses for improved livelihoods. In this chapter, we focus on three women who participated in the project and their perspectives on content creation using digital media. The field work took place in late 2021 in two shelters in northwestern Brazil and involved in-depth interviews with fifteen participants, and a workshop on how to be a digital influencer. The analysis of these three cases presents different ways in which refugee and migrant women use digital media and their aspirations for a better life through content creation.

The waste management sector has attracted the private sector in India. Taking the case study of a start-up in waste sorting and recycling, the essay examines how technologies used in such spaces affect women's work. It finds that there is a shift in the perceptions of who engages in this work and how the work itself is experienced and seen. But it also cautions against the perpetuation of the gendered division of labour in sanitation work, particularly in roles that demand technical (often digital) literacy/competence.

The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the futures of work—what we term as “FemWork" —is the need of the day and should manifest in multiple and various forms, placing the worker at the core and drawing on her experiences, aspirations, and realities. This volume offers grounded insights from academic, activist, legal, development and design perspectives that can help us think through these inclusive futures and possibly create digital, social, and governance infrastructures of work that are fairer and more meaningful.

UNHCR has been pursuing an agenda of enhanced connectivity and digital inclusion for forcibly displaced people. In 2020, following an array of standalone efforts in pursuing these agendas – for example, through the 2016 Connectivity for Refugees Strategy – the organization began a journey to consolidate initiatives around digital transformation into a new organization-wide strategy. One priority outcome area is around digital inclusion that seeks to ensure forcibly displaced and stateless people “have equitable access to digital technology and channels and can use them to pursue opportunities for lifelong learning, inclusion in the digital economy, leisure, and solutions.” For a number of years, many digital inclusion interventions have been tied to specific developmental goals – enhanced education, use of digital financial services, greater access to information, among others. There is emerging evidence that challenges the notion that those targeted with such interventions prioritize connectivity for these purposes. Rather, the agenda highlights leisure as a key driver for adoption of digital technologies, and a critical use case for such technologies that bring indirect benefits beyond the ‘virtuous’ aims of humanitarian aid and development programmes globally. In this report, UNHCR and Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) scholars document the evidence on digital leisure in the forced displacement context, highlighting issues unique to that context. This report constitutes a continuation of the desk review,1 and provides evidence from fieldwork carried out in two refugee shelters in the city of Boa Vista, Brazil – Rondon III and September 13 – at the end of 2021. The report focuses on the main uses and potential benefits of digital leisure in refugee contexts. It brings together evidence from Venezuelan forcibly displaced people with an emphasis on Brazil due to that country’s relevance in the human mobility context within the Latin American region. The report aims