Project Title 

Optimisation Within and Without: Work and Subjectivity in the Smart City

Research Topic

By theorising smartness and optimisation from the Global South and applying this theorisation to the urban field in India, this project aims to study the tensions between grand smart city narratives communicated through policy and the mundane, day-to-day experience of smart city initiatives. Situated within the smart mobility initiative of Pune, Maharashtra in India, this study will explore how smart city narratives are communicated through policy discourse, and the way these technologies are embedded within everyday experiences of members of the working class.

The everyday experience of the smart city is contrasted with narratives of smartness because while optimising pressures are exerted, the ideological expectation of optimisation matters as much when it is resisted as when it is followed, and humans respond in a wide range of manners to this expectation. This is essential to recognise all the ways optimisation fails most people - “Shifting attention away from optimization’s ideals and institutions, and toward locally grounded practices and legitimacies, has the potential to animate new understandings of optimization as a critical concept,” (McKelvey and Neves, 2018). A study of “conscious, collective, human reflection” (Halpern et al, 2016) employed by the working class in India’s smart cities as they continue to physically engage with, implement, and respond to regimes of datafication is proposed.

Supervisors

Dr Alison Powell and Professor Myria Georgiou

Biography

Shivani holds an MSc in Media and Communications (Research) from the LSE, and a Bachelor of Mass Media (Journalism) from Mumbai University. She is now working as a Research Assistant with Professor Ellen Helsper at the Digital Futures for Children Centre, analysing global digital inclusion policies through a child-centered lens; and as a Subwarden with LSE Residential Life, supporting wellbeing and inclusion for student residents.

Prior to starting her PhD in Data, Networks and Society at the LSE, she worked as the Digital Safety Officer at the University of Edinburgh where she managed the university's digital safety, wellbeing and citizenship awareness initiatives. She has also contributed to projects on media ownership, internet policy, digital human rights, smart cities, digitisation policy, user-generated content and social media at organisations such as the LSE; Birkbeck, University of London; the Internet Education Foundation; and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme.