Knowing Digital Governance from Below

This paper considers the question of what it is to ‘know’ digital governance through an experiential, bottom-up lens, and presents some empirical detail from recent fieldwork with feminist movement actors in northern India – both formally organised feminist ‘workers’ and the broader social movement. Despite existing post-structural, feminist, post- and de-colonial work that has demonstrated the importance of understanding partial and situated perspectives, governance through the digital (rather than of the digital) has largely been understood from top-down, policy perspectives that focus on the intentions behind the governance tools. Drawing on digital ethnographic work carried out between 2019 and 2023, I argue that what is revealed through studying digital governance from the perspective of those who are governed is a deeply affective relationship with digital technology. Working within a digital space, feminists acknowledge and respond to their own perceived lack of knowledge of digital technology: a ‘digital skills divide’. This is explicitly acknowledged; the partialness of knowledge is part of the knowledge itself. In the context of increasing threats and perceived threats in the digital space – of violence, harassment and surveillance – feminists seek to organise specifically around the need for better digital skills and also employ strategies to keep themselves ‘safe’ while organising online. Digital governance from this perspective is a power relationship of socio-technical intimacies as well as a simply an organising structure.