Influence as method and method as influence: Collaborative platform work in Mumbai and Delhi.

Abstract

In this position paper, the authors discuss the collaborative influencing practices of women beauticians operating online and offline in Mumbai and Delhi, through the lens of the authors’ engagements with them as researchers and collaborators. The authors focus on how these beauticians skillfully develop and translate offline networking habits and connections into online engagement on platforms, through a high and continuous level of hidden cognitive labor. The authors reflect on methodological interventions they made to understand the influencing worlds of women beauticians that remain hard to access within biased platform logics. The authors ask: What does it mean to be present in the entangled lives of our interlocutors, not as flies on the wall but as our multiple selves that are called on at different times to co-create the worlds we are supposedly studying?