Damni Kain

Damni Kain works as a Research Associate at Fairwork India. She previously worked as a Legislative and Research Assistant to a Member of Indian Parliament as well as a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Technology. She worked on platform economy, condition of gig workers and India’s biometric system by assisting the MP in parliamentary interventions and IT Committee engagement on these issues.

Prior to this, she worked at the Centre for Internet and Society as a researcher on online hate speech— a project supported by the Association for Progressive Communications and the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights. She is a recipient of prestigious research grants from Women’s Fund Asia and the Indian Association for Women’s Studies where she studied women’s labour movement in India and the working conditions of Aanganwadi workers through fieldwork in Haryana.

Her publications include:

• Damni Kain, Shivangi Narayan, Torsha Sarkar, Gurshabad Grover. “Online Caste-Hate Speech: Pervasive Discrimination and Humiliation on Social Media— Association for Progressive Communications and The Centre for Internet and Society“, December 2021
• Damni Kain. “How the Absence of Caste in Curriculum Aids the Presence of Caste in Pedagogy”, SAGE India, February 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2455328X211066185
• She has also contributed to popular media platforms like The Wire, The Firspost and Down To Earth amongst others. She holds a Masters degree in Political Science from Hindu College, University of Delhi.

For Fairwork, she is leading fieldwork in Delhi and the parliamentary engagement for the project in India. She is also operationalising Fairwork principles, contributing to the report writing and scoring process of platform companies. She tweets at @DamniKain