The Social and Cultural Life of Information workshop was held in Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, on November 14-16 2013. It brought together a select group of media scholars, historians, anthropologists and geographers for an intensive two day workshop, and aimed at bringing together research on colonial and postcolonial information infrastructures, with a strong South Asian component.
About the Workshop:
Over the past decade information culture and technologies of identification have become part of popular discourse, as regimes roll out large modernisation projects aimed at populations and existing structures of governance. A growing body of scholars have turned their attention to the study of information culture and its history. Information infrastructure offers a material site to connect different bodies of scholarship across the disciplines.
The workshop was interested in connecting colonial strategies of identification, writing, and storage with recent debates. Questions of interest included information ecologies around paper, film, and recent digital storage systems. Equally, colonial information theories and contemporary arguments for digital governance emerged in the course of the workshop. Technologies of writing, file notings, and digital algorithms in state and private databases were themes brought in by scholars at the workshop.
Download the abstracts and biographic briefs of the participants.
Participants and Papers:
How to Spell Mohammedan? Note on Circulation, Standardisation & the Documentary Production of Empire
Brian Larkin, Barnard College, Columbia University
Technological Inertia: The Politics of Privacy and the Failure of Anglo-American Biometric Registration
Keith Breckenridge, University of Witwatersand
De-Duplicating India: On the Promise of Immateriality
Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley
Of Hidden Cameras and Hidden Truths: Law and Visual Evidence in an Era of Digital Uncertainty
Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum
Speech Marks: Early Modern Information Geographies
Miles Ogborn, Queen Mary, University of London
Man-eaters of the Indian Himalaya: Identifying, Naming, and Hunting Big Cats in Uttarakhand
Nayanika Mathur, University of Cambridge
Punished by Surveillance: Legal Codification and Police Modernisation in Colonial India 1861-1923
Radhika Singha, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Data’s Discordances: The Political Life of Medical Information in Maputo, Mozambique
Ramah McKay, University of Minnesota
Information, Transparency, and the New Urban Turn
Ravi Sundaram, The Sarai Programme, CSDS
Cinematic Information in the Colonial Archive, 1940-1946
Ravi S. Vasudevan, The Sarai Programme, CSDS
Occupied and Possessed Cities: Territoriality, Information, and Techno-Managerial Politics
Solomon Benjamin, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Of Identity, Platform, and ‘New’ Information Infrastructures of Governance: Situating the Aadhaar Project within the History of Electronic Governance in India
Sumandro Chattapadhyay, The Sarai Programme, CSDS
‘One Hearth, One Home, One Family’: Materiality and Affect in Urban Poor Enumeration
Tarangini Sriraman, Centre de Sciences Humaines
Recordings:
Discussant: Miles Ogborn, Queen Mary, University of London
Discussant: Radhika Singha, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Discussant: Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Discussant: Ravi Sundaram, The Sarai Programme, CSDS
Discussant: Ravi S. Vasudevan, The Sarai Programme, CSDS
Discussant: Awadhendra Sharan, CSDS
Discussant: Keith Breckenridge, University of Witwatersand
Discussant: Sarada Balagopalan, CSDS
Discussant: Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Brian Larkin, Barnard College, Columbia University
Discussant: Sumandro Chattapadhyay, The Sarai Programme, CSDS
Discussant: Nayanika Mathur, University of Cambridge
Discussant: Ramah McKay, University of Minnesota