media, information, the contemporary
Feature

BioScope Volume 10 Issue 2, December 2019

We’re happy to announce the publication of BioScope vol. 10. no. 2.

This issue of Bioscope explores the televisual, whereby the mission of television goes beyond the medium and becomes a central node of information and cultural flows in the nation. Expanding on the notion of television, with its historical antecedents in print, radio, cinema and its contemporary overlaps with new media technologies, we frame the object of enquiry as ‘Televisual Pakistan’ to gesture to the continually intermedial nature of television. Colonial censorship, serialised print digests, online streaming platforms and the hashtag activisms explored in the articles featured here convey the porous boundaries of contemporary television. A special issue on Pakistani television culture is both a symptom of and a corrective to the sparse scholarship on the theme. Through this special issue, we hope not only to participate in the larger project of the diversification of a critical and self-reflexive ‘Pakistan studies’ (Bajwa, 2016) via cultural studies and media anthropology. We also see these forays into the multi-sited televisual space as an occasion for new methods, diverse positionalities and a desire to produce theory – an empirical investigation into what Pakistan reveals about the mass medium.

Editorial: Televisual Pakistan
Ravi Vasudevan, Rosie Thomas, S. V. Srinivas, Kartik Nair, Debashree Mukherjee, Lotte Hoek, and Salma Siddique (Special Issue Co-Editor)

Articles
A Soundtrack for Reimagining Pakistan? Coke Studio, Memory and the Music Video
Richard David Williams, Rafay Mahmood