This one-day workshop explores the transformation that mediated lives in South Asia are undergoing in this contemporary digital moment. The emergence of the digital disrupts every sphere of our present-day lives in myriad ways. This can also be an opportunity to discuss the binaries that inhabit our current critical consensus in South Asia politically, economically, socially, and culturally. The binaries are in the form of conformism/antagonism, private/public, memory/oblivion, among others. A lot has been said about the affect of the overwhelmingness of the information economy. It is important to analyse these transformation taking place through a range of media objects, and platforms as it sublimates from global to local digital cultures.
This workshop brings together researchers to deliberate on these varied mediated lives that we see being lived in South Asia in the present by discussing the following questions:
Introduction (10:00-10:30): Awadhendra Sharan & Sagorika Singha
PANEL 1 (10:30-12:00): Mobile Media Practices and Data Politics in India
Chair S V Srinivas, School of Arts & Sciences, Azim Premji University
Theaters of the Self(ie): Social Media Platforms and Selfie Entrepreneurship in India; Anirban Baishya, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Arriving at the Digital: Mobile Media practices from suburban North India; Gayas Eapen, North Carolina State University
Digital Identity for All?: Tracing Civil Registration and Data Politics in India; Khetrimayum Monish Singh, IFRIS Postdoctoral Researcher, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), Paris
Tea Break (12:00-12:30 pm)
PANEL 2 (12:30-1:30) Studying the Digital in India
Chair Sagorika Singha, The Sarai Programme, CSDS
The Infrastructural Return in Media Studies on India: Looking Back and Ahead; Vibodh Parthasarathi, Jamia Millia Islamia
Challenging new hegemonies: Developing digital tools for the south; arjun, IIT Delhi
LUNCH (13:30-14:30 pm)
PANEL 3 (14:30-16:00): Caste, Misinformation and Masculinity in Digital India
Chair Vebhuti Duggal, School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi
Articulation of Dalit vision of the society through new media; Saroj Kumar, PhD Scholar, AJK Mass Communication Research Centre Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
Transformation of the misinformation ecology around majoritarianism under informational capitalism and possibilities for interventions; Fathima Nizaruddin, CSDS
Guns, Guys and Gaming: Masculinity in MMOG[1] in India; Smriti Singh, SSH, IIITD, (Rishabh Hooda, ECE, IIITD, Tanuj Rana, ECE, IIITD)
Tea Break (16:00-16:30 pm)
(16:30-17:00): Concluding remarks
Friday, 23 November 2022, 10 am-5 pm. Attend online here: http://bit.ly/3E9tm8n