media, information, the contemporary
Event

Digital Cultures Transforming South Asia Workshop

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:

  • How do digital objects affect broader social and political shifts in South Asia?
  • What shapes the new experiences of various new media forms and subcultural politics?
  • What purpose do these media infrastructures and indigenous subjectivities serve in the larger understanding of the region?
  • What’s driving South Asia’s politics of digital transformation whether it means labour, memory or gender?

Schedule:

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 IndiaAnirban Baishya, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Arriving at the Digital: Mobile Media practices from suburban North IndiaGayas Eapen, North Carolina State University

Digital Identity for All?: Tracing Civil Registration and Data Politics in IndiaKhetrimayum 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 AheadVibodh Parthasarathi, Jamia Millia Islamia

Challenging new hegemonies: Developing digital tools for the southarjun, 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 mediaSaroj 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 interventionsFathima Nizaruddin, CSDS

Guns, Guys and Gaming: Masculinity in MMOG[1] in IndiaSmriti 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