The Sarai Programme organised the Lives of Information workshop to gather an inter‐disciplinary group of researchers to discuss information practices, cultures, infrastructures, and histories with a specific focus on post-colonial contexts. The workshop examined topics of colonial and post-colonial strategies of archiving identification, storage and informatic governance; bureaucratic cultures and politics of document and media forms; information infrastructures and networked politics; user-created content cultures and anxieties of mediated lives; and more.
Here are the audio recordings of the presentations at the workshop. All files are hosted at Internet Archive.
Plenary Lecture
Matthew Hull – What’s In a Claim? The Ontology of Land Holdings in South Asia
Information, Circulation
Monika Halkort – On Information, Rights and Self-Determination: A case Study in Nahr el Bared, a Palestinian Refugee Camp in North Lebanon
Nishaant Choksi – Circulating Scripts, Creating Networks: Santali Language Media Production and Transformations in Adivasi Politics
Authority, Network
Ritam Sengupta – Understanding Universal Service Obligation in India: Towards a Critical Approach
Rolien Hoyng – Marching with Nonhumans: Technological Renderings of Authority in Urban Politics
Resistance
Vidhi Shah – Narrating Sousveillance: A Look at Hasan Elahi’s Orwellian Project
Discussion
Bhuvaneswari Raman, Laura Stein, and Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay – Studying Information Practices
Rhetoric, Governmentality
Prasad Khanolkar – Of Storytelling and Governmentalities
Tarangini Sriraman – A Petition-like Application? Rhetoric and Rationing Documents in Wartime Delhi, 1941-45
Body, Document
Anindita Majumdar – The Culture of Anonymity: Information, Technology and Kin in Commercial Surrogacy Arrangements in India
Rijul Kochhar – The Inscription of Desire: The Disability Certificate as an Effecting Device, and More
Text, Image
Debjani Dutta – Picturing Words, Writing Images: Reading the Korean Wave through Fansubs
Shaunak Sen – Spectral Cellular: Cell Phones and the Supernatural in Hindi Cinema
Archive, Database
Parnisha Sarkar – The Material that Remains: Preserving the Trace in the Imperial Record Department, 1910-1940
Sumandro Chattapadhyay – What Kind of ‘Database State’ is the Aadhaar Project Proposing? A Study of Policy History and Code
Discussion
Amlan Das Gupta, Kaushik Bhaumik, and Sebastian Lütgert – Archives and (New/Old) Technologies
[clear]