This project explores the remarkable transformation signalled by social media in the contemporary era. We are interested in new circuits of social communication, cultural consumption and sharing, transparency discourses and political mobilisation. Such contemporary changes will be situated in a complex history mapping the social basis and circuits of older and more recent media, including…
Infrastructure has come to be an increasingly important object of social science and cultural-historical research. From roads and railways to river and seaborne transport, from dams and irrigation canals to electrical circuits, from telegraphs and telephones to cable networks and satellite communication, the question of infrastructure has been key to the evolution of the modern…
Sarai-CSDS and SOAS, London launched a three-year British Academy funded project called “Hinglish: The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Hindi-English Bilingualism” in early 2013. The project seeks to understand the contemporary explosion of a new mixed, middling linguistic register involving code-switching and code-mixing between English and Hindi. This popular phenomenon is by no means confined…
The research project hypothesizes that uncertainty in climate change has been narrowly conceptualized from ‘above’ (by scientists, experts and decision-makers). In doing so, the day-to-day experiences and practices of local people around uncertainty have been ignored, thus missing out on local-level detail. Thus, it is important to bridge the divide between uncertainty from ‘above’ and…
The advent of social media and its increasing use in India has led to numerous questions concerning its legal regulation. Our research commenced with questions around incidents of communal and ethnic violence where social media has been ascribed an important role – the Bangalore and Pune North East exodus of 2012, the Azad Maidan disturbance…
Big Data and the Data Revolution have been pitched as a potential transformation of all modes of digital data collection, organization, storage, mining, analytics and visualization. The proliferation of digital infrastructures and information after the social media revolution called Web 2.0, has led to a global movement around leveraging the enormous potential of data to…