media, information, the contemporary

Ongoing Projects

  • Media and the Constitution of the Political

    This project, supported by ICAS:MP, speaks to the following thematic engagements: Social Media, Data and Information Infrastructures This project looks at data and information infrastructures that have emerged from the rise of social media. Governments have been modernising data collection while addressing paper-based systems. Private companies work with a host of smaller intermediaries and advanced analytics…

  • Objects, Media Technologies, Aesthetics and Politics: Material Histories and Cultural Imaginaries, India c. 1940-1960

    This project, supported by ICAS:MP, speaks to issues of archiving and memorialization by developing an engagement with a novel and underexplored terrain of historical experience. This is the world of objects as they bear testimony to major transformations in energy use, environment, travel, bodily health and cleanliness, registers of everyday life. We seek to attend to…

Projects: 2012 to 2018

  • Social Media: Contemporary Histories and Archaeologies

    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…

  • Media and Information Infrastructures

    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…

  • Hinglish

    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…

  • Climate Change and Uncertainy: From Below and Above

    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…

  • Law and Social Media

    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…

  • Ethnographies of Social Data

    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…

Projects: 2001 to 2012

  • Cybermohalla

    Cybermohalla”, a network of dispersed labs for experimentation and exploration among young working class people in different neighbourhoods of the city, that was initiated by Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education, Delhi and Sarai-CSDS, Delhi in the year 2001. Over the years, the collective produced a wide range of materials, practices, works and structures.  Cybermohalla…

  • Information and Society

    This colloquium, early in the history of the Information and Society Research Cluster at Sarai-CSDS, posits that the ‘sensor-census-censor’ triad may be a useful way in which the histories and contemporary realities of South Asia and Europe may be investigated. Here, we mean the historic affinities, networks and resonances pertinent to the traffic of information…

  • City as Studio

    The City as Studio programme emerged in 2010 to intervene in the shaping of a responsive and engaged milieu of contemporary art and media practices through a cluster of dedicated art and media fellowships tied to a structure of studio situations and processes in Delhi. The fellowship brings together artists, media practitioners, intellectuals, writers, activists,…

  • FLOSS – Free/Libre Open Source Software

    Ever since its inception the Sarai programme of CSDS, Delhi was excited about and engaged with the free software practices in local and global contexts. We invited Richard Stallman to deliver a lecture on and published several books explaining the concept and practice. Our English and Hindi print publications have always been available online for…

  • Publics and Practices in the History of the Present

    Publics and Practices in the History of the Present (PPHP) emerged in the early years of Sarai to explore rapidly changing mediated urban milieux through questions of production, distribution and delivery, circulation, information networks, legality, and the materiality of media forms. Practitioners, artists, activists, lawyers, and academics engaged with these themes through  ethnography, media practice, and…