media, information, the contemporary
Events

The Social and Cultural Life of Information | Workshop

Sarai - The Social and Cultural Life of Information - Workshop Poster

The Social and Cultural Life of Information workshop was held in Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, on November 14-16 2013. It brought together a select group of media scholars, historians, anthropologists and geographers for an intensive two day workshop, and aimed at bringing together research on colonial and postcolonial information infrastructures, with a strong South Asian component.

About the Workshop:

Over the past decade information culture and technologies of identification have become part of popular discourse, as regimes roll out large modernisation projects aimed at populations and existing structures of governance. A growing body of scholars have turned their attention to the study of information culture and its history. Information infrastructure offers a material site to connect different bodies of scholarship across the disciplines.

The workshop was interested in connecting colonial strategies of identification, writing, and storage with recent debates. Questions of interest included information ecologies around paper, film, and recent digital storage systems. Equally, colonial information theories and contemporary arguments for digital governance emerged in the course of the workshop. Technologies of writing, file notings, and digital algorithms in state and private databases were themes brought in by scholars at the workshop.

Download the abstracts and biographic briefs of the participants.

Participants and Papers:

How to Spell Mohammedan? Note on Circulation, Standardisation & the Documentary Production of Empire
Brian Larkin, Barnard College, Columbia University

 

Technological Inertia: The Politics of Privacy and the Failure of Anglo-American Biometric Registration
Keith Breckenridge, University of Witwatersand

 

De-Duplicating India: On the Promise of Immateriality
Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley

 

Of Hidden Cameras and Hidden Truths: Law and Visual Evidence in an Era of Digital Uncertainty
Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum

 

Speech Marks: Early Modern Information Geographies
Miles Ogborn, Queen Mary, University of London

 

Man-eaters of the Indian Himalaya: Identifying, Naming, and Hunting Big Cats in Uttarakhand
Nayanika Mathur, University of Cambridge

 

Punished by Surveillance: Legal Codification and Police Modernisation in Colonial India 1861-1923
Radhika Singha, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

Data’s Discordances: The Political Life of Medical Information in Maputo, Mozambique
Ramah McKay, University of Minnesota

 

Information, Transparency, and the New Urban Turn
Ravi Sundaram, The Sarai Programme, CSDS

 

Cinematic Information in the Colonial Archive, 1940-1946
Ravi S. Vasudevan, The Sarai Programme, CSDS

 

Occupied and Possessed Cities: Territoriality, Information, and Techno-Managerial Politics
Solomon Benjamin, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

 

Of Identity, Platform, and ‘New’ Information Infrastructures of Governance: Situating the Aadhaar Project within the History of Electronic Governance in India
Sumandro Chattapadhyay, The Sarai Programme, CSDS

 

‘One Hearth, One Home, One Family’: Materiality and Affect in Urban Poor Enumeration
Tarangini Sriraman, Centre de Sciences Humaines

Recordings:

Discussant: Miles Ogborn, Queen Mary, University of London

 

 

Discussant: Radhika Singha, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

Discussant: Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore

 

Discussant: Ravi Sundaram, The Sarai Programme, CSDS

 

Discussant: Ravi S. Vasudevan, The Sarai Programme, CSDS

 

Discussant: Awadhendra Sharan, CSDS

 

 

Discussant: Keith Breckenridge, University of Witwatersand

 

Discussant: Sarada Balagopalan, CSDS

 

Discussant: Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley

 

Discussant: Brian Larkin, Barnard College, Columbia University

 

Discussant: Sumandro Chattapadhyay, The Sarai Programme, CSDS

 

Discussant: Nayanika Mathur, University of Cambridge

 

 

 

Discussant: Ramah McKay, University of Minnesota