media, information, the contemporary

Tag: Governance


  • Culture, Conflict and Cyberspace: Towards a Bodo Digital Identity

    The Death Valley (2012) is a multilingual short film by Rajiv Saikia that aims to capture the 2012 ethnic conflict between the Bodos and Muslims, highlighting how innocent civilians from both sides are caught in the crossfire. This fictional account tells the story of a Bodo man and a Muslim man who are on friendly terms. Their peaceful existence is disrupted when ethnic conflict erupts. The Bodo man is chased by a group of Muslim men before being brutally murdered while his Muslim friend is killed as he tries to save him. Afterwards, the women of the two families leave with their children because of the unsafe environment…

  • The Quest for Bodoland: Social Media in the Time of a Separatist Movement – Part Two

    This is the second part of my two-part exploration of the Bodo community and its engagement with social media and the online world. This post builds on the first part where the focus of investigation was on the insurgency and the presence of reports, pictures, discussions, videos on social media pertaining to this.[1] This post will explore the presence of Bodo entertainment content, VCD films and music videos on websites like YouTube, and shared via social media. The focus will be on the kind of content that is shared as well as on specific content, exploring the links and connections that go into the production of a Bodo identity through the medium of the Internet, and the ways in which media today aids in the scattered explosion of such ideas and beliefs…

  • The Quest for Bodoland: Social Media in the Time of a Separatist Movement – Part One

    In the first part of this two-part post, I aim to give a brief political history of the Bodoland movement which lays the ground for the rise of social media that has come to both inform and participate in the political situation in the region. The growing role of social media, as I see it, continues to reach out to a larger audience who take an interest in the movement for numerous reasons. Popular social media websites like Facebook and YouTube, which I focus on, have become points of dissemination for various types of news and information, thereby making it a multi-purposive platform…

  • Digital Identities: The Online Circulation of Bodo VCD films and Music Videos

    The demand for Bodoland, a separate state from Assam, has garnered national attention in the last few decades because of the violence and insurgency that has ensued in its wake. In recent times, the Bodo agitation has become an important component in the political discourse of Assam, and remains a complex and emotive issue.[1] There has been considerable focus within the Bodo community on this issue that is linked with questions of identity, culture and language. Additionally in the last two decades, there has been an emergence of locally made low-budget productions due to the availability of affordable digital technology…

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

    The Social and Cultural Life of Information | Workshop

    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…