media, information, the contemporary

Tag: Urban


  • Call for Papers: Twenty-First Century Media? Affective Bodies, Crowds and Collectives

    In the last two decades, digital media infrastructures have spread worldwide, including the global South. Despite inequalities of access, low-cost mobile devices and cheaper broadband have connected large subaltern populations to media infrastructures. The effects are increasingly planetary, initiating a series of debates in media scholarship and cultural theory. Mediatisation has emerged as a material…

  • The Mediatized Protest: Hong Kong, Cinema, Telegram, and The Lennon Wall

    The Mediatized Protest: Hong Kong, Cinema, Telegram, and The Lennon Wall Date: 17th January 2020, Friday Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi-110054 Time: 4.00 pm Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, 15 September 2019: Young citizens all around you gear up: face masks, gloves, goggles, helmets, knee and shin-pads, biking gear, backpacks and…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…