media, information, the contemporary

Tag: Urban


  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Of calibrations and conversations, or how to measure time in walking

    Samprati Pani & Sarnath Banerjee, in conversation with Sarover Zaidi Date: 18th February 2019, Monday Venue: Basement, Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi-110054 Time: 5.30 pm The sociologist Rabi Ray once explained the origins of advanced mathematics in tandem with the origins of melancholia. How does one fill time when time becomes nothing? How…

  • Decree and Devotion: Sacred Property on Internet

    I took a murky turn between the Sunday market on Biplabi Rash Behari Bose Road and the Portuguese Church that is called the Portuguese Church Lane. Behind the white church, in the lane teeming with resting pushcarts, small shops and old shabby buildings, I found my address – 10, Portuguese Church Lane, Kolkata 700001. It was a typically dilapidated building whose façade could not be fully seen from where I stood, it overwhelmed my field of vision. There was an A3 sticker on a closed part of the door that spoke about martyrdom and I was sure that it was the front gate of Haji Kerbalai Imambara…