Elizabeth Losh delivered a lecture on The Metadata is the Message: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Online Activism on 4th September 2013.  

Bernadette Längle, Centre for Internet and Society and Chaos Computer Club, delivered a talk at Sarai on the Chaos Computer Club and Digital Activism in Europe,…

The Sarai Programme at CSDS invites applications for 2 research positions, to work on the subject of `media and information infrastructures’. The research agenda is historical and contemporary, archive based and ethnographic, and will traverse a variety of media, including radio, gramophone, cassette, photography, film, television, video, and digital forms.

The Water Cookbook presents ideas from the Sarai project on peri-urban sustainability in Ghaziabad, India. It is a short graphic novel combining pictures with brief stories from daily life in the city.

Power creates rules, makes many implements to reign in possibilities and the impulses to create. But force of life cannot be contained; it bursts through anyway. Energy travels from body to body; each environment germinates countless more. It is of such questions, imaginations and collisions that No Apologies for the Interruption is an expression.

Modernity’s great promise – the freedom from fear, now lies in ruins. One can argue that this vision was always compromised – modernity (especially in the form that emerged in the West, under Capitalism) always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears – the fear of epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal activity. This led to a drive for transparency: for separating the civic from the criminal, the civilised and the barbaric peoples, the human from the non human, life from the machine. With the advent of the mass slaughters of the 20th century, where more died than ever in recorded human history, this promise lay shattered. Today, the drive for transparency has been rendered doubly difficult, with new mobile populations, new networks, new previously unimagined terrors. Sovereignty seems an antiquated slogan of the past, and in the wake of the financial shocks of 2008,
there seems to be some substance in the contention that Western capitalism has entered a phase of possibly long term decline…

Trickster City is an extraordinary composite of writings on the city of Delhi. They were written over a period of two years by a group of twenty young people who live in different places in the city of Delhi, and who have, over the last several years, sustained among themselves and with others around them, a relationship of writing and conversing about the city.

The protagonists of Tinker.Solder.Tap bring alive the ways in which the relationship between life and the media has been re-scripted in the various neighbourhoods of our cities. The story begins in the mid-80s, when a man returns home with an object called a VCR. The chain of effects that follows transforms irreversibly the social life of the neighbourhood and its reverberations can be felt all over the world…

Compilation of selected abstracts from the 2006-2007 round of Independent Fellowship Programme.