The Associate Fellowship Programme was undertaken in 2007 to develop a level of interaction between independent practitioners, researchers and scholars that is deeper and more extensive than that afforded by the Independent Fellowship process.

Frontiers considers limits, edges, borders and margins of all kinds as the sites for declarations, occasions for conversation, arguments, debates, recounting and reflection. Our book suggests that you consider the frontier as the skin of our time and our world, and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary experience in order to generate a series of crucial (and frequently unsettling) narrative and analytical possibilities. For us, the frontier is a threshold waiting to be crossed, a space rife with the seductive aura of transgression…

Horizon of Scanning juxtaposes found materials, thoughts and reflections on the body, to radio waves, to television screens, the coming of street lighting, to acts of reading – scanning operates as a metaphor for control, diagnosis and a recombinant frame (when you search, you scan, and so open up possibilities of newer interconnections). The word travels between different disciplines and practices (from medicine to literature to surveillance to everyday acts).

Are you a non-nerd, a human being who happens to use computers without living inside them? Does that make you curious to find out what the buzz regarding open source and free software is all about? What’s in it for you? Does it work? Is it fun and easy to use? How is it made and who makes it? And how ‘free’ or ‘open’ is it, really? Have you looked long and hard for answers to questions like these in plain English? If that’s the case, ‘FLOSS is not just good for teeth’ could be just what you are looking for.

If there were ever to be a ‘weather report’ for our times, an audit of the climate in which we have grown accustomed to live, it would use the word ‘turbulence’ often. We inhabit the vortex of storms, and smell sunshine. We are always prepared for rain. Our cities are sites of flood and fire. We live between tremors, power cuts and voltage surges. Agitations emerge and abate on our streets and on the airwaves, as if by accident. Books are burned, blogs are blocked, bourses dance mad tarantulas. We fly with seat belts fastened. Predictions are pronounced and dissembled in seconds. Bets are placed and lost, wagers made and found wanting. Insurance companies invoke acts of God. The more things change, the more they change…

The Sarai-CSDS Independent FLOSS Fellowship Programme enabled programmers to research and develop different kinds of open source software-based applications. Typically, these are projects that would not usually find support in formal, institutional or market-driven settings, either because of the intent/ nature of the goal or because of the ‘open’ nature of the knowledge thus produced/created.

“Bade-Bade Sheheron mein Kuchh Namm Baatein (Softer Evocations in Large, Loud Cities)”, is a quarterly publication produced by the Cybermohalla broadsheet editorial team (practitioners from the…

This year, the Reader looks at ‘Acts’ – at instruments of legislation, at things within and outside the law, and at ‘acts’ – as different ways of ‘doing’ things in society and culture. Several essays echo and complement themes that have emerged in earlier readers. Piracy, borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the language of expertise, the legal regulation of sexual behaviour and trespasses of various kinds have featured prominently in previous Readers. This collection foregrounds these issues in a way we hope can make a series of coherent but autonomous and interrelated arguments…

The Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellowships allow the time for individuals from diverse backgrounds to either begin or continue research into specific aspects of media and urban culture and society, broadly and creatively defined, and to also think carefully and rigorously about the various public forms in which their research might be rendered. We are also interested in using the materials generated through the research to continue to build up our thematic archive of research on the city. Thus, we see the fellowship as an important source for this archive.