[Air-L] Fwd: Call for Papers: DigiNaka

Wed Jul 29 22:58:03 PDT 2015

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Diginaka Seminar <diginaka2016 at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 7:39 PM
Subject: Call for Papers: DigiNaka
To: kpj at tiss.edu

*DIGINAKA**
Where the Local Meets the Digital
International Seminar of the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS.
January 7–9, 2016

http://smcs.tiss.edu/diginaka/

The advent of the digital and growing access to the Internet in India,
along with the availability of cheap devices such as mobile phones has
brought about an explosion of user-mediated creativity across various
platforms, allowing for sharing, tweaking, co-creating and repurposing of
digital media content in the public sphere. While the digital divide
reproduces and intensifies various social hierarchies of gender, caste,
class and region, one sees a simultaneous deployment of the digital by
sections of society that previously were denied access.

The cellular phone has been an important accessory in this widening of
access; its use by the urban and rural poor at individual and collective
levels opens pathways for incorporation into cultures of consumption and
political hegemony as well as for resistance and *jugaad*. The mobile phone
is a platform for recording, editing and uploading images, for accessing
‘pirated’ media content, for engaging with social media and for resisting
moral codes pertaining to age, caste, class and gender. *Jugaad* as a
“pragmatic workaround” (Rai 2012) [2] <http://smcs.tiss.edu/diginaka/#_ftn2>
and a “frugal disruptive innovation” (Rajdou, et al, 2012) [3]
<http://smcs.tiss.edu/diginaka/#_ftn3> has become a widespread mode of
engaging with uncertain and fluid media ecologies and economic imperatives
not only for the resource poor of the global South but also for
corporations caught in the cusp of highly competitive and shifting global
flows. For the poor in the cities and small towns of urban India, and
increasingly in rural areas too, engaging with the digital through the
mobile has become an important part of the everyday, a means of
communication, pleasure, and identity construction. Large informal grey
markets, for hardware, software and various services (providing films,
charging, repairing and refurbishing phones) respond to this growing
engagement with the digital. The scant regard for notions of copyright and
intellectual property makes the production and consumption of popular media
content a zone of contestation between audiences, the media industries and
the state.

Along with its potential use for greater local articulation and sharing is
also the use of social media and the Internet for trolling, harassing and
stalking, particularly of those who resist dominant political and social
codes. In recent times, feminists, secularists and activists, among others,
have been subjected to and resisted hate speech, making social media an
important terrain for the playing out of political struggles. Feminists
have engaged with the idea that online spaces can indeed be as dangerous
for women as real spaces. Scholars have also turned their gaze to the
production and representation of the online self in a variety of ways.

Apart from this individual deployment of the digital, there is increasing
use of these technologies by a range of movements, campaigns, local
filmmakers and grassroots initiatives, with mixed and complicated effects.
Ideological battles are waged on the Internet, as various interests use
this space to marginalise oppositional viewpoints. Popular films in local
dialects and idioms, made on shoe-string budgets, find their own niche
audiences and modes of commercially viable distribution. Community radio
and video are spaces not just for communication of “development messages”
but also for subverting dominant flows of power and for granting access to
voices hitherto denied media coverage. Internet journalism, in English and
various languages, covers stories often neglected by the mainstream media,
which are read, shared and have the potential of going viral, thus
countering the censorship of the corporate controlled market. As the
boundaries between content producers and users become fuzzy, this growing
subaltern and alternative digital and online activity also compels the
conventional news media and mainstream cinema to rethink their forms, their
modes of content delivery and their revenue models, thus complicating the
role of the maker and the user, and the nature of texts. Corporate and
state surveillance, data mining, censorship and deployment of digital
technologies and algorithms for management of user behaviour and temper
these possibilities for democratisation.

This three-day international seminar will merge this year with *Frames of
Reference*, the annual graduate student seminar of the School.

Papers are invited, from scholars across disciplines on the following
themes, and any others that fall within the rubric of local appropriations
of digital technologies in the Indian context:

Subaltern Image-making Practices
Selfies and the Self
Regional Cinemas
Community Media Praxis
The Mobile Phone and
*Jugaad *Internet Censorship and Regimes of Control
Informal Digital Markets
Rethinking Copyright and Intellectual Property
Social Media as a Space of Local Articulation and Contestation
Recycling and Repurposing Media Content
Satire as a Political Practice
Digital Documentary
Social Movements and Online Spaces
Feminist Technological Re-imaginations
LGBTQIA Initiatives and the Creation of Communities
Resisting Caste Hierarchies
Crowd funding of Alternative Production
Hate Speech and the Internet

Submission of a 300 word abstract (with 3-5 keywords) and a 100 word bio
note to diginaka2016 at gmail.com: September 1, 2015
Notification of selection: September 20, 2015
Paper submission: November 20, 2015

Please clearly mention in your abstract if you are currently enrolled as a
post-graduate student/research scholar in any university.

Student/research scholar paper presenters will be provided with free
accommodation and hospitality for a maximum period of 4 nights. Other
participants will have to pay a registration fee of Rs. 3000 to cover all
meals and conference kit (accommodation not included). Limited guest house
accommodation is available on campus. Daily registration fee for local
participants (covering lunch, teas and conference kit) is Rs. 500.

The seminar will include invited plenary speakers. An edited volume and a
journal issue of SubVersions (subversions.tiss.edu) are envisaged, based on
the seminar papers.

P.S. Apologies for cross-posting and please do circulate to your
contacts/lists _____________________________________________________________

* <http://smcs.tiss.edu/diginaka/#_ftnref1> *Naka*: A Marathi word meaning
crossroads or junction.

[2] <http://smcs.tiss.edu/diginaka/#_ftnref2> Rai, A. (2012). On the Jugaad
Image: Embodying the Mobile Phone in India. *Postmodern Culture*, Volume
23, No. 1, September 2012.

[3] <http://smcs.tiss.edu/diginaka/#_ftnref3> Radjou N., Prabhu J., Ahuja
S. (2012). *Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate
Breakthrough Growth*. San Francisco, USA: Jossey-Bass.

______________________________________________________
DigiNaka 2016–International Seminar
School of Media and Cultural Studies
Tata Institute of Social Sciences,  Deonar, Mumbai 400 088, India
Phone:+91 22 2552 566 <%2B91%2022%202552%205661>7
URLs: http://smcs.tiss.edu/

Radhika Gajjala
*Co-editor of ADA: Journal of Gender and New Media*
*http://adanewmedia.org <http://adanewmedia.org/>*

*Fulbright Professor/Research Scholar in Digital Culture at University of
Bergen, August 1, 2015-July 31, 2016*
*__*

Professor
School of Media and Communication
and
American Culture Studies Program
Bowling Green State University,
Bowling Green Ohio
http://www.radhikagajjala.org <http://www.cyberdiva.org/>