[Air-L] Call For Abstracts – The Act of Media: Workshop on Law, Media And Technology in South Asia, 8th to 10th January 2016, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi

[Sandeep Mertia]

*Call for Abstracts - The Act of Media: Workshop on Law, Media And
Technology in South Asia, 8th to 10th January 2016, The Sarai Programme,
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. *

The traditional understanding of ‘media law’ has gradually given way to
approaches that show us that ‘law’ and ‘media’ are not separate domains but
constantly overlap, define and redefine each other. The law seeks to define
and regulate media practice, inciting a discursive space which brings
media, its relationship to social order and subversion, its materiality and
evidentiary status, into the very folds of the law. And the law is relayed,
debated and disputed through media publicity and tested by media acts that
regularly challenge legal regulation.

Following in this trajectory, this workshop will explore the historical
relationship between law and media, as it is constituted in culture,
politics and performance and on the shifting ground of sovereignty in South
Asia.

The period leading up to the Partition, the framing of the Indian
Constitution and the establishment of two sovereign nation states in the
subcontinent, was an important reference point for the debates that
occurred round the law, and its relationship to the circulation of
information, media and free expression. In India, the debates in the
Constituent Assembly and during the First Amendment to the Constitution are
testament to how concerns around the political viability of the nation and
public order rode roughshod over concerns of civil liberties and freedom of
speech and expression.

Arguably, we have transited to a new political setting, in which the
earlier concentration of power in the sovereign state and its legal
institutions have become substantially complicated by the transformation of
the media sphere. This workshop will aim to explore the role of the law and
censorship through, as William Mazzarella puts it, a theory of performative
dispensations, when political authority can no longer reside in the
physical body of a singular sovereign and finds itself in the anonymous
space of mass publicity.

It is with this background in mind that The Act of Media workshop will
explore the histories of technological development in the subcontinent and
the manner in which both the promise of, and anxieties around technology
have framed legal discourse and regulation.

The workshop will examine how media-enabled subjectivities produce new
sites of departure in the law. The shift from theatre to cinema; cinema to
video; and video to satellite television have been productive sites for
law’s engagement with technology. The understanding of traditional notions
of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and a public sphere defined by rational
discourse have been challenged by the contemporary post Web 2.0 moment and
the sheer speed, reach and inter-media circulation that this moment has
enabled, breaking the bubble sphere of the old Internet. The increasing use
of cell phone enabled technologies, and the evolution of cultural practices
around the cell phone, pose a massive challenge to older forms of control,
policing and the terms of political engagement. The workshop will explore
debates, both in South Asia and globally, around trolling, hate speech,
violence, the ‘dark net’ and ‘unsocial media’, and the emergence of new
infrastructures of governance and surveillance.

The Act of Media workshop will bring together law and media practitioners,
legal and media theorists, scholars from the law and social sciences, media
and visual studies and media anthropology. The workshop will be a space to
throw open and explore new ideas and work in these fields, and engage with
ongoing research in this area, while keeping in mind the nuances of legal
and media practice.

Workshop themes will include:

*I Evidence, Truth and Legal Procedure*
Changing media technologies demand the ability of law to deal with the
evidentiary aspects of these technologies. The government’s truth labs that
have been set up have institutionalized practices related to criminal law,
criminology and forensics. Drawing upon the work of scholars such as
Cornelia Vismann, what are the longer histories of media technologies that
help explain the relationship between the file, truth and law? For
instance, the ability to fake and doctor images and recordings throws into
question how evidence law can verify the authenticity of these claims.

*II Histories of Media, Law and Technology*
The proliferation of blogs, online forums like Facebook and Twitter, and
peer-to-peer networks such as Whatsapp have led to the government arguing
for stricter legal standards to regulate these media. In the 2015 *Shreya
Singhal* judgment, the Indian Supreme Court held that legal regulation of
the Internet could not be equated to the regulation of other media. At the
same time the Court held that the safeguards under the Constitution could
not be diluted for the Internet. How does one read this development in
relation to older debates and legal doctrine around changing media
technology?

*III Law and the Media Event*
With the legal trial becoming a media event, there has been an increasing
focus on the power of the media and its ability to influence the legal
process. The ethical and legal issues surrounding the interviews of
undertrials, the release of a film or book while a trial is going on, and
the hyper-mediatised coverage of incidents like the Arushi murder, have led
to legal precedent, and debates on the ethical aspects of these trials.
What happens to the notion of publicity in the trial? How has the law
attempted to balance the right to fair trial and the freedom of speech and
the right to receive information?

*IV Censors and their Sensibilities*
How do we understand the production of knowledge and theory of aesthetics
even as we examine debates around the censorship of media through the law?
What are the ways that the language of the law, couched in reason,
struggles with the affective space of sentiments – hurt, contempt, and
disgust? Does the medium determine the capacity of language to incite,
inflame, outrage and stir passions? What are the tensions between the
evolving juridical categories such as hate speech, the social media’s
circulation of incendiary material, and political contestations around
these categories and practices?

*V Consent, Technology and Gendered Violence*
The Internet has emerged as a highly masculine space, and there are
emerging debates in the Indian context around the barriers that women and
persons of diverse genders face in occupying the online public sphere.
Videos of rape that are circulated, revenge pornography, and videos and
images of public figures that circulate without their consent, have given
us cause to think of the complex interplay between the criminal law,
consent, and the gendered use of technology. Is the state and police
apparatus complicit in the production of a pornographic public? How has the
emergence of social media and new media technologies changed the terms of
the debates around representation, and the distinction between the speech
act and its impact?

*VI Circulation, Virality, Rumour*
How does the law deal with events that are staged for the afterlife of You
Tube videos, when the audience is not just those watching the events but
the millions of people who view and share these videos? In what way is new
and ubiquitous media technology like Whatsapp images on mobile phones
implicated in the production of heightened affect? What are the
infrastructures of surveillance and regulation that are put in place to
respond to the circulation of ‘objectionable’ material on social media? How
has the phenomenon of rumour and its potential to mobilize crowds adapted
to the post We­b 2.0 moment? How have corporate media agencies such as
Google and Facebook responded to the circulation of rumour and hate speech
and how transparent are they in their actions?

*The Sarai Programme invites submission of abstracts for ‘The Act of Media’
workshop. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words, and should be sent to *
*dak at sarai.net* <dak at sarai.net>* by 15th October, 2015, with the subject
heading ‘Proposal for The Act of Media Workshop'. Authors of the selected
abstracts will be notified by 1st November 2015.*


*The workshop will be held from 8th to 10th January 2016, at Sarai-CSDS, 29
Rajpur Road, Delhi. The Sarai Programme will cover three days of
accommodation for outstation participants. In addition, participants from
India will be eligible for travel support.*

URL:
http://sarai.net/call-for-abstracts-the-act-of-media-workshop-on-law-media-and-technology-in-south-asia/


*----------*Sandeep Mertia,
Research Associate,
Sarai-CSDS,
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054.