Call for Applications: Researching the Contemporary 2017
The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies invites applications for its two-month course on ‘Researching the Contemporary’. This cross-disciplinary course will critically examine the formation of the contemporary and its multiple histories, ideologies, forms and affects. The following four courses offered this year will enable participants engage with concepts, theories and methods to critically understand and analyse the contemporary...
Lives of Data Workshop – Report & Recordings
The ‘Lives of Data’ workshop, 05-07 January 2017, brought together a diverse group of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to reflect upon the historical and emergent conditions of data-driven knowledge production in India and South Asia. The workshop initiated wide-ranging conversations on history of statistics, media and computational cultures, politics and practices of data-driven governance, and Big Data infrastructures and imaginaries...
Lives of Information Workshop – Recordings
The Sarai Programme organised the Lives of Information workshop to gather an inter‐disciplinary group of researchers to discuss information practices, cultures, infrastructures, and histories with a specific focus on post-colonial contexts. The workshop examined topics of colonial and post-colonial strategies of archiving identification, storage and informatic governance; bureaucratic cultures and politics of document and media forms; information infrastructures and networked politics; user-created content cultures and anxieties of mediated lives; and more. Here are the audio recordings of the presentations at the workshop...
Culture, Conflict and Cyberspace: Towards a Bodo Digital Identity
The Death Valley (2012) is a multilingual short film by Rajiv Saikia that aims to capture the 2012 ethnic conflict between the Bodos and Muslims, highlighting how innocent civilians from both sides are caught in the crossfire. This fictional account tells the story of a Bodo man and a Muslim man who are on friendly terms. Their peaceful existence is disrupted when ethnic conflict erupts. The Bodo man is chased by a group of Muslim men before being brutally murdered while his Muslim friend is killed as he tries to save him. Afterwards, the women of the two families leave with their children because of the unsafe environment...