Diginaka

Although media studies and digital humanities are established fields, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving readers a critical guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersections of media, culture, and practice. Topics include: access, praxis, social justice, design, interaction, interfaces, mediation, materiality, remediation, data, memory, making, programming, and hacking.

This book examines instances of transformative dissent, turning points or shifts in popular mobilisation patterns in contemporary India, while adopting a historical approach and analysing past events. Exploring the different continuities and discontinuities in mobilising patterns and dissident agency in India, the authors present a heterogeneous insurrectional pattern that pivoted around issues of caste, class, religion, land reform, labour, taxation and territorial control, with anti-colonialism movements becoming prominent in the first half of the twentieth century. The authors move beyond this to explore more recent templates of mobilisation which surfaced towards the end of the twentieth century, during India’s liberalisation period. With growing marketisation and technological advancement, unprecedented changes in social relations, growing economic opportunities and cultural transfusion taking place, the country became a ‘New India’ - one which aspired to be a global player in the wider technological public sphere. Tracing the historical trajectories of social movements in India, this book examines recent trends in digitised dissidence and explores new frontiers of protests, providing fresh insights for those researching the history of social movements, South Asian and Indian history and postcolonial studies.

In India, the practice of jugaad—finding workarounds or hacks to solve problems—emerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty, discrimination, and violence but is now celebrated in management literature as a disruptive innovation. In Jugaad Time Amit S. Rai explores how jugaad operates within contemporary Indian digital media cultures through the use of the mobile phone. Rai shows that despite being co-opted by capitalism to extract free creative labor from the workforce, jugaad is simultaneously a practice of everyday resistance, as workers and communities employ hacks to oppose corporate, caste, and gender power. Locating the tensions surrounding jugaad—as both premodern and postdigital, innovative and oppressive—Rai maps how jugaad can be used to undermine neoliberal capitalist media ecologies and nationalist politics.

The title of this book comes from an ancient parable about a farmer who, when greeted with fortune or misfortune has the same retort: “Good news, bad news, who can tell?” The parable provides some simple wisdom in approaching turbulence and catastrophe in life, such as living through a pandemic. This book offers a variety of touching stories, lyrics, and poems written by people who represent nine categories of those on the frontlines of the pandemic (educators, COVID survivors, artists, clergy, those who lost loved ones, students, physicians, restauranteurs, and journalists) from the U.S. and India, regarding experiences, lessons and wisdom they acquired. A novel interpretation of the parable is presented as well as a framing (a figure 8) that provides some perspective and guidance as we move through the various trials and tribulations of life, and through challenges of mental illness and substance use. There is also a chapter “signs of the times” which showcases a variety of creative and amusing signs that were all around us during the pandemic. Even some clever bathroom signs. The summary outlines lessons learned and wisdom gained by the editor from struggling through the pandemic in rural West Virginia, as a psychotherapist on the frontlines, and from reading the heartfelt stories and poems in the book. And perhaps the most interesting feature of the book is the last chapter, an opportunity to reflect and write your own lessons, story, poem, and space for your photos to add to the documentation of this experience called “the pandemic.”

This book engages with the idea of the Global South through cinema as a concept of resistance; as a space of decolonialisation; and as an arena of virtuality, creativity and change. It opens up a dialogue amongst scholars and filmmakers from the Global South: India, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, and Egypt. The essays in the volume approach cinema as an intertwined process of both production and perception not divorced from the economic, social, political and cultural. They emphasise film as a visual medium where form, structure and content are not separable. Through a wide array of film-readings, the authors explore the concept of a southern cinematic esthetics, in particular, and the concept of the Global South in general. The volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of film and media studies, critical theory, cultural studies and Global South studies.

When we work or play through digital technologies – we also live in them. Communities form, conversations and social movements emerge spontaneously and through careful offline planning. While we have used disembodied communication and transportation technologies in the past – and still do – we have never before actually synchronously inhabited these communicative spaces, routes and networks in quite the way we do now. Digital Diasporas engages conversations across a selection of contemporary (gendered) Indian identified networks online: “Desis” creating place through labour and affective network formation in secondlife, Indian (diasporic) women engaged in digital domesticity, to Indian digital feminists engaged in debate and dialogue through Twitter. Through particular conversations and ethnographic journeys and linking back to personal and South Asian histories of Internet mediation, Gajjala and her co-authors reveal how affect and gendered digital labour combine in the formation of global socio-economic environment.

The history of documentary has been one of adaptation and change, as docu-mentarists have harnessed the affordances of emerging technology. In the last decade interactive documentaries (i-docs) have become established as a new field of practice within non-fiction storytelling. Their various incarnations are now a focus at leading film festivals (IDFA DocLab, Tribeca Storyscapes, Sheffield DocFest), major international awards have been won, and they are increasingly the subject of academic study. This anthology looks at the creative practices, purposes and ethics that lie behind these emergent forms. Expert contributions, case studies and interviews with major figures in the field address the production processes that lie behind interactive documentary, as well as the political, cultural and geographic contexts in which they are emerging and the media ecology that supports them. Taking a broad view of interactive documentary as any work which engages with 'the real' by employing digital interactive technology, this volume addresses a range of platforms and environments, from web-docs and virtual reality to mobile media and live performance. It thus explores the challenges that face interactive documentary practitioners and scholars, and proposes new ways of producing and engaging with interactive factual content.