Inhabiting Cyberspace in India


Book Description

This book gathers a selection of essays on the multifaceted aspects of cyber culture in India, both online and offline. It presents an in-depth analysis of cyberspace and its components, while also exploring its lived reality. The respective contributions highlight theoretical perspectives that address questions of relationality regarding all aspects of cyber culture in India, from the physical to the virtual. Bearing in mind India’s vast cultural diversity, which is shaped by different levels of political, social, and economic development, the book offers nuanced studies that analyze the complexities of cyberspace and digital culture in India. The book appeals to all readers interested in technology, cultural studies, online communication networks, feminism, virtual diasporas, and sociology.




Gender and Popular Visual Culture in India


Book Description

Perhaps, male-mindedness seems to have adapted to changing-contemporary circumstances to become more covert and conspiratorial. Sexist suggestions—through objectification and substantiated subordination—for instance, may have been explicit in Indian media a decade earlier. But in the contemporary times of online social media and vociferous feminism, such openness of unfairness against women in the media will, more often than not, be met with strife and unpalatable backlash—fearing which blatant prejudice is prudently steered clear of. It is, hence, understandable that patriarchy, to sustain itself as a culture, has adapted to become more benevolent in an increasingly hostile environment. To identify such sly and stealthy sexism embedded in media content, one may need a reconfigured grasp of contemporary feminist issues and an altered nuance for isolation and identification of discriminatory depictions. This book exposes redefined and hidden sexism that predominates the popular visual culture of India—particularly investigating mass and new media representations that are a prime part of and have a domineering effect on the ensemble of popular visual culture—and characterises contemporary feminist movements. It binds a collection of contemporary Indian case studies of sexism and feminism encompassing communication media such as print, cinema, television, Web series and social media. There is a lack of book titles that study media sexism in the present times, and the proposed book aims to explore an unexplored area that is of social and scholarly importance. This book highlights the duality of media platforms: while media is a critical tool associated with fourth-wave feminism, they still remain to be a deterrent to the development of women engendering inherent and age-old patriarchal notions. This book will be an eye-opener to the general readers about benevolent sexism and train them to identify sexism hidden in seemingly pro-women media representations.




Digital India: Navigating Sustainable Development Goals


Book Description

Digital India: Navigating Sustainable Development Goals is a comprehensive edited volume exploring India's transformative digital journey in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This resource-rich book caters to academics, researchers, policymakers, practitioners, students and global stakeholders. Covering diverse topics such as the impact of COVID-19 on education, Fintech adoption, gender justice, and sustainability challenges, it provides a nuanced understanding of the intersection between technology and sustainable development. The book serves as a valuable resource for gaining insights into the practical implications of Digital India initiatives and their role in achieving SDGs.




Affective Feminisms in Digital India


Book Description

This book studies digital feminist activism in contemporary India. It provides a close and comprehensive analysis of the postmillennial digital moment in India which has given rise to new modes of women’s digital dissent. The volume examines how anti-rape narratives, Feminichy scandals, #MeToo movements, and menstrual activisms, amongst a host of other performative feminist dissent and their discursive medialities create ‘affective digital feminisms’ which both break with and continue the residual and emergent practices within feminisms in India. It looks at digital womanspeak from India and focuses on vernacular forms of dissent, through which the author aims to decolonize feminist imaginaries from their moorings in the West. The author explores new digital, cultural, and social geographies where politically untamed women use their precarity to unsettle deep sexist structures and mount a gendered critique of the political economy of the nation state. An important contribution to the study of feminism in India, the volume will be useful for students and researchers of gender and women’s studies, cultural studies, digital sociology, intersectional feminism, transnational feminism, digital humanities, and South Asian studies. It will also be appeal to readers interested in the history of women’s dissent in India.




Citizenship in Contemporary Times


Book Description

This book engages with evolving definitions of borders and citizenship in the public discourse in the South Asia region. The traditional understanding of citizenship and belonging in the Indian context has been fraying in recent decades. The book offers an analysis of discussions on India’s contested zones, the anxieties around identity and the implications of and reactions to the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in different regions in the country. It interrogates the concepts of belonging, ownership and dissent through an analysis of the anti-CAA protests, the Namasudra movements, the life of Tibetan refugees in India and the precarious lives of many communities in India who are identified as stateless, refugees, migrants or outsiders. Interdisciplinary and topical, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of sociology, political science, law, refugee studies, borderland studies, migration studies, public policy, social policy and development studies.




Ocean as Method


Book Description

Ocean as Method presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and the social sciences. It explores maritime connections in social and humanistic research and puts forward an alternative to national histories and area studies. As global warming and rising sea levels ring alarm bells across the world, the chapters in the volume argue that it is time to think through oceans to realign discourses which better understand our future. The volume: • Engages with the paradigms of oceanic narratives to identify connections between continents through trade, migration, and economic processes, thinking beyond the artificial distinctions between the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans; • Discusses oceanic travel accounts by Muslim travellers to counter the idea that the colonial era was marked by European travel to Asia and Africa, without a counterflow of “native travel”; •Examines the connections between South Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia through histories of Indian indenture and the slave trade, and engages with the idea of the ocean and enforced movement; •Compares and connects recent scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities centring the ocean to break away from inherited paradigms which have shaped world history so far. As a unique transdisciplinary collaboration, this volume will be of much interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially oceanic history, historiography, critical theory, literature, geography, and Global South studies.




Affective World-Making


Book Description

This volume fosters a re-imagination of the planet where it is seen not only as a resource, but also as an entity that must not be excluded from the political imperative of care and kinship. The authors go beyond the normative understanding of space by recognizing the potency of touch, where they look at somatic experiences that invite the intensity of affect. This book questions the dominance of the capitalocene through the existence of social aesthetic and records the affective encounters that facilitate the creation of planetary identity, affinity, and entanglements. With discussions on architecture, poetry, rap music, romantic literature, performance art, digital fashion, Instagram, Netflix shows, YouTube videos, moving image practices, eco-sexual movements, and graphic narratives, the chapters in this volume initiate a conversation on what it means to inhabit the world today. An important contribution, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of environmental humanities, planetary humanities, affect studies, digital humanities, and media studies, besides also being of interest to those studying interdisciplinary critical/cultural theory, Television and film studies, philosophy, and architectural theory.




Globalization and Planetary Ethics


Book Description

This volume is a critical investigation into the contemporary phenomenon of the dissensus of the globe and the planet, and the new terrains of consciousness that need to be negotiated towards a possibility for transformation. It examines the possibilities of alternate, sustainable modes of being and existing in a world which requires a unified, ethical, biopolitical worldview. The book explores themes like philosophical posthumanism and planetary concerns; disruption of cultural and intellectual inequality; bodily movement through nomadic subjectivity; dystopic spatialities of game(re)play; globalization, and speculative imaginaries of the body; and theory of multiplicity. It also discusses the impact of COVID-19 on human beings, the role of the neoliberal media, the question of rights of robots and cyborgs in sci-fi movies, and representation of refugees in literature. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, political philosophy, cultural studies, literary cultures, post-colonial studies, critical theory, and social anthropology.




Terrains of Consciousness


Book Description

TERRAINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS emerges from an Indian-German-Swiss research collaboration. The book makes a case for a phenomenology of globalization that pays attention to locally situated socioeconomic terrains, everyday practices, and cultures of knowledge. This is exemplified in relation to three topics: - the tension between 'terrain' and 'territory' in Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe' as a pioneering work of the globalist mentality (chapter 1) - the relationship between established conceptions of feminism and the concrete struggles of women in India since the 19th century (chapter 2) - the exploration of urban space and urban life in writings on India's capital - from Ahmed Ali to Arundhati Roy (chapter 3).




Challenges for Digital Citizenship and Ethics: Social Media, Deep Fakes, and Virtual Communities


Book Description

The integration of human rights, social responsibility, and technical innovation acquires significant importance in the current era of digital transformation. As technology rapidly evolves, it profoundly influences societal structures, economic systems, and individual lives. It is essential to examine the impact of digital transformation on human rights and social responsibility, and emphasize the importance of striking a balance that upholds individual rights while leveraging technological advances for the benefit of society as a whole. Challenges for Digital Citizenship and Ethics: Social Media, Deep Fakes, and Virtual Communities analyzes the implications of digitalization on human rights and social responsibility. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this research combines perspectives from the fields of digital ethics, information technology, law, and social sciences. It examines the impact of digital technologies on privacy and data rights, assess the strategies utilized by corporations in the digital age to uphold human rights, and explore the policy and legal frameworks required to assure the ethical adoption of technology. Covering topics such as cybercrimes, digital literacy, and societal dynamics, this book is an excellent resource for policymakers, sociologists, researchers, academicians, educators, students, and more.




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