RAW Main
Re:wiring Bodies: Call for Review
Dr. Asha Achuthan's research project on "Rewiring Bodies" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. From her vantage position, straddling the disciplines of medicine an Cultural Studies, through a gendered perspective. Dr. Achutan historicises the attitudes, imaginations and policies that have shaped the Science-Technology debates in India, to particularly address the ways in which emergence of Internet Technologies have shaped notions of gender and body in India.
A provisional definition for the Cultural Last Mile
In the first of his entries, Ashish Rajadhyaksha gives his own spin on the 'Last Mile' problem that has been at the crux of all public technologies. Shifting the terms of debate away from broadcast problems of distance and access, he re-purposes the 'last mile' which is a communications problem, to make a cultural argument about the role and imagination of technology in India, and the specific ways in which this problem features in talking about Internet Technologies in contemporary India.
Privacy, pornography, sexuality (a video)
The video is an attempt to use the material collected for purposes of provoking a discussion around privacy, pornography, sexuality and technology. It focuses largely on an Indian context, which most viewers would be familiar with. The video is pegged around the ban of Savita Bhabhi – a pornographic comic toon – but uses that to open up a discussion on various incidents and concepts in relation to pornography and privacy across Asia.
Negative of porn
The post deals with what has been written about Savita Bhabhi in an attempt to make sense of her peccadiloes and with the seeming futility of Porn studies located in America to our different reality. I take the liberty of exploring my own experiential account of pornography since I feel that in that account (mine and others) when done seriously, certain aspects of pornography emerge that address questions that are about cinema, images, sex, philosophy and how desire works. The title is mischeviously inspired from Dr. Pek Van Andel's recent video of MRI images of people having sex.
Rethinking the last mile Problem: A cultural argument
This research project, by Ashish Rajadhyaksha from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, is mainly a conceptual-archival investigation into India’s history for what has in recent years come to be known as the ‘last mile’ problem. The term itself comes from communication theory, with in turn an ancestry in social anthropology, and concerns itself with (1) identifying the eventual recipient/beneficiary of any communication message, (2) discovering new ways by which messages can be delivered intact, i.e. without either distortion of decay. Exploring the intersection of government policy, technology intervention and the users' expectations, with a specific focus on Internet Technologies and their space in the good governance protocols in India, the project aims at revisiting the last mile problem as one of cultural practices and political contexts in India.
Alternatives? From situated knowledges to standpoint epistemology
The previous post explored, in detail, responses to science and technology in feminist and gender work in India. The idea was, more than anything else, to present an 'attitude' to technology, whether manifested in dams or obstetric technologies, that sees technology as a handmaiden of development, as instrument - good or evil, and as discrete from 'man'. Feminist and gender work in India has thereafter articulated approximately four responses to technology across state and civil society positions - presence, access, inclusion, resistance. The demand for presence of women as agents of technological change, the demand for improved access for women to the fruits of technology, the demand for inclusion of women as a constituency that must be specially provided for by technological amendments, and a need for recognition of technology’s ills particularly for women, and the consequent need for resistance to technology on the same count. Bearing in mind that women’s lived experiences have served as the vantage point for all four of the responses to technology in the Indian context, I will now suggest the need to revisit the idea of such experience itself, and the ways in which it might be made critical, rather than valorizing it as an official counterpoint to scientific knowledge, and by extension to technology. This post, while not addressing the 'technology question' in any direct sense, is an effort to begin that exploration.
Rewiring Bodies: Methodologies of Critique - Responses to technology in feminist and gender work in India
In this post, part of her CIS-RAW 'Rewiring Bodies' project, Asha Achuthan records the arguments within feminism and gender work that critique the use of technology in the Indian context, and attempts to show continuities between these arguments and postcolonial formulations. Overall, the post also records notions of the 'political' that inform the contour of these critiques.
Archive and Access: Digitisation and Private Records--The Case of the Regional Archive
This is the first in a series of posts by CIS-RAW researcher Aparna Balachandran on the Tamil Nadu Archives (TNA), looking at different aspects of their functioning in order to think about the issue of access in relation to regional archives in the country. More specifically, these posts will engage with the relationship of the TNA with the ways in which history is thought and written about in the Tamil region, both within the academy and outside. These posts are part of the CIS-RAW project 'Archive and Access'.
Pleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects
In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn.
Transparency and Politics: Politically Aware and Participatory Citizenry
In this, her fourth blog post on her CIS-RAW project, Zainab Bawa looks at the notions of Stakeholder and Participation.
Archive and Access: Documents in the Time of Democracy
This is the seventh in a series of blog posts documenting Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijeet Bhattacharya's CIS-RAW project, Archive and Access. In this entry, Rochelle Pinto introduces a sub-set of posts that will look at the political significance of public access to official documents on the internet.
Analysing Wikipedia: A First Attempt at Clustering
In this, their second update on their Analysing Wikipedia project, Kiran Jonnalagadda and Hans Varghese Mathews discuss their first attempt at grouping the various editors of a frequently edited Wikipedia document, each distinguished from the others by some particular interest, through a quick machine process requiring minimal human intervention.
Transparency and Politics: Talk by Barun Mitra
A talk by Barun Mitra, Chairperson of the Liberty Institute, a Delhi-based think tank, was held at CIS recently, organised by Zainab Bawa in relation to her CIS-RAW project on 'Transparency and Politics'. In this post, the third in a series exploring questions of transparency and politics, Zainab reports on the lecture and discussion.
Archive and Access: The Inalienable Right to the Archives - Entering the Capital
This entry complements the prior discussion by Aparna Balachandran of the Delhi State Archives and its status as a repository of records. Her discussion compares the place of the user and that of the document in the Delhi State Archives as opposed to in the National Archives. This post by Rochelle Pinto discusses questions relating to the National Archives of India and other archival entities.
Archive and Access: The Delhi State Archives
In this, the fifth entry in a series on the CIS-RAW Archive and Access project, Aparna Balachandran reports on two state archives located in Delhi, the National Archives of India, and the Delhi Archives.
Postcolonial Hybridity and the ‘Terrors of Technology’ Argument
In the last couple of posts, Asha Achuthan has been building towards an understanding of how the anti-technology arguments in India have been posed, in the nationalist and Marxist positions. She goes on, in this sixth post documenting her project, to look at the arguments put out by the postcolonial school, their appropriation of Marxist terminology, their stances against Marxism in responding to science and technology in general, and the implications of these arguments for other fields of inquiry.
Pleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law
In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.
The (Postcolonial) Marxist Shift in Response to Technology
In her previous post, Asha Achuthan discussed, through the Gandhi-Tagore debates, the responses to science and technology that did not follow the dominant Marxist-nationalist positions. Later Marxist-postcolonial approaches to science and responses to technology were conflated in anti-technology arguments, particularly in development. In this post, the fifth in a series on her project, she will briefly trace the 1980s shift in Marxist thinking in India as a way of approaching the shift in the science and technology question. This exercise will reveal the ambivalence in Marxist practice toward continuing associations between the ‘rational-scientific’ on the one hand and the ‘revolutionary’ on the other.
Analysing Wikipedia: An Introduction
Kiran Jonnalagadda and Hans Varghese Matthews introduce their project, aimed at producing tools that will allow anyone to analyse editing behaviour on Wikipedia. This is the first in a series of posts documenting their work.
Transparency and Politics: An Introduction [II]
In this post, the second in a series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Zainab Bawa explains how transparency is embedded in particular institutional contexts. This impacts the ways in which transparency materially manifests and also has implications for administrative politics.
Document Actions
