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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.
Rewiring Bodies: Technology and the Nationalist Moment [2]
This is the third in a series of posts on Asha Achuthan's Rewiring Bodies project. In this post, Asha looks at the Tagore-Gandhi debates on technology to throw some light on the question of whether there was a nationalist alternative to the technology offered by the West.
Rewiring Bodies: Technology and the Nationalist Moment [1]
This is the second post in a series by Asha Achuthan on her project, Rewiring Bodies. In this blog entry, Asha looks at the trajectory of responses to technology in India to understand the genesis of the assumption that the subjects of technology are separate from the tool, machine, or instrument.
Archives and Access: Land, Museum, Legacy
This blog entry is the third in a series of posts on Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijit Bhattacharya's Archives and Access project. The entry, by Rochelle Pinto, describes her visit to a museum of agricultural implements in Goa and touches upon some questions of land use and ownership in Goa and how this would be affected by public access to documents proving land rights.
Transparency and Politics: An Introduction [I]
This is the first in a series of blog posts documenting Zainab Bawa's CIS-RAW project on Transparency and Politics. This post briefly explains how the notion of transparency has developed over time, and the changes that it has been through.
Pleasure and Pornography: Initial Encounters with the Unknown
This blog entry is the first in a series by Namita Malhotra on her CIS-RAW project that is about pornography, Internet, sexuality, law, new media and technology. She aims for this to be a multi media and research project/journey which is able to cite and draw on various sources including legal studies, film studies and philosophy, academic and historical work on sexuality, art, film and pornography itself.
Archive and Access: The Archive and the Indian Historian
This post is the second in a series by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto. It comes to the question of how we can extend some of the questions and concerns that have arisen around contemporary archives to the documentary archive. It argues that the conventional understanding of the print archive as a fragile, irreplaceable national cultural legacy is a limited one and tries instead to rethink questions of ownership and access, issues thrown up in sharp relief by the digital archive.
Archives and Access: Introduction
The members of this research project team are Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore and Abhijit Bhattacharya from the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Calcutta. This intial post tries to outline the concerns underlining this project which will attempt to critically examine archiving practices and policies in India in order to conceptualize ideas about ownership and use towards the goal of the greatest public good; reflect on issues of digitization and access; and facilitate public conversations and the articulation of a collective voice by historians and other users on possible interventions in these institutions.
Justice and Difference - the first talk in 'the monster album of feminist stories'
CIS and 'the monster album of feminist stories', in relation to the Rewiring Bodies project by Asha Achuthan, hosted the first of a series of talks on cognizing feminism at the CIS premises on Cunningham Road on 14th November, 2008.
Launch of Public Juris (An Online Archive of Legal Resources)
Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijit Bhattacharya announce the launch of Public Juris, an online archive of legal resources.
of doctors and maps - Snippet two
This may seem like a careless swipe at the volumes of critique of technology. And yet ... I need to know ...
of doctors and maps - Snippet one
The clinic is not what it was. It is highly technologized, flooded with information systems. But what of the relationships it traditionally supported, between patient and doctor?
Unpacking technology - beginnings
This is a work-in-progress that seeks to inaugurate a field of critical technology studies with the women-technology relationship as a unique entry point of investigation.
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