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Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List, Jan 30 - Feb 1, Lamakaan
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list
<b>Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions. IRC19 will be organised in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, during January 30 - February 1, 2019.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Venue: <a href="http://www.lamakaan.com/" target="_blank">Lamakaan</a>, Off Road 1, Near GVK Mall, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad 500034</h4>
<h4>Location: <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/grVp3tKUGiu" target="_blank">Google Maps</a></h4>
<h4>Conference Programme: <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CIS_India/irc19-list-conference-programme" target="_blank">Read</a> (SlideShare) and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-conference-programme/at_download/file">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Code of Conduct and Friendly Space Policy: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-code-of-conduct-and-friendly-space-policy/at_download/file" target="_blank">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Poster: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list/image" target="_blank">Download</a> (JPG)</h4>
<h4>Registration: Directly at the venue, it is a free and open conference</h4>
<hr />
<h3><strong>IRC19: #List</strong></h3>
<p>For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the <em>list</em> in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the <em>list</em> as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated <em>list</em> of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a <em>list</em> that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft <em>lists</em> and their revisions. NRC is producing a <em>list</em> with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a <em>list</em> of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a <em>list</em> to connect/aggregate other <em>lists</em>, a <em>meta-list</em>.</p>
<p>From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, <em>lists</em> have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The <em>list</em> - in terms of <em>list</em> of people receiving a message, <em>list</em> of machines connecting to a router or a tower, <em>list</em> of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the <em>list</em>, as <a href="http://amodern.net/article/on-lists-and-networks/" target="_blank">Liam Young documents</a>, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.</p>
<p>As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the <em>list</em> becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.</p>
<ul>
<li>Who makes lists?</li>
<li>How are lists made?</li>
<li>Who can be on a list, and who is missing?</li>
<li>Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?</li>
<li>What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?</li>
<li>What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?</li>
<li>What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?</li>
<li>What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?</li>
<li>What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?</li>
<li>What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?</li>
<li>What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?</li>
<li>What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?</li>
<li>How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?</li>
<li>Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?</li>
<li>Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?</li></ul>
<p>For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.</p>
<h3><strong>Sessions</strong></h3>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah" target="_blank">#AyushmanBhavah</a></strong> - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-butitisnotfunny" target="_blank">#ButItIsNotFunny</a></strong> - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin" target="_blank">#CallingOutAndIn</a></strong> - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy" target="_blank">#EnlistingPrivacy</a></strong> - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo" target="_blank">#FOMO</a></strong> - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists" target="_blank">#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design</a></strong> - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface" target="_blank">#ListInterface</a></strong> - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed" target="_blank">#LoSHAandWhatFollowed</a></strong> - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting" target="_blank">#PowerListing</a></strong> - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals" target="_blank">#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals</a></strong> - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh</p>
<h3><strong>Papers</strong></h3>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers#brindaalakshmi" target="_blank">Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature</a></strong> - Brindaalakshmi.K</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers#gayas" target="_blank">De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods</a></strong> - Gayas Eapen</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers#monish-ranjit" target="_blank">Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC</a></strong> - Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh</p>
<h3><strong>About the IRC Series</strong></h3>
<p>Researchers and practitioners across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, conceptualisations, and boundaries.</p>
<p>The researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) initiated the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) series to address these concerns, and to create an annual temporary space in India, for internet researchers to gather and share experiences.</p>
<p>The IRC series is driven by the following interests:</p>
<ul>
<li>creating discussion spaces for researchers and practitioners studying internet in India and in other comparable regions,</li>
<li>foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India,</li>
<li>accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and</li>
<li>exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) objects of power/knowledge.</li></ul>
<p>The <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16" target="_blank">first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference</a> series was held in February 2016. It was hosted by the <a href="https://www.jnu.ac.in/SSS/CPS/" target="_blank">Centre for Political Studies</a> at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund. The <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17" target="_blank">second Internet Researchers' Conference</a> was organised in partnership with the <a href="http://citapp.iiitb.ac.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy</a> (CITAPP) at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus on March 03-05, 2017. The <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc18" target="_blank">third Internet Researchers' Conference</a> was organised at the <a href="http://www.sambhaavnaa.org/" target="_blank">Sambhaavnaa Institute</a>, Kandbari (Himachal Pradesh) during February 22-24, 2018, and the theme of the conference was *offline*.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at WorkEvent2019-01-31T06:41:38ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Selected Sessions and Papers
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers
<b>Here is the list of selected sessions and papers for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19) - #List. IRC19 will be held in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, from Jan 30 to Feb 1, 2019. The conference announcement, along with the final agenda, will be published on Monday, January 7.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call" target="_blank">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers" target="_blank">Call for Papers</a></h4>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions" target="_blank">List of Proposed Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Selected Sessions</h4>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah" target="_blank">#AyushmanBhavah</a> - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-butitisnotfunny" target="_blank">#ButItIsNotFunny</a> - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin" target="_blank">#CallingOutAndIn</a> - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy" target="_blank">#EnlistingPrivacy</a> - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo" target="_blank">#FOMO</a> - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists" target="_blank">#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design</a> - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha <strong>(9 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface" target="_blank">#ListInterface</a> - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince <strong>(7 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed" target="_blank">#LoSHAandWhatFollowed</a> - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose <strong>(7 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting" target="_blank">#PowerListing</a> - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana <strong>(10 votes)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals" target="_blank">#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals</a> - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh <strong>(11 votes)</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h4>Selected Papers</h4>
<p id="brindaalakshmi"><strong>Brindaalakshmi.K</strong></p>
<p><strong><em>Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature</em></strong></p>
<p>In July 2009, the Delhi High Court legalised homosexual acts among consenting adults. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court of India held that homosexuality between two consenting adults was illegal and reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This section was reinstated under the pretext of the LGBTIQA+ community being a minuscule minority. The Supreme Court saw this as insufficient for declaring that Section 377 as going against Article 14, 15 and 21. However, on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India passed the historic verdict reading down Section 377 to decriminalise homosexuality in India. In the time between 2013 and 2018, the LGBTIQA+ community struggled to their presence and rights. Different groups and organisations have worked on this.</p>
<p>One such collectives has been Orinam, an all-volunteer unregistered Chennai-based collective. Started in 2003, Orinam among other things, has also been recording queer experiences on its website since Dec 2005. These experiences of queer people and their families have been recorded in Tamil and English on Orinam’s blog, Our Voices as poetry, fiction, news, views, podcasts and reviews. The website also archives queer events in India through The Orinam Photo archives. Orinam has also been archiving the legal developments with respect to the rights of LGBTIQA+ community. This included legal documents, landmark verdicts, letters written by the family of queer individuals in multiple Indian languages to the Supreme Court to read down Section 377, among others <strong>[1]</strong>. These listings along with others, in turn also contributed to building the case for the legal battle to eventually read down Section 377.</p>
<p>This paper looks specifically at the functioning of Orinam based in Chennai that uses lists in a way to support a marginalised community acknowledging their realities and also keeping them alive in different ways. This is being done through its support resources, peer support, activism or archiving queer experiences in the form of literature and other media, both online and offline. This paper will trace Orinam’s work through the fifteen years of its existence as a listing and archiving platform supporting the LGBTIQA+ community.</p>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Orinam@15: talk delivered at 15th Anniversary Celebrations. Dec 23, 2018</p>
<p><em>Brindaalakshmi is a member/volunteer of the Chennai based queer collective, Orinam; and is currently working with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, on a study on 'Gendering of Development Data in India'.</em></p>
<p id="gayas"><strong>Gayas Eapen</strong></p>
<p><strong><em>De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods</em></strong></p>
<p>Natural disasters can be crucial time for making lists: of people in need of assistance, rescue, support, relief and other similar disaster-related operations. In lists concerning rescue, being on the list and not being on it could mean the difference of life and death. In which case it is important to consider: how do the processes which make such lists possible come about? How do they ensure that people are not left out of these lists? How they do they sort out redundancies? I study the lists made during the Kerala floods of 2018 to attempt to answer some of these questions.</p>
<p>As rescue requests started piling up on social media, a group of volunteers set up the web portal, keralarerscue.in, which later became the central database of all the rescue requests. The portal was unique in two fronts. First, the developers building the portal were volunteers from the community instead of being the state employees, but, nonetheless, worked in coordination with the the government and rescue agencies along with the feedback they were getting from people. Second, the rescue requests were being crowdsourced from people directly. This led to the duplication of requests, it wasn’t until much later that it was realized that crowdsourced information was not coming directly from the victims, but from people who were placing requests on their behalf.</p>
<p>In this paper I argue how feedback from the community, coupled with the personal investment of the programmers lead to improvements in the structuring and use of the database. I will delineate the concerns of de-duplication (process of removing redundancies) which posed a serious dilemma, of either deleting crucial information hence posing danger to people’s lives, or incurring loss of precious resources in chasing repeated rescue requests.</p>
<p>I argue that the streamlining of programming operations by developing methods such as ticketing system (of labelling the urgency or marking completion of rescue requests by telephonically confirming them) were made possible because of a participatory model of building lists. Those involved in the technical creation of the lists identified closely with the experiences of the people stuck in the flood. The solution, which involved not deleting names of people but instead undertaking another painstaking scrutinizing operation even in a time sensitive environment, can be placed in stark contrast to how lists have been created by state or corporate agencies in similar crucial situations.</p>
<p><em>Gayas is an assistant professor of English and Journalism (as part of the Resident Expert Panel, 2018-19) at Dayapuram Arts and Science College, Kozhikode, University of Calicut.</em></p>
<p id="monish-ranjit"><strong>Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh</strong></p>
<p><strong><em>Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC</em></strong></p>
<p>This paper focuses on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as a case study to discuss legal and administrative challenges in categorizing Assamese residents as citizens of India. At a fundamental level, lists manifest a binary of categories: people who are on the list and others who are not. However, the process of achieving this binary distinction, especially in the exercise of updating NRC, has required bureaucratic accounting of a wide variety of Assameseresidents who neither are completely on the list nor completely off it. This paper specifically focuses on instances of inclusion and exclusion of three categories of Assamese residents in the process of updating the NRC: (i) Original Inhabitants (OI), (ii) Doubtful Voters (D-Voters), and (ii) Women applicants who have been excluded from the list because of the lack of appropriate bureaucratic documents. As an administrative exercise, the NRC as a citizen identification project is a moment where temporalities of NRC as a classification system does not map onto the individual biographies of a variety of Assamese residents as outlined above. In such moments of ‘torque’ (Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting things out: Classifications and its consequences, 2000), listing (or the process of making a list) is not simply bureaucratic accounting; it is also a lived experience of mismatch and the struggle that follows in efforts to secure representation through listing. We show that while the NRC update in
Assam may itself be driven by anxieties around illegal immigration, the attempts to technologically, legally, and politically categorize the ‘other’ using the information infrastructure of NRC have profound consequences on the ‘self’ of India as a nation state.</p>
<p><em>Monish is a Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, India; and Ranjit is a PhD candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Internet and Society, India.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p>The sessions have been selected based on the votes submitted by all the session teams (that proposed a session for IRC19). Please find details of this process in the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call" target="_blank">Call for Sessions</a> page. The papers have been selected by the researchers@work team.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC192019-01-21T12:11:35ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Call for Papers
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers
<b>Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list*. </b>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Call for Papers</strong></h3>
<h4>For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.</h4>
<p>Paper abstracts (of not more than 500 words) are to be submitted by <strong>Sunday, December 23</strong> via email sent to <strong>raw@cis-india.org</strong>.</p>
<p>Authors of selected paper abstracts will be informed by Monday, December 31, and will be expected to present the full paper (either in person, or remotely) at the IRC19 - #List, to be held in Hyderabad during Jan 31 - Feb 2, 2019.</p>
<p>Selected paper authors, who are unemployed or underemployed, will be offered support to cover travel expenses fully/partially.</p>
<p>The only eligibility criteria for submitting papers is that they must engage with the thematic of the conference - *list*.</p>
<h3><strong>IRC19: List</strong></h3>
<p>For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.</p>
<p>From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.</p>
<p>As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.</p>
<ul>
<li>Who makes lists?</li>
<li>How are lists made?</li>
<li>Who can be on a list, and who is missing?</li>
<li>Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?</li>
<li>What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?</li>
<li>What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?</li>
<li>What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?</li>
<li>What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?</li>
<li>What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?</li>
<li>What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?</li>
<li>What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?</li>
<li>What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?</li>
<li>How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?</li>
<li>Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?</li>
<li>Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC192018-12-06T07:00:30ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals
<b>Details of a session proposed by Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>All our tangible history can be attributed to our records-making going back to when the records were literally set in stone, so to say, archived using human digits (digital heritage!). Oral traditions such as songs, stories and recitals, performative traditions, arts and other cultural expressions that reaffirm of our collective experiences remain intangible. Stories create Legends, Rituals physically embody the legends through performances, Records attempt to freeze time at a moment. Thereby characterizing culture and memories of a community. Our effort here is to visit and discuss who creates the records, discuss the affordance of lists as an information artefact for exchange, facilitating dialogue and collective meaning-making. We peek at the traditional community of Helavaru as map and genealogy tellers, their legends, rituals / performances and the cultural economy involved in making and circulating the archives of cultural memories in contrast with the technology driven formulation of lists that are founding the Internet culture. Allegorically, if the memory of stone as a medium of a message is still alive in us, how are people included and who all are excluded from our “memories”.</p>
<p>Our session would be a performative through experimental list artefacts that intend to make visible the interplay between the form of the information artefact and the content. How do we perceive information when the form of the list changes. The implicit structure of lists is suggestive of a certain order, priority and disconnected connections. We intend to play with those structures, breaking them and making new ones in the process. What do we call a list? and what does it do?</p>
<ul>
<li>Priyanka and Aditya will bring "poetic" list artefacts that juxtapose traditional aspects of list making and lists as a dynamic phenomenon on the internet (ex. #Metoo).<br /><br /></li>
<li>Bhanu will introduce the traditional storytelling community of Helavaru as list performers.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Aishwarya will bring in the current context of social auditing and the stories from the ground today, from a rural context.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Dinesh will illustrate 3 ways list are formulated today mathematically, socially and technologically.</li></ul>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Priyanka</strong> is a new media artist-researcher, currently engaged with Microsoft as an interaction designer. While at Microsoft she solves design problems for the browser, her personal inquiries run deep into understanding people’s lives on the internet, nature of the digital-materiality and its affordances for expression and exchange in networked societies.</p>
<p><strong>Aditya</strong> is a designer and an entrepreneur always thinking of ways to display information beautifully. Lately he has been working on interfaces for lists to provide a clear stream of reason to anyone through simple model(s) of visualisation of information and, therefore attempt to make knowledge more accessible.</p>
<p>Priyanka and Aditya intends to play with the form of lists to investigate its effect on narrative construction. They will bring in “poetic-lists” - experimental list artefacts that probe into the implicit order and biases that lists bring to the act of meaning making, especially in the context of a collective audience.</p>
<p><strong>Bhanu Prakash GS</strong> - As Web application developer at Servelots(.com), he contributes to the open and free software, and has been working on developing tools for delivering visual stories from archives. He has worked with the NCBS@25 project titled “13 Ways” where stories from the history of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Democracy Archives for University of Gottingen, and also on methods to render the folk stories of Vijayadashami rituals into visual stories on the Web.</p>
<p>Bhanu introduces the ways the Helavaru community, in the pre-internet era, created, “circulated” and mutated Lists of names, facts and events forming the information networks of communities, castes, jaatis, clans, tribes. The Helavas are a nomadic community visible around Karnataka and Andhra who deck up their bullocks and carts, set out to the villages of their patrons to sing praises of great deeds of their forefathers and the genealogy of the families with great detail, and end their performance with a ritual Harike - a wish for the well being of their patrons. In return they are paid for their services with grains, clothes, goat, sheep, cow, bullocks and money as much as one can afford.</p>
<p>Their story is an indicator of the cultural economy, of interweaving a web of communities, their systems of socio-political-cultural organisation by developing competence in data indexing, backups and restores, dealing with identity and authentication, conflicts and negotiations and more from generation to generation. The Helavaru claim that each family recorded genealogy of at least 3 lakh families, and passing it on, and also losing in some cases is fascinating.</p>
<p><strong>Aishwarya</strong> is a Communication Strategist at the Society for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT) - Andhra Pradesh, Department of Rural Development, Government of Telangana. SSAAT has been set-up with a vision to uphold the concept of eternal vigilance by the people, facilitated by social activists and Government acting in conjunction.</p>
<p>A social audit is a standardised way of facilitating people to critique the implementation of a welfare scheme, and demand accountability from the government. It is a powerful tool which enables people to come forward, demand information, question officials, and fight for their rightful deliverables of a government scheme. This mechanism ensures transparency in the way a government functions, and has helped recover a lot of money lost to corruption.</p>
<p>In India, a Supreme Court mandate made the social audits of MGNREGS compulsory in all states. However, Social Audit units have been successful in empowering the people only in a few states. While the SAU facilitates an audit, it is conducted by people from the families of the beneficiaries. One social audit is a 15-day process of record verifications, door-to-door verifications, awareness rallies, a Gram Sabha and a Public Hearing. While a social audit ensures accountability, it lacks the guarantee of enforcement. The different layers of bureaucracy often swallows the essence of public participation and grievance redressal does not have follow-ups.</p>
<p>All grievances are recorded in the form of paras in the social audit database. While our on-ground social auditors may be socially and politically aware enough to observe and call out patterns in caste and gender discrimination, the results remain, but in a list on the MIS.</p>
<p><strong>Dinesh</strong> is part of Janastu team - a non-profit group. The team is eager to help address Web content accessibility for the low-literate using social semantic web concepts and are also looking at 3D methods for spatial navigation, location interpretation and storytelling. Janastu engages with software commons by developing and supporting open source social platforms.</p>
<p>Dinesh, with a Computer Science background, will bring list comprehension to this platform using map/reduce, monads, and blockchain as the technical formalisms that make the Internet work and how people are made to toe these invisible lines. Then initiate discussions on Machine Learning within the history of page ranking and how the who, where, what of lists manifest. This will be contextualized with the traditional, the social and the new media social networks and processes that nurture community memory by tuning the semantic distance needed for privacy and by making room for forgetting in ways that communities heal from trauma.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-28T15:55:24ZBlog EntryIRC19 - List of Proposed Sessions
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions
<b>Here is the list of sessions proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call" target="_blank">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah" target="_blank">#AyushmanBhavah</a> - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-butitisnotfunny" target="_blank">#ButItIsNotFunny</a> - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin" target="_blank">#CallingOutAndIn</a> - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-digitalplatformattributes" target="_blank">#DigitalPlatformAttributes</a> - Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy" target="_blank">#EnlistingPrivacy</a> - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo" target="_blank">#FOMO</a> - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists" target="_blank">#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design</a> - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface" target="_blank">#ListInterface</a> - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase" target="_blank">#ListsAsDatabase</a> - Ria De and Samata Biswas</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed" target="_blank">#LoSHAandWhatFollowed</a> - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting" target="_blank">#PowerListing</a> - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice" target="_blank">#SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice</a> - Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals" target="_blank">#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals</a> - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh</h4>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-28T15:40:58ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice
<b>Details of a session proposed by Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>2017 saw the sudden emergence of the hashtag #metoo, both in India and across the world. This has impacted not just the general public of the internet, but also the global movement women's rights movement and feminist discourse around sexual assault, gender and consent. #MeToo allowed (female) survivors of harassment to resort to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as a tool to accuse powerful men of sexual harassment. In 2017, we saw this with Rose McGowan who tweeted about Harvey Weinstein or Raya Sarkar who released #LoSHA, which further erupted in late 2018 into a larger wave of ‘outing’ of Indian perpetrators in media, politics, and other areas of work.</p>
<p>With #LoSHA and the 2018 wave of #metoo in India, there have been a gamut of responses, even some amount of polarisation, especially among Indian civil society. During #LoSHA, we observed resistance from traditional legal and Human Rights activists and practitioners against acknowledging the unique impact of ‘survivors’ testimonies on social media’ for fear of validating a method that lies outside of ‘due process’ and ‘fair trial’. They reason that due to the ungoverned nature of social media, its platforms are without checks and balances and therefore cannot regulate arbitrary misuse. However, one can argue that social media platforms are indeed regulated by the service providers who have the ultimate power to censor complainants by simply suspending or expelling them from the platform altogether. This became evident when Twitter silenced Rose McGowan and Facebook, Raya Sarkar, promptly after their testimonies began to gather accelerated traction. Thus, the accused may always appeal to the ultimate gatekeepers, the platform providers themselves. It is precisely due to the above stated reasons, that the 2017-2018 wave of social media testimonies has garnered considerable support from a typically contemporary civil society, who recognise the disruption as powerful despite the gaps in the methodology.</p>
<p><strong>Our Proposal</strong></p>
<p>The tentative proposal is for our team of 2 researchers to carry out a 15-20 minute lightning talk (a conversation or debate) providing a landscape analysis of #metoo, raising specific points of discussion and interest. Following this, we will open up the discussion with the audience in the form of multiple roundtable conversations, which will seek to address the following 2 questions:</p>
<ol>
<li>If survivors of sexual harassment are resorting to social media as a ‘means’, or their choice of instrument, what does this imply about the existing fora for due process?<br /><br /></li>
<li>New and emergent imaginaries/perspectives around the end of ‘justice’ that may lie outside the contours of conventional legal frameworks i.e. to what ‘end’ are these survivors disposed?</li></ol>
<p>Our session aims at working towards the following outcomes:</p>
<ol>
<li>A comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of phenomenon of social media - mediation of justice<br /><br /></li>
<li>A current and expanded understanding of 'justice' that is not bound by legal recourse</li></ol>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Esther Anne Victoria Moraes</strong> (Communications Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist and researcher who is passionate about expanding the discourse on the evolving forms of rights-based movements. At TYPF, Esther works on building feminist leadership through on-ground programming and on research on youth movements. Esther also works with on communication and public advocacy around issues of health, rights and youth leadership with a focus on young girls and adolescents. She coordinates online and on-ground public advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and rights and access to information through TYPF's national-level campaign, Know Your Body, Know Your Rights.</p>
<p><strong>Manasa Priya Vasudevan</strong> (Programme Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist researcher who is passionate about the theory and praxis of social justice in an increasingly internet-mediated world, especially in the context of urbanization and datafication. She has undertaken research and advocacy on issues at the intersections of information communication technologies and social justice, primarily in the area of internet governance. She has actively engaged with international multi-sectoral movement building and strategy, both online and offline. At TYPF, she manages the Know your body know your rights programme. Prior to this, she worked at IT for Change in Bengaluru.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:22:52ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #PowerListing
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting
<b>Details of a session proposed by Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>#PowerListing: Approaches towards an understanding of power dynamics of knowledge creation and agency behind ‘listing’ as exercised by the State, Individuals and Corporations</p>
<p>‘Lists’ come with an ontological mandate of organising information in a structured and hierarchical manner. This has a deliberate aspect with respect to the question of power. Our panel attempt to investigate the question of power in terms of who wields it and what implications, philosophically and materially, this lands on the stakeholders thereof. The questions of power have different insinuation when the agency of the ‘listing’ rests with the state, the individual or if it is folded within the operational matrix of a corporate service.</p>
<p>Our panel attempts to bring all these myriad conversations together to try and unpack the various nuances of this discussion on power around ‘lists’. Listed below is the detailed breakdown of this plan:</p>
<p><strong>Paper 1: Digital Lists and List-making in Post-disaster Contexts</strong> [Prof. Shubhda Arora]</p>
<p>Looking at crowd sourcing of lists for humanitarian and relief purposes, this paper explores list making and circulation in a post-disaster context, specifically looking at aspects of public list making and its challenges of credibility and duplicity. The paper further examines the interaction between these ‘unofficial’ lists and intervention agencies namely the Government, Army and NGOs, which prepare their own ‘official’ lists for purposes of relief and rehabilitation. Lists of missing people, of people being marked safe, of relief material and centres, of monetary aid, of loss in terms of human life, land and money are the different kinds of lists prepared and circulated through media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram among others. The constant revision of lists based on localized information and on-ground data, the compilation of master list from various sources of lists and the problem of ‘fake lists’ need further inquiry to understand digital list making after a disaster.</p>
<p><strong>Paper 2: Identity frameworks and #MeToo in India</strong> [Prof. Nidhi Kalra]</p>
<p>When Lawrence Grossberg argued that "Cultural studies needs to move towards a model of articulation as 'transformative practice', as a singular becoming of a community", he likely did not anticipate what became the #MeToo movement. Concerns of identity-transformation, community creation, and activism spread over social has been termed as arm-chair slactivism. Yet, we are witness and participant in a movement whose terrains and possibilities are forming as we read and write. Just a few hours before writing this piece news came of Tarana Burke, the founder of #MeToo claims that she is wary that the movement will need "to shift the narrative that it’s a gender war, that it’s anti-male, that it’s men against women, that it’s only for a certain type of person — that it’s for white, cisgender, heterosexual, famous women. That has to shift."</p>
<p>In the Indian context, #MeToo has been the vehicle of a movement with many identities linked to it--from scholars, politicians, celebrities, to Dalit female students, to women and men in the Media industry. Considering it is such a historic moment in internet history, it is important for us to use the lens of cultural studies to ask what this wave of activism does vis-a-vis identity production/transformation? What the sites of contestation around the concern of identity as it used in the #MeToo movement in India? This talk will hope to open dialogue about recording, transcribing and understand this moment and it's frameworks of identity.</p>
<p><strong>Paper 3: “Making” the (ethnic) citizen: NRC list as State power and anxiety</strong> [Prof. Smitana Saikia]</p>
<p>In borderland regions of modern nation states, the ontological status of legal subjects is often fraught with competing assertions. In India’s northeastern state of Assam, this is particularly true due to a historical movement of peoples from Bangladesh (then East Bengal/Pakistan). Assam’s own nativist movement against “illegal” immigrants in 1980s (both popular and an armed resistance) catapulted the issue into national prominence thereby reiterating the anxiety that nation-states feel while defining and interpellating its citizens, in an Althusserian sense. In this context, the NRC emerges as a tool to affect order in what remains a contested terrain of citizenship. This paper thus situates the NRC in the interacting landscape of the Indian nation-state’s attempt to “identify” (and hence create) citizens on one hand, and on the other, the Assamese elite’s attempt to create the ethnic “other” to consolidate and preserve political power. The paper argues that the state’s need to create a register (list) of citizens is at once a display of its hegemonic power, as it is also reflective of an acute anxiety inherent to projects of constructing (nation-) states.</p>
<p><strong>Paper 4: ‘Congratulations you got a match’-- The embedded listing within the dating app ‘Tinder’ & its implications thereof</strong> [Prof. Ravikant Kisana]</p>
<p>The process of ‘listing’ involves the act of segregating and organising data. This involves questions of power. Who makes the lists and to what end— the state or the subversive, with what motivations, are important points of investigation and discussion. However, such an operational understanding of a ‘list’ assumes a mechanical agency in the ‘listing’ process. This paper looks to investigate the digital apps and services which are based on automated listing and hierarchical segregation of its subscribers. Google, Facebook, Uber, etc— all contain within the folds of their operational code, an algorithmic listing of data. The researcher will seek to explore this nuance in the context of dating app ‘Tinder’, which now offers three levels possible dating matches that have been ‘listed’ and curated automatically. This paper will seek to interview users of the app and try to map the ideas and anxieties around such a digital listing of their very identity profiles.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Dr. Shubhda Arora</strong> is currently working as assistant professor of media and communication at FLAME University, Pune after having completed her doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad . Her doctoral thesis is in the area of Environmental and Disaster Risk Communication.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Smitana Saikia</strong> is an assistant professor of Politics at FLAME University, Pune. She has received her PhD from King’s College London and her thesis studied long term state and identity formation processes to explain conflict in India’s northeast. Her research interests include ethnic conflicts, borderlands, federalism, and caste and electoral politics in India.</p>
<p><strong>Prof. Nidhi Kalra</strong> has been a learning facilitator since 2008. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at FLAME University, Pune. Prior to that, she has taught at the English Department in Savitribai Phule Pune University and Gargi College in the University of Delhi. Nidhi has received her MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi, for which she worked on problematizing Holocaust memoirs. Her research interests include Memory Studies, Trauma Studies, Oral History, Digital Humanities, and Children’s/Young Adult Literature.</p>
<p><strong>Prof. Ravikant Kisana</strong> is currently the Co-Chair of Humanities & Languages at Flame University, Pune. He has previously completed his doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad. His doctoral research focused on the oral histories of Bollywood cinema in Kashmir, and its intersections with Kashmiri nationalism and resistance. His areas of research focus on the sociology of cinema, gender & sexuality intersections with films & new media platforms, as well as investigations into the structural mores of cybercultures.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:22:03ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #LoSHAandWhatFollowed
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed
<b>Details of a session proposed by Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>In an attempt to initiate a conversation around #LoSHA, a group of more than twenty students of Ambedkar University, Delhi, organised a series of events in April 2018, under the campaign <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/2039293892992857/">‘Questioning The Silence’</a>. While the primary focus of the initiative was to point to the cultures of sexual harassment in academia, concerns were also raised around the immediate reception of the LoSHA. What the crowdsourced LoSHA by Raya Sarkar, a law student and an Ambedkarite feminist, triggered were a series of responses, including the <a href="https://kafila.online/2017/10/24/statement-by-feminists-on-facebook-campaign-to-name-and-shame/">Kafila statement</a>; the second list which was made public on Facebook under the pseudonym Malati Kumari, and later deleted; followed by other lists and sexual harassment accusations in different workspaces; institutional backlash, as the LoSHA accused ‘trusted’ men in positions of power in academic spaces. Many also questioned the credentials of the list or chose to remain silent altogether.</p>
<p>Coming from an experience of institutionally engaging with the #LoSHA through the #questionthesilence campaign, we propose to conduct a session that seeks to theorize the ‘list’ as a document, the particularity of its form, and list as a medium and a message. What goes into the making of a list, and what are the kind of subjectivities produced through it? How does social media as an internet platform, in the preparation and circulation of the list, determine the discourses that emerge from it? Further, we want to explore the various possibilities of solidarity networks and feminist practices that have emerged post-LoSHA. Given the possibilities of new intimacies and relationships that liberal spaces open up, how have the debates around the LoSHA questioned the contemporary feminist understanding of sexual harassment and violation in these spaces? How has the existing imagination of gender justice been challenged by the LoSHA?</p>
<p>In an attempt to address these questions, we propose a session with three components. The first part will be a paper presentation which will theoretically engage with the concept of a list. It will explore whether ‘list’ as a medium can define the message, and perhaps mark its limits. It will critically engage with the LoSHA in the larger background of #MeToo with respect to questions around scope for subjectivity in list-making, its potential in questioning power and the ‘due process’ in place, politics around its making, and some of its limitations in addressing the issue of sexual harassment. The second part entails a curated panel discussion with the session organizers as panelists, wherein we will thematically engage with the responses to the #LoSHA, as crowdsourced through our social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter in the month of December. Speaking about the shortcomings of our past engagement, we see a need to approach the LoSHA from different vantage points. The third part of the session will be a poster exhibition, partly curated during the campaign itself, that seeks to demonstrate the kind of problematic remarks normalised under the garb of progressive pedagogy in liberal academic spaces.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Anannya Chatterjee</strong> is a trained Bharatnatyam dancer, a Hindustani classical singer and a theatre artist. She is a part of Sar-e-raahguzar, an endeavour to talk about love, resistance, hate crimes and freedom on the streets by employing the art forms she practices. She holds a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and has written her Masters’ dissertation titled <em>Love, Passion, Peril: A Feminist Understanding of Abuse in Heterosexual Romantic relationships in India</em>. She has also been a member of <em>Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks</em>, and believes in bringing together her art with her feminist politics.</p>
<p><strong>Arunima Singh</strong> holds a Bachelors deree in History form Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has worked as a freelance writer, model, game show host, and is currently working with Swiggy in Sales and Accounts Management. She is a member of <em>Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks</em>. She also plans to one day follow her dream of becoming the Jon Stewart of India. She worked on the figure of Bharat Mata for her MA thesis titled: <em>Clothing Womanhood - meanings of modesty and tradition: from colonial modernity to the contemporary</em>, and wishes to work on studying and deconstructing the discourses around oppression and modesty in her future studies.</p>
<p><strong>Bhanu Priya Gupta</strong> is an M.Phil. student in Women and Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), who has been invested in issues of gender, sexuality and mental health. She has previously worked with Indian Social Institute on social conflict among dalit women in rural Haryana. She is a freelance facilitator on gender, violence and identity formation, with People for Parity, and has conducted gender and capacity building workshops in urban and rural Rajasthan with adolescent school children, middle-aged women and village stakeholders. She has also attended training programmes on gender, sexuality and rights, at Crea and TARSHI. She is currently working on physical disability, sexuality and the emergence of disability life writing in India.</p>
<p><strong>Renu Singh</strong> is a doctoral candidate in Women and Gender Studies Program at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Study (CWDS). She holds an M.Phil. degree in Public Health from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her interdisciplinary training has allowed her to work in the development sector for eight years, while she has also been associated with sexual harassment complaints committees at some of the academic institutions she has been a part of. She is involved with the women’s movement for almost 15 years, especially in Delhi, on issues around social reproduction, affect and care, gender & sexuality, intimacy, love and interpersonal lives. She has also been involved in student politics and is an active member of New Socialist Initiative (NSI) and <em>Stree Mukti Sangathan</em>. She is currently working on higher education, young women’s aspirations and interpersonal ties in the backdrop of liberalization.</p>
<p><strong>Rhea Bose</strong> did her Bachelors in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and holds a Masters’ degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Until recently, she was working at Centre for Social Research, Delhi. Her interest in the field of gender has manifested in different ways, including participation in the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS) where she presented a paper on women in global politics, conducting workshops on gender sensitization in schools as a part of an initiative called <em>Khalbali</em>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:21:01ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListsAsDatabase
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase
<b>Details of a session proposed by Ria De and Samata Biswas for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>The internet-based List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA), initiated by Dalit feminist and lawyer activist Raya Sarkar in 2017 anonymously crowd-sourced names of academics and activists who were accused of harassing women colleagues and students. While a large number of women in the academia rallied in support of the list and its motivations, it also unleashed anxieties about how the list was put together, and the kind of impact it was feared to have. Variously, it has been equated to Khap Panchayats, vigilantism, mob lynchings etc. Last month, the government of India launched an online National Database on Sexual Offenders (NDSO), which will contain the details—names, photographs, residential address, fingerprints, DNA samples, PAN and Aadhar numbers—of individuals convicted on charges of sexual offences against women and children. An associated portal, the Cyber Crime Prevention Against Women and Children (CCPWC) was also launched where citizens can enter complaints against child pornography and other sexually explicit material. Both are modes of digital enlisting through the use of new media technologies, one that is open access and therefore available for modification, co-option and critique, while the other is to be accessible only to law personnel. This two-member panel locates the list in the context of ongoing debates about the conversion of social justice and rights issues in to data repositories. We take in to account the debates on the Right to be Forgotten or the right to delist from the internet, as a specific concern raised in the Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 submitted by the Justice B.N. Krishna Committee. The Bill recognises data principals (or the individuals to whom personal data belongs) as a central component of the legal framework, and subjects data fiduciaries (or agencies seeking to collect, use and process personal data) to the free, informed and explicit consent of the data principals. Right to be Forgotten has clearly emerged as a logical extension of the demands for one’s Right to Privacy. Given that a number of logics, that of ‘naming and shaming’ of offenders, a digital list (database) as a means of communication, dissemination of information and surveillance etc. underscore both the #LoSHA and the NDSO, how do we navigate the messy terrain of human rights concerns about the freedom of speech and expression on the one hand, and the rights to privacy on the other hand? We also think about this vis-a-vis the larger issues related to the data economy and those of data ownership. We refer to studies on state-generated data on crime in India and elsewhere to understand how such data artefacts can be monopolised and processed by private and non-governmental agencies, and how they co-opt contemporary feminist politics and articulations?</p>
<p>We, Samata Biswas and Ria De, will present a collaborative study, organised across two 30 minute long papers, plus a 15 minute discussion time for each totalling to the mandated 90 minute session. The first paper will study the form and scope of the list as a digital artefact through a detailed analysis of the #LoSHA and the NDSO. The second paper will configure the two lists in terms of their status within the data economy.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Ria De</strong> is pursuing her PhD in Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research was about stardom and intermediality. She is interested in popular culture, network and media studies and gender. Currently, she is interested in the women’s movements in the Indian film industries.</p>
<p><strong>Samata Biswas</strong> teaches English Literature at Bethune College, Kolkata, India. Her doctoral research was about body cultures in contemporary India, analysing fitness, weight loss, and diet discourses as present in popular media as well as through narratives of participants. She is interested in visual culture, gender studies, and literature and migration. At present, she is trying to map Kolkata as a sanitary city, focusing on access to clean sanitation or the lack thereof. She runs the blog ‘Refugee Watch Online’. Her latest publication is on “Haldia: Logistics and Its Other(s)” in Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Ranabir Samaddar (Edited) Logistical Asia: The Labour of Making a World Region. (Palgrave Mcmillan, 2018)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:20:14ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #EnlistingPrivacy
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy
<b>Details of a session proposed by Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>This session offers a provocation to advance the conversation on privacy in India. Privacy is at once a legal right, a technological/design feature and an everyday practice of managing our social and personal lives. What do we mean when we invoke privacy in our everyday conversations? Privacy conjoins opposing impulses to engage in online public sociality and expressing a desire for limits on data sharing. We trade privacy for convenience. When we skip
lengthy terms and conditions of apps, websites and other online agreements we enter into an agreement without much concern for what we are agreeing to when we tick the box at the bottom of the contract. Privacy is a right we cannot <em>not</em> want. As much as privacy remains a subject of, and subject to impassioned speech, it becomes a cognitive burden when we are called upon to read the privacy policies before signing up for an online service.</p>
<p>In this session, we invite participants to tell stories on privacy based on their life experiences. The session aims to employ the concept of a list liberally to understand how privacy continues to be on a to-do list of sorts for lawmakers, technologists and users who are constantly being informed to manage their online account settings, to constantly make certain things private and to care about privacy. Even as privacy has finally joined the list of fundamental rights in India, its meaning continues to be contested. What may be the politics of privacy at play in the circulation of the #MeToo list? Privacy itself may be spoken of as a list of values and affordances: as dignity and bodily integrity of rights subjects, as confidentiality of certain information, the integrity of data flows, self-determination and individual autonomy. The list of all things privacy will evolve with new, privacy-by-design technologies in a rapidly evolving information technology global landscape.</p>
<p>The objective of the session is to bring the examples of potential and actual privacy violations from our daily life in the public domain. We plan to invite three to five participants to engage in a small roundtable-format discussion on privacy and the metaphor of list. Pawan Singh (New Generation Network Fellow, Deakin University) and Pranjal Jain (Masters student of Design, Srishti School of Design) will facilitate the session. We plan to invite participants from our academic and professional networks at the International Institute of Information Technology,
Bangalore, NUMA co-working space and Digital Identity Research Initiative (DIRI) at the Indian School of Business (ISB).</p>
<p>We plan to contact interested participants through email in December 2018. In order for this roundtable-format session to be productive, we plan to invite participants from diverse backgrounds who can share their perspectives.</p>
<p>The intent of the session is to make a repository of examples from daily life on privacy at the intersection of online space and social life. The repository of examples can be a dynamic list that grows as participants, attendees and others add to the conversation on privacy. It may be maintained as a digital artefact or an online resource.</p>
<p>We are looking for participants who questions what is privacy to them and still in the process of figuring out what is privacy? We also welcome the participants who do not know what is privacy but curious to discover it.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Pawan Singh</strong>: New Generation Network Scholar at Deakin University. Works on issues of identity, representation, privacy and the costs of social justice in India and globally. Current project on Aadhaar, data privacy and social media in India.</p>
<p><strong>Pranjal Jain</strong>: Human-Centered Designer from Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology. Currently in the 2nd year of Master in Design and research assistant at Digital Identity Research Initiative, Indian School of Business. Believe in Ethical Data Practices. Works on designing for online privacy through speculative and critical design.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2019-01-08T09:56:31ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListInterface
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface
<b>Details of a session proposed by Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>We would, as a starting point like to consider the conditions of possibility for the ‘list’ to emerge as the core thematic for this year’s Internet Researchers’ Conference. The proposal call provides several motivating questions and anchoring reasons foregrounding the list as an object for analysis and discussion. Broadly these may be divided along two lines - one pertaining to the qualities of the list (who makes it, why are they ephemeral, what makes lists this or that) and the other pointing to certain critical questions that emerge on our political landscape, with the list or practices of listing central to this politics.</p>
<p><strong>Segment 1</strong> [15 minutes]</p>
<p>In our session, the first item on the agenda (this also is a list!) is an outline of the way lists are thought of in 2 contexts:</p>
<ol>
<li>Bureaucratic processing/management (lists and their relationship to documents, files in offices, and also, everyday lists such as shopping lists).<br /><br /></li>
<li>List as a technological object in networked technological systems ie the list-interface.</li></ol>
<p>The late media theorist Cornelia Vismann is our guide among others, including Umberto Eco and Foucault’s notion of the ‘statement’.</p>
<p><strong>Segment 2</strong> [15 minutes x 3 => 45 minutes]</p>
<p>In the second part of our proceedings, we would like to consider 3 problems pertaining to the list:</p>
<ol>
<li>‘List’ as a mode of presentation in various user-interfaces, such as the whatsapp screen and its relationship to the subjective experience of time : It's winter and you've opened the Amazon app to buy one winter jacket. You open the app on your phone and begin to search for one, only to realize you've been endlessly scrolling for the last half an hour looking for jackets without buying a single one and if your friend hadn't called you to break you out of that flow, you would have most probably continued to scroll for another half an hour. I could make a similar point about how you keep scrolling through Instagram endlessly without stopping or how you similarly keep scrolling endlessly through Netflix or YouTube videos without touching to watch a single one. A common theme that connects these interfaces is their "no dead end" feature. They are arranged in the form of “lists” keep going on without a stop, structuring the user’s experience of subjective time.<br /><br /></li>
<li>The #MeToo movement is, as the proposal call says, a few years old, but it is only with the publishing of this list that it erupts into the terrain of the political, at least within the context of academic institutions. We would like to examine the conditions that make this political emergence possible. As first pass, we will note here that the #LoSHA is a list that refuses to process (Other facebook posts for example, are read, ‘liked’ or commented on and then passed over, ie processed).<br /><br /></li>
<li>Social media platforms - sites of media exchange are organized structurally as lists. There’s a list of posts, responses to ‘posts’ are also lists and even interactive features are available as lists -“Like, Share and Subscribe” at the end of a youtube video for example. On Facebook, audiences would be asked to “Like, Comment and Share” in that order of increasing activity. In the recent past, “Likes” have been expanded further to “reacts” which gives a list of “reacts” (including emotions, example-sad), a list or sequence of sentiments which people use to register their response. Similarly, there are such structures present in the forms of lists across platforms, built into the keyboard to be able to structure our immediate response or sentiment (emoticons, stickers gifs etc). These are attempts to codify emotion or more broadly, affect. The 3rd problematique in our panel will consider the process of structuring affect in online environments through the listing of signs such as the ‘like’, the ‘react’ etc.</li></ol>
<p><strong>Segment 3</strong> [30 minutes]</p>
<p>Following our presentation of these problems and modes of analytically situating ‘lists’ in everyday practices in online spaces, we will open the floor for discussion.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Bharath Sivakumar</strong> graduated with a B.Sc (Research) degree in mathematics from Shiv Nadar University and currently works for Loonycorn where he's part of the team that creates technical courses. He has eclectic tastes ranging from mathematics to philosophy to Anthropology and feels at home in the hills. He enjoys trekking, loves performing on stage and aspires to be a stand up comedian one day.</p>
<p><strong>Rakshita Siva</strong> is a researcher at IIIT Bangalore in the faculty of Digital Society. She graduated with a Mechanical engineering major and a minor in Sociology from Shiv Nadar University. Her interests relate to the digital, questions of self, interiority and the psyche. Rakshita is a singer and enjoys a good jam.</p>
<p><strong>Deepak Prince</strong> is a course instructor and Phd candidate in the Department of Sociology, School of Humanities and Social sciences at SNU. His thesis research seeks to grapple with the 'explosion' of smartphones and touchscreens in practices of everyday sociality through the conceptual categories of the screen and the interface. Deepak's key research interest revolves around technics, the history and philosophy of technical objects. He also takes an interest in questions of anthropological disciplinarity, the history of ideas and political anthropology.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:19:12ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists
<b>Details of a session proposed by Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>The session will comprise of three segments, where we shall analyse and highlight the form that is “List” in its multifarious inhabitations. From the much talked about spaces of the Hindi Film Industry to unfolding the dynamics of WhatsApp Groups, and finally to the listicles of violence and terror, the session will pose questions and argue for the malleability and limitations of the form. The obsession to finish a to do list and scheduling tasks around lists, makes list making one of the highest priority task in the big data age. The session will engage in unravelling these dynamics as well as texture its implications in varied spaces.</p>
<p><strong>Paper 1: The Grapevine List - Hindi Film Industry Professionals Post #MeToo </strong> [Akriti Rastogi, PhD Candidate (Cinema Studies), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University]</p>
<p>In the age of data big data enlightenment (Byung Chul Han, 2017), the statistical tool of list making makes a comeback with a vengeance. List as a form of data-design enumerates and informs at a glance. When there are unending social media posts of harassment narratives shaking the readers (who might just be acknowledging the mobilization of social media into a movement), a list becomes an escape from the detailed unnerving and ugly truths. A red list of perpetrators scours many small to large scale films, but the voices against the powerful allegedly remain mum. In the ‘filmy’ world of filmmaking professionals, Izzat (Honour) finds poetic justice in a small way in this moment, but does it culminate into a change? An assistant director in a field interview spoke of the horror stories from a shoot, when a powerful actor targeted a crew professional. The said actor however may never find a mention on the list. Despite the social media emancipation – and what have you, the powerful remain in the white-washed limelight spiced with scandalous details that never filter out from the PR barricade.</p>
<p>On an entertainment channel, a veteran actress spills the beans on the working conditions in the maligned and besotted Hindi Film Industry. This sparks off a chain reaction, and in the following days, Twitter becomes a testimonial sharing courtroom. The press quotes it as the arrival of #MeToo and #TimesUp in the ‘Bollywood’ from the ‘Hollywood’. While a formal list is not abbreviated to gasp at the morbid working conditions that men and women face at the glamorous film industry, the survivor stories become a staple for transmedia channels. But where is the list? The absence of the list making aside from the <a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/me-too-accused-men-list-harassment-5396034/">Indian Express Article dated October 11, 2018</a> points to an important power driven working culture and network of the Hindi Film Industry. In the case of Hindi Film industry, the list has been talked about more in terms of the survivors than the perpetrators. The absence then of a #MeToo list indicates a power dynamic here. While in case of other media industries, the perpetrators have been terminated from their working projects, here the powers that be have tried to salvage the money by transferring the projects to bigger and more powerful media companies in the market. The message is clear, more the power , more the PR, less the risk of being named and shamed. This paper will map out the nuances of the absence of this “list” in the wake of #MeToo moment. While the lists form an intrinsic part of the hearsay and grapevine among professionals working in the Hindi film industry, there is an absence of a formal crowdsourced list like in case of #LoSHA. What then can be said about the industry’s working dynamics, and how does this hearsay list become a marker for the professionals to manoeuvre their daily work becomes the key analysis of this segment.</p>
<p><strong>Paper 2: Most Disturbing</strong> [Ishani Dey, PhD Candidate (Cinema Studies), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University]</p>
<p>During the era of analogue tape, video circuits were replete with rumors of an underground network of snuff/gore video productions, which featured actual murder and torture caught on tape. It was speculated that there was a lucrative market for these videos, which was being cashed in by shadowy figures. However, whenever a snuff film surfaced in the mainstream, it turned out to be a simulation of crime, as opposed to real acts of violence. This changed with the emergence of the internet, which hosted a subculture dedicated to snuff/gore videos. These included websites and forums where video producers would often be in dialogue with their viewers. These communities consisted of snuff/gore aficionados who prided themselves on their ability to be able to distinguishing ‘real crime’ from mere simulations of violence. Speculations over authenticity dominated conversations on these forums, which even witnessed creators of snuff/gore taking extra measures to prove the authenticity of their product. For instance, in 2012 the headquarters of the ruling party in Canada received six packages which contained severed body parts of a victim whose death had been featured in a video which was circulating on the snuff forum, GoreGrish. Such stories were not uncommon in snuff/gore sites, which circulated videos that were often linked to crimes under investigation, at times leading to apprehending perpetrators. Many videos from such snuff/gore sites (even those that are now defunct) are often curated on mainstream video sharing platforms like YouTube, where their ‘shock value’ is highlighted through listicles like the ‘top 5 most disturbing videos on the internet (Snuff edition)’ or ‘5 Real MURDER VIDEOS You Can't Find on the INTERNET’. While the desire to capitalize on clickbait can be one motivator, snuff/gore videos have traditionally (and continued) to thrive only in niche circuits. I am therefore interested in interrogating the function of the listicle in showcasing snuff/gore content. In specific, who hosts these listicles? What kind of videos are chosen? How are the chosen clusters received? And, finally, what function do these listicles serve in the larger network of snuff/gore subcultures?</p>
<p><strong>Paper 3: The Anatomy of a WhatsApp List</strong> [Sagorika Singha, PhD Candidate (Cinema Studies), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University]</p>
<p>The WhatsApp list or group is one rapidly growing communication platforms at present. As the usage of this application rises, so does one’s chances of being in a WhatsApp group. There is a group for everything - for booking portals to share online tickets, for news publications to send their latest news, for workgroups to communicate outside formal communication channels, for students, for teachers, for people selling handmade products among many others with both crafty and well-meaning intentions. In the early days of WhatsApp, being a part of such groups was not only useful but perhaps even had some associated novelty. However, with the continued mushrooming of various groups and their corresponding increase in reach, WhatsApp groups have mutated into something more formidable. I am interested in unfolding the avenues generated by this cross-platform messaging application which owing to its encryption makes conversations hard to trace. The puerile group formations in WhatsApp has grown into a mechanism of self-forming lists wherein, at times, participants are involuntarily included. The participants have different patterns of presence in such WhatsApp groups. This paper compares the growing mundanity of such list-making with the casual readiness observed in sharing information via such platforms. I consider such WhatsApp groups as lists of users. What are the dynamics that lead to the creation of such lists? How can we read into such forms of network formation? What fuels the propagation of such lists and what does it say about our current communication practices? Just the way users have become immune to the content and their presence in such groups, it has also become routine for them to share the content. The habit of sharing becomes as mundane as the habit of being participants in multiple groups, with their own purposes and directions. As participants, we are unsure both about the groups we will be added to in the future as well as the multiple lists that the contents shared in a group will end up in. This organic network formation is what gives power to such groups and explains their existence and ramifications which we have been witnessing in the contemporary time.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Akriti Rastogi</strong> is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies department of the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her current work proposes to trace the design of monetization channels of cinema effects in a new media environ. She has previously worked as a radio broadcast producer at All India Radio, New Delhi.</p>
<p><strong>Ishani Dey</strong> is working on her PhD in Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her current project seeks to analyse some of the ways in which the body-technology ensemble has changed with the rise of the digital. While every new image making technology since the mid-nineteenth century has reconfigured the human body, this project is dedicated to understanding the implications of twenty-first century digital technologies and the internet on bodies that inhabit the screens of the ‘post-cinematic’.</p>
<p><strong>Sagorika Singha</strong> is a doctoral candidate in the department of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her areas of interest include cinema, subculture, queer studies, technoculture, post-cinema, new mediascape, and digital societies. Her ongoing doctoral work virtually reimagines the contested region of North-east India following the arrival and popularity of mobile media and media-sharing technologies.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:18:07ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #FOMO
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo
<b>Details of a session proposed by Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>The broad basis of the discussion would be the lists that address and invoke aspirations to know, particularly what has come to be known as 'listicle'. The focus would also be on social media and other digital platforms, including blogs and fan clubs, which list out cultural objects like books, films, music, etc. that one must not miss. On one hand, many of such listicle-s are essentially advertising devices and, in that way, descendants of the bestseller list and such that one used to encounter on the pages of The Hindu and so on. On the other, we have similar lists made by fans and culture enthusiasts, and the consumers. Both of these play on a specific type of aspiration and the attendant anxiety, expressed in common parlance as FoMo, i.e. Fear of Missing Out, in this specific case the fear of missing out on knowing/knowing about something. But FoMo, as a dominant structure of feeling in contemporary society, in the context of listicle-s, begs many more questions: what is one afraid to miss out and how intense can that fear be? Who is afraid to miss out and what does missing out represent to them? Who decides what can be missed and what not? What is deemed to be the proper content of listicle-s and what is not; and what are the repercussions of the list form on the overall repository of knowledge from which the listicle-s are culled? What is the difference and continuity between lists meant as content that leads to commercial advertisement and lists made by the consumers? What happens when one begins to increasingly learn everything from the list form? Is there a 'list knowledge', the way there is a 'bookish knowledge'? What are the political repercussions of such 'list knowledge'?</p>
<p>The sessions will begin with two presentations/short papers (15 minutes each), mainly to provide an initial guide map for the discussion. The next 45 minutes will be devoted to discussion with the audience, so as to list out the complex factors and facets the conjugation of listicle and FoMo has produced, which will be moderated by both the presenters. The final 15 minutes will be assigned to the summarization of the points discussed by the speakers.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti</strong> is an Assistant Professor at the Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication, Pune. Besides receiving his doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from EFL University, Hyderabad, he has also worked in the publishing industry as well as a content editor in the corporate sector. His doctoral dissertation maps the ideological terrain of contemporary Bollywood against the rise of neoliberalism in India. His areas of interests include contemporary film cultures, digital modernity, particularly digital cinephilia, comparative cultural studies, etc.</p>
<p><strong>Pritha Chakrabarti</strong> is an independent researcher based out of Hyderabad. She has recently submitted her doctoral dissertation titled <em>Politics of Screen Dance in Indian Cinema</em> in the department of Cultural Studies at EFL University, Hyderabad. A recipient of the ICSSR-CSDS doctoral fellowship, she has worked on the ideology of on-screen choreographic construction and dissemination and reception of film dance as popular culture. Professionally a Content Manager, she has nearly a decade-long experience in marketing content generation, both offline and online.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:17:11ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #DigitalPlatformAttributes
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-digitalplatformattributes
<b>Details of a session proposed by Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>Digital platforms have been in the news for quite a few years now in India. Some of the most prominent sectors which has seen platforms flourish are transportation, e-commerce, education and social media. But platforms are taking root in other sectors as well, with the potential to disrupt existing businesses.</p>
<p>The session proposes to examine the attributes of digital platforms, particularly with reference to the quality and regulatory aspects of platforms. Quality influences regulation and vice versa. Depending on the context and type of platform, both of these aspects need to be comprehensively listed and defined to enable platform stakeholders like platform and service providers, users, and regulatory authorities ensure proper and successful conduct of businesses so as to benefit all the stakeholders.</p>
<p>The session hence deals with the "list" as a taxonomy of attributes. The session is envisaged to consist of two parts. The first part will draw from previous research work by the team on quality attributes of digital platforms and will illustrate the methodological reasoning and some of the challenges faced in the endeavour. This part leans towards an academic contribution to the conference. The second part will focus on the platform attributes important from regulatory perspectives, and will seek to crystallise the emergent attributes in juxtaposition to the quality attributes identified already, with the ultimate goal of identifying a checklist of regulatory attributes for digital platforms which will be of interest to policy planners. The entire exercise is also a step towards establishing a comprehensive taxonomy of platform attributes as a superset of attributes from different perspectives.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Nandakishore K N</strong> is a Master of Science by Research student in the IT and Society domain at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B). His recently completed thesis was on design of a Quality of Service framework for digital platforms. Nandakishore joined IIIT-B with an experience of 20+ years in the IT industry, the last decade of which was in project and quality management roles, and includes an 18-year stint with TCS.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. V. Sridhar</strong> is Professor at the Centre for IT and Public Policy at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B). He is a prolific writer on matters related to telecom regulation and policy in India, with two books and contributions to peer-reviewed leading telecom and information systems journals and prominent business newspapers and magazines. He is a member of GoI committees on Telecom and IT. Dr. Sridhar has taught at many Institutions in the USA, Finland, New Zealand and India, and was the recipient of Nokia Visiting Fellowship. Prior to joining IIIT-B Dr. Sridhar was a Research Fellow at Sasken Communication Technologies. Dr. Sridhar has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, U.S.A., Masters in Industrial Engineering from NITIE, Mumbai, and B.E. from the University of Madras, India. His work can be accessed at: <a href="http://www.vsridhar.info">http://www.vsridhar.info</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-digitalplatformattributes'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-digitalplatformattributes</a>
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No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:15:04ZBlog EntryIRC19 - Proposed Session - #CallingOutAndIn
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin
<b>Details of a session proposed by Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
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<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
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<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>Lists are empowering; they offer a method of curating—things, experiences, people, events. As elements of an archive, they are a powerful tool for including and marking something as important. A list is not a neutral collection of objects; it comes into being within a specific logic, an articulated or unseen/unspecified rules, or criteria by which these objects are either included or excluded. In the context of the #MeTooIndia movement, lists have been weaponized by survivors of sexual abuse or harassment, serving to call out behaviours that for many years had been normalized, accepted, or simply ignored, but a patriarchal system. The list, in this instance, becomes a means around which survivors can rally and find support, while also being a tool for punitive action of various kinds, from legal to administrative to social. While “naming and shaming” (or naming to shame) was the purpose that gained currency in the popular discourse, we would like to explore the multiple meanings and experiences that underlie and are implicated by the act of listing. With specific but not exclusive attention to the list that is commonly referred to as LoSHA, the papers on this panel approach the logic and culture of lists and listing as modalities of feminist action.</p>
<p>To begin with, <strong>Usha Raman</strong> looks at calling out through listing as a meaning making, legitimating, even therapeutic act for those who participate in the creation of the list as well as those who engage with it in different ways. <strong>Radhika Gajjala</strong>, along with <strong>Riddhima Sharma</strong> and <strong>Tarishi Varma</strong> then go on to discuss the role of feminist digital narratives as evidence and the ways in which they could transgress and rupture institutional/legal/academic institutions and infrastructures. Following this, <strong>Pallavi Guha</strong> discusses the #MetooIndia movement as the second wave to #LoSha movement, which started in 2017, and points to who and what is still left out of the online narrative of sexual harrassment. <strong>Sai Amulya Komarraju</strong> applies Sara Ahmed’s ideas about affective economies to look at the responses of feminists and feminist organizations to the two waves of #metoo in India and at the responses of the state and the judiciary following incidents of sexual harassment at work. Finally, <strong>Sugandha Sehgal</strong> asks, in the context of #LoSHA and #MeTooIndia, how the digital list as spreadable and replicable social media content proliferates online, while also exploring the opportunities digital listing as a form of activism offers to contemporary feminist praxis in the Global South.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Usha Raman</strong>, professor, Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad.</p>
<p><strong>Radhika Gajjala</strong>, professor of Media and Communication Studies and American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University.</p>
<p><strong>Riddhima Sharma</strong>, is a doctoral scholar at Bowling Green State University.</p>
<p><strong>Tarishi Varma</strong>, is a doctoral scholar at Bowling Green State University.</p>
<p><strong>Pallavi Guha</strong>, assistant professor of communication and new media, Towson University, USA.</p>
<p><strong>Sai Amulya Komarraju</strong> is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad.</p>
<p><strong>Sugandha Sehgal</strong> is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:13:43ZBlog Entry