The relationship between information and the nation-state is typically portrayed as a face-off involving repressive state power and democratic flows: Twitter and the Arab Spring, Google in China, WikiLeaks and the U.S. State Department. Less attention has been paid to those scenarios where states have regarded information and its diffusion as productive of modernity and globalization. It is the central argument of this book that the contemporary nation-state, especially in the global South, is far from hostile to the current informational milieu and in fact makes crucial use of it in order to develop adequate modes of governance, communication and sociality in a networked world. This book focuses on India – an emerging country that has recently witnessed a "software miracle" – to highlight the critical role informatics has historically played in the national imagination and to demonstrate how the state, private capital and civic society have drawn upon and engaged the precepts and protocols of the information age to fashion an "info-nation."

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

This book explores the use of digital humanities (DH) to understand, interpret, and annotate the poetics of Indian literary and cultural texts, which circulate in digital forms — in manuscripts — and as oral or musical performance. Drawing on the linguistic, cultural, historical, social, and geographic diversity of Indian texts and contexts, it foregrounds the use of digital technologies — including minimal computing, novel digital humanities research and teaching methodologies, critical archive generation and maintenance — for explicating poetics of Indian literatures and generating scholarly digital resources which will facilitate comparative readings. With contributions from DH scholars and practitioners from across India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more, this book will be a key intervention for scholars and researchers of literature and literary theory, DH, media studies, and South Asian Studies.

Theorizing digital archives : power, access and new order -- Deciding for digital archives improvement through collection management systems -- Community-based digital archives : programming alternatives -- Creating and curating digital archives : horizontal and vertical structures -- Using digital archives : online encounters, stories of impact and postcolonial agendas -- Digital archives' objects : law and tangibility -- Conclusion. Cultural production in the present with reference to the past and directed at the future.

Global Sceptical Publics is the first major study of the significance of different media for the (re)production of non-religious publics and publicity. While much work has documented how religious subjectivities are shaped by media, until now the crucial role of diverse media for producing and participating in religion-sceptical publics and debates has remained under-researched. With some chapters focusing on locations hitherto barely considered by scholarship on non-religion, the book places in comparative perspective how atheists, secularists and humanists engage with media – as means of communication and forming non-religious publics – but also on occasion as something to be resisted. Its conceptually rich interdisciplinary chapters thereby contribute important new insights to the growing field of non-religion studies and to scholarship on media and materiality more generally.

The past few years have seen the street emerge as one of the most volatile and engaging sites of a politics in flux. Mass protests, widespread networks, and quick mobilization in the age of social media have instilled a new life in protests and agitations, engendering an entirely new brand of rights agenda in India today. Grassroots activism along with organized, collective action has influenced several landmark legislations, often resulting in progressive outcomes and policies. Agitation to Legislation finds that such a progression is not so sudden. It examines ways in which social mobilizations influence legislative trajectory, opening up modes of direct engagement between the state and its citizens, between the government and the governed. It simultaneously focuses on political actors and processes that help expand rights and accountability and at the same time resist any attempt to increase representation of under-represented groups. Positive outcomes have depended on political responses and party strategies, either appropriating or reinforcing or disregarding the scale and intensity of public protests and collective action.

This book explores the forms, patterns, and trends in political communication in India in the twenty-first century. It underlies the influence of context in political messaging laying bare its complex, overlapping, and multidimensional structures. The volume: Examines how political decision-making is shaped by media — through political speeches, community opinion leaders, and formal and informal public conversations. Explores a range of political communication channels— from community radio to social media. Presents an overview of the problems associated with message designing and message dissemination through communication channels in a political setting. Highlights how political communication impacts critical aspects of democracy and governance and goes beyond mere rhetoric. A comprehensive work on the production, diffusion, transmission, and impact of information in a political environment, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, governance, democracy, media and communication studies, journalism, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of India as a major media producer and consumer market increasingly engaged with the global economy. Aided by rising incomes, technological remediation, regulatory strategies, and a shifting political terrain, the business of media has been given official recognition as a substantive component of India’s economy and as a prominent feature of its economic thinking. In light of these developments, these two pioneering volumes investigate the dynamics of an increasingly integrated media economy encompassing television, film, music, sport, and telecoms. Volume 1: Industrial Dynamics and Cultural Adaptation illustrates the distinctive industrial dynamics of India’s media economy, tracking the deeply embedded cultural, political, and economic forces that determine its everyday operation. The selection of essays serves to demonstrate the unique patterns of development and the complex field of exchanges that have constituted India’s media economy. As a whole, this volume posits a comprehensive approach to understanding the nature of media resources, the negotiation of industrial norms and the cultural context of a media economy firmly situated in the realities of India’s distinct regions, cultures, and human networks. Volume 2: Market Dynamics and Social Transactions provides a comprehensive analysis of the interlocking markets that constitute the media economy, focusing upon its particular commodity forms, labour conditions, and spaces of consumption. Taking account of a rich set of case studies, this volume argues for the necessary consideration of multiple and interdependent markets in explicating our everyday encounters with media. By foregrounding the social transactions that encapsulate market exchanges, it begins to illustrate some of the novel aspirations, meanings, and relationships arising with India’s media economy.

This book examines how Asian American women bloggers challenge dominant race and gender discourses through the practice of food blogging. Asian American food blogs, which situate recipes and food photography within the personal narratives and domestic spaces of Asian American women, offer unique insights into the ways that hegemonic race and gender discourses are negotiated in quotidian life. The genre’s focus on food provides a particularly rich backdrop for this study as it necessarily implicates family histories, gendered labour, domestic spaces, and the power dynamics of consumption. These intimate digital texts therefore provide unique insights into the ways that postfeminist and postrace discourses are encountered in the individual’s mundane experiences. The author engages a critical cultural analysis of food blogs narratives, images, communities, and platforms expressions of post-race and feminism discourses are constrained by the commercial logics of this digital culture. The author argues that while Asian American food blogs rarely present a sustained challenge to hegemonic identity representation, the processes of reproduction and rupture that define this blogosphere consistently reveal the collective desire to push back against the limits of ‘post’-identities. This is a unique and fascinating study which is ideal reading for students and scholars of gender studies, media studies, cultural studies and sociology.

In The Globally Familiar Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan traces how the rapid development of information and communication technologies in India has created opportunities for young people to creatively explore their gendered, classed, and racialized subjectivities in and through transnational media worlds. His ethnography focuses on a group of diverse young, working-class men in Delhi as they take up the African diasporic aesthetics and creative practices of hip hop. Dattatreyan shows how these aspiring b-boys, MCs, and graffiti writers fashion themselves and their city through their online and offline experimentations with hip hop, thereby accessing new social, economic, and political opportunities while acting as consumers, producers, and influencers in global circuits of capitalism. In so doing, Dattatreyan outlines how the hopeful, creative, and vitally embodied practices of hip hop offer an alternative narrative of urban place-making in "digital" India.