Centre for Internet and Society

The Cultural Politics of Neo-Pentecostalism in India

praskrishna — 2013-08-21T11:04:26Z

Talk by Pradip Ninan Thomas

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore invites you to a talk by Pradip Ninan Thomas on The Cultural Politics of Neo-Pentecostalism in India. Harvey Cox, the scholar of religions, has described pentecostalism as ‘a religion made to travel’ and as the global face of Christianity today. While there is little hard data available in India on any changes in Christian denominational membership, there is evidence available via the Pew Study on Global Pentecostalism and any amount of soft data that indicates that there has been a massive expansion in new churches in India predominantly linked to the Pentecostalist and neo-Pentecostalist traditions.

This brief lecture is based on a study of Christian fundamentalism and Communications in India that Pradip Ninan Thomas had carried out in 2006. This lecture will explore the cultural politics of neo-Pentecostalism in India including its organizational strategies, ideological struggles, communicative practices and correspondences between the global and the local.

The religious marketplace in India has experienced extraordinary growth over the last two decades. Christianity too has been affected by this growth and Pradip Ninan Thomas argues that the commodification of Christianity is tied into Church planting, the numbers game and contestations with Hindutva in India.

Speaker

Pradip Thomas is Joint Director of the Centre for Communication & Social Change, University of Queensland, Brisbane. His research trajectory primarily comes out of the political economy of communication tradition and he has written/co-edited a number of books and papers on issues related to media ownership, intellectual property, religion and the media and communication and social change. A forthcoming book that will be published by Sage is entitled ‘Political Economy of Communications in India: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. He is currently in India carrying out interviews related to a book project on Communication Rights Movements in India. He has had a long standing research interest in issues related to religion and media, particularly religious fundamentalism and the media.

Time and Date

Wednesday, 24 February, 2010; 5.00 to 7.00 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bangalore - 71

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/cultural-politics-neo-pentecostalism-india

Citizen 2.0?

radha — 2011-10-21T09:54:31Z

Exploring Research Questions, Frameworks, and Methods - Presentation by Minna Aslama, at CIS, on Nov 23rd @ 4.30pm , Bangalore.

The early and mid 1990s witnessed a surge of academic thinking and public debates around the democratizing power of the Internet. The most hopeful utopias of deliberative online communication and formation of active ‘subaltern counter-publics’ (Fraser 1992/1997) were countered with fears ranging from trivialization, fragmentation, even disappearance of widely and commonly shared issues, to viral distribution of non-democratic, ‘harmful’ content. Now the same debates are re-emerging once again in era that is witnessing the explosion of ‘social production’ in a multitude of digital platforms.

The recent examples of the elections in two very different societies, the United States and Iran, provide just two cases where information production by non-professional individuals and loose associations, distributed via informal networks including social networking sites and microblogging, has played a major role in democratic processes (e.g., Williams & Gulati 2007; Keim & Clark 2009).

A question remains: do social networks facilitate platforms for democratic debate and participation in our ‘post-broadcast’ democracies (Prior 2007) characterized by ‘a networked information economy’ (Benkler 2006)? And further, is or can there exist such a phenomenon as a ‘Citizen 2.0’ who actively participates in democratic processes (issue driven and/or local, regional, national, transnational) via digital media? So far academic scholarship has focused on theorization rather than empirical analyses (e.g., Gripsrud 2009), has tended to emphasize activities of social justice movements that are by default networked and proactive (Aslama & Erickson 2009), and thus have ‘romanticized’ the participatory and democratizing nature of the Internet, web 2.0 and mobile communications (while most quantitative indicators tend to point towards concentrated and elite communication, and while digital divide still clearly exists, Hindman 2009). Needless to say, much of the hopeful theorization is European / Anglo-American, and there seems to be relatively little cultural sensitivity in grand visions of global public spheres (c.f., Castells 2008).

The talk will not claim to provide answers to these paramount questions. Instead, Minna wishes to raise more questions about (1) what should be researched about mediated democracy and citizenry in our time; what should we know? (2) How could we frame that research theoretically and conceptually? And (3) what kinds of methodological solutions might be useful in this context. Rather than presenting a comprehensive research agenda, Minna will suggest some ideas that would broadly connect to macro, meso and micro-level view of media, power and citizenship (c.f. Clegg 1989), and will illustrate those ideas with some empirical examples of her current pilot work for a planned multi-country study on the theme. Minna hopes to provoke a lively discussion, or, rather, a brainstorming session amongst us who care about the possibility of Citizen 2.0.

References:

Aslama M. & Erickson I. (2009). Public Spheres, Networked Publics, Networked Public Spheres? Tracking the Habermasian Public Sphere in Recent Discourse. Fordham University, McGannon Center Working Papers.Retrieved at: http://www.fordham.edu/images/undergraduate/communications/public%20spheres,%20networked%20publics,%20networked%20public%20spheres.pdf

Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks. How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Castells, M. (2008). The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance. The Annals Of The American Academy Of Political And Social Science, vol. 616, no. 1, pp. 78-93.
Clegg, S. (1989). Frameworks of Power. London: Sage.

Fraser N. (1997(1992)). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of an Actually Existing Democracy. In Calhoun C (ed.). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp., 109-142.

Gripsrud, J. (2009, March). Digitising the Public Sphere: Two Key Issues. Javnost-The Public, 16(1), 5-16.

Hindman, M. (2009). The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Keim N & Clark J (2009) Public Media 2.0 Field Report: Building Social Media Infrastructure to Engage Publics. Twitter Vote Report and Inauguration Report ’09. American University, center for Social Media.
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/public_media_20_field_report_building_social_media_infrastructure_to_engage/ (accessed 30 August 2009).

Prior, M. (2007) Post-Broadcast Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, C. B., & Gulati, G. J. (2007). Social Networks in Political Campaigns: Facebook and the 2006 Midterm Elections. Paper presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Minna Aslama’s Bio:
Minna Aslama is a researcher and a lecturer at Fordham University, New York, and the University of Helsinki. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki and has taken part in several international research activities including The Media Between Culture and Commerce Project by the European Science Foundation, and the research-advocacy project on Global Media Monitoring of news media (GMMP, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2009). From 2008-2009, she served as the Program Officer for the Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere program at the Social Science Research Council.
Prior to her academic career, she worked at the Division of Advancement for Women of the UN Secretariat and at the Finnish Broadcasting Company in the research, training and development unit. She has also served as a consultant for various national and international organizations on research and training, especially with regard to issues of media and gender.
Her recent/ongoing research work includes new conceptualizations of media audiences and the concept of ‘participation’, public service media and content diversity in the digital era, and media policy flows in the globalizing media environment. In addition, she is especially interested in new forms of collaboration emerging in relation to the media justice and reform movements. Together with Phil Napoli, she is currently editing a book “Communication Research in Action” that depicts scholar-practitioner collaborations in the field.
Contact: minna.aslama@helsinki.fi

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/citizen-2.0

User generated content, citizen journalism and news

radha — 2011-04-05T04:28:42Z

Public Talk by Jamillah Knowles who is an online and radio journalist for the BBC on the 26th of September, Saturday at 16:00 hrs

Jamillah Knowles is an online and radio journalist for the BBC. She has 15 years experience working in the new business on many platforms. Starting in newspapers as a photographer she spent a great deal of time in print, moving on to radio for several years with BBC Radio Five Live and World Service before making a jump to online news.

Currently she works in the User Generated Content Hub at the BBC providing contacts, images, case studies and eyewitness accounts in multimedia form for all news outlets across the corporation.

In her spare time she makes the Pods and Blogs radio show for BBC Radio Five Live about digital life online. Over the past year she has been working on developing relationships with online citizen reporters and looking at how social networks can play a role in creative news making.

This talk is about how the BBC has embraced user generated content and how it has changed our news environment in the way we research and provide news for radio, television and online.

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/user-generated-content-citizen-journalism-and-news

Dialogue Systems in Education and Learning

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:35:46Z

A talk on dialogue interfaces for intelligent tutoring systems (ITS)

One-to-one tutoring has been shown to increase learning gain in students because instruction can be adapted to the student's expertise. Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) are computer programs that adaptively provide students with exercise problems to solve and a detailed feedback once they resolve the problems. However the interface between the student and the system is restricted to GUI and therefore detailed discussion on what went wrong in problem solving cannot be discussed. Dialogue interfaces to tutoring systems resolves this drawback and enables the student to have a conversation on the mistakes he/she committed. In tutorial dialogue systems, the system interacts with the students in natural language either spoken or typed. The system and the student engage in a conversation after the student presents a solution to the problem. In case of an incorrect solution, the system helps the student to solve the problem by engaging the student in a remediation dialogue by asking simpler questions and giving clues. Such systems have been shown to be more effective than its GUI counterparts. Can such systems be used to improve the learning gain amongst students in India?

Speaker

Srinivasan Janarthanam is a third year Ph.D student at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He works in Spoken Dialogue Systems with focus on making user adaptive systems. His Ph.D is supported by UK India Education Research Initiative. Previously, he worked as a research associate in Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetam, Coimbatore on English-Tamil Machine Translation. He did his M.Sc in Intelligent Systems from the University of Sussex, UK and his B.E from Bharathiyar University, Coimbatore. His other interests are Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Indian languages, application of NLP and Artificial Intelligence for education.

Time and Date

Friday, 12 June, 2009; 5.30-6.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/dialogue-systems-in-education-and-learning

Talk on 'Inheritance of Alphanumeric Characters'

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:40:53Z

CIS and Abhishek Hazra welcome you to a talk on 'Inheritance of Alphanumeric Characters', Abhishek's recent body of work currently on display at Gallery SKE, Bangalore. These works attempt to engage with the social history of science and the way the practice of science is deeply contextualised within the larger discourse of power and knowledge systems. It is also about negotiating with the 'inheritance' of discourses like Orientalism or Stalinism and finding ways of engaging critically with that legacy.

At one level, the title, 'Inheritance of Alphanumeric Characters' can be parsed as an allusion to the centrality of language in this entire process. It is also a reference to the phrase 'Inheritance of Acquired Characters', a popular one-liner on Lamarkism, an influential early 19th century theory of evolution that was discredited by the Darwinian-Mendelian paradigm. Abhishek uses multiple modalities - video and spoken word performance to artist's books and large-scale digital prints – to articulate his ongoing explorations.

Artist Profile:

Abhishek Hazra is a visual artist based in Bangalore. His work explores the intersections between technology and culture through the narrative device of a 'visual fable'. He is also interested in the social history of scientific practices, and his current, ongoing project attempts to explore the history of science research in colonial India. Abhishek works with animated shorts and digital slideshows that often integrate textual fragments drawn from fictional scenarios. He is also interested in the way in which the languages of science journalism and information visualisation participate in the complex dynamics of 'knowledge dissemination' and 'translation'. Recent shows include First Left, Second Right, a 3 person show at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York with Yamini Nayar and Kiran Subbaiah; Horn Please. Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art (Curated by Bernhard Fibicher and Suman Gopinath), Kunstmuseum Bern and Ghosts in the Machine and other Fables: an exhibition of video, sound and interactive works at Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi (Curated by Pooja Sood). A brief overview of some of his works can be found here: http://abhishekhazra.blogspot.com/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/talk-on-inheritance-of-alphanumeric-characters

Fear and Gender in Public Space

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:41:10Z

A discussion of work on the body and the city and collaborative interventions on the theme of Fear and Gender in Public Space

Fear and Gender in Public Space is the theme of multiple, collaborative interventions being held during 14th to 28th January 2009 in Bangalore city. A confluence of artists, designers and practitioners will mobilize the workshop theme across select locations in various formats. The outcome of these interactions will be presented to local groups at intervals during the two weeks.

At one of these intervals, CIS-India researchers will discuss their works on the body and the city in conjunction with interim discussions on the ongoing interventions being carried out in the city.

Contact: zeenath.hasan@gmail.com

Venue:

The Centre for Internet and Society

No. D2, 3rd Floor,

Sheriff Chambers

14, Cunningham Road,

Bangalore 560052

Map: Google Maps

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/fear-and-gender-in-public-space

Talk on Justice and Difference

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:44:07Z

Centre for Internet & Society

& monster album OF feminist stories

invite you to

a public talk by

Dr. Shefali Moitra

Justice and Difference

Traditionally justice and impartiality are thought to be inseparable. In a pluralistic context there is a demand for making justice difference-sensitive. This may appear an attempt at squaring the circle. Many feminists think difference can be accommodated without compromising justice. The speaker will critically examine this thesis.

Day, Date & Time: Friday, 14^th November, 2008, 4:00 pm
Venue: Centre for Internet and Society

No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers
14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore,
Karnataka 560052,
Phone: (+91)-080-4092-6283‎

About the Speaker: Dr. Shefali Moitra received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, and joined the Department of Philosophy at Jadavpur University in 1979. She has occupied various positions in the university during her time there, as Director of the School of Women's Studies, as Co-ordinator of the Centre for Psychological Counselling and Studies in Self-Development, and as involved teacher to many generations of students. Her research interests lie in the areas of Feminist Philosophy, Ethics and the Philosophy of Language. Her key publications have included Feminist Thought: Androcentrism, Communication and Objectivity (2002), Women, Heritage and Violence, (Ed.1996), and Communication, Identity and Self-Expression, (Ed. 1984).

Map: Google Maps

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/talk-on-justice-and-difference