Centre for Internet and Society

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Call for Papers

sneha-pp — 2018-12-06T07:00:30Z

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*.

Call for Papers

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.

Paper abstracts (of not more than 500 words) are to be submitted by Sunday, December 23 via email sent to raw@cis-india.org.

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.

Selected paper authors, who are unemployed or underemployed, will be offered support to cover travel expenses fully/partially.

The only eligibility criteria for submitting papers is that they must engage with the thematic of the conference - *list*.

IRC19: List

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.

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.

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.

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers

Internet Researchers' Conference 2018 (IRC18): Offline, February 22-24, Sambhaavnaa Institute

sumandro — 2018-07-02T18:30:52Z

We are proud to announce that the third edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference series will be held at the Sambhaavnaa Institute, Kandbari (Himachal Pradesh) during February 22-24, 2018. This annual conference series was initiated by the Researchers@Work (RAW) programme at CIS in 2016 to gather researchers, academic or otherwise, studying internet in/from India to congregate, share insights and tensions, and chart the ways forward. The *offline* is the theme of the 2018 edition of the conference (IRC18), and the conference agenda will be shaped by nine sessions selected by all the teams that submitted session proposals, and an independent paper track consisting of six presentations.

Venue: Sambhaavnaa Institute, Kandbari, Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, 176061

Travel Information: Getting to Sambhaavnaa (Sambhaavnaa Institute)

Weather in Kandbari: 10°-20°c with possibility of light shower (AccuWeather)

Registration: RSVP (Google Drive)

Agenda: Conference Programme (Google Drive)

Poster: Download (JPG)

IRC18: Offline

State and commercial providers of internet and telecommunication services work in tandem to produce both the “online” and the “offline” - through content censorship, internet regulation, generalised service provision failures, and so on. Further, efforts to prioritise the use of digital technologies for financial transactions, especially since demonetisation, has led to a not-so-subtle equalisation of the ‘online economy’ with the ‘formal economy’; thus recognising the offline as the zones of informality, corruption, and piracy. This contributes to the offline becoming invisible, and in many cases, illegal, rather than being recognised as a condition that necessarily informs what it means to be digital.

Who is offline, and is it a choice? The global project of bringing people online has spurred several commendable initiatives in expanding access to digital devices, networks, and content, and often contentious ones such as Free Basics / internet.org, which illustrate the intersectionalities of scale, privilege, and rights that we need to be mindful of when we imagine the offline. Further, the experience of the internet, for a large section of people is often mediated through prior and ongoing experiences of traditional media, and through cultural metaphors and cognitive frames that transcend more practical registers such as consumption and facilitation. How do we approach, study, and represent this disembodied internet – devoid of its hypertext, platforms, devices, it's nuts and bolts, but still tangible through engagement in myriad, personal and often indiscernible ways.

For the third edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC18), we invite participants to critically discuss the *offline*. We invite sessions that present or propose academic, applied, creative, or technical works that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the *offline*.

Sessions

#OnlineGovernanceOfflineGovernment - Mohammad Javed Alam and Suman Mandal - Session Details

#WomenInTech - Priyanka Chaudhuri and Tripti Jain - Session Details

#Cyberflesh - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha - Session Details

#RethinkingTheVirtualPublic - Daisy Barman and Aamir Qayoom - Session Details

#FeminismIRL - Mamatha Karollil, the SIVE Collective, and Tara Atluri - Session Details

#ILoveYou - Dhiren Borisa and Dhrubo Jyoti - Session Details

#CollectionAndIdentity - Ravi Shukla, Rajiv Mishra, and Mrutyunjay Mishra - Session Details

#FollowUsOffline - Dinesh, Farah Yameen, Afrah Shafiq, and Bhanu Prakash GS - Session Details

#OfSiegesAndShutdowns - Chinmayi S. K. and Rohini Lakshané - Session Details

Papers

Slow journalism and the temporalities of the offline - Akshata Pai - Paper Abstract

Campus campaigns: User perceptions in pre-digital and digital eras - Arjun Ghosh - Paper Abstract

The many lives of food: Blogs to books and back - Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay - Paper Abstract

Feminism in digital age - Putul Sathe - Paper Abstract

Marathi literary criticism in the era of social media - Rajashree Patil - Paper Abstract

Taking open science offline - Shreyashi Ray - Paper Abstract

About the IRC Series

The Researchers at Work (RAW) 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.

The IRC series is driven by the following interests:

creating discussion spaces for researchers and practitioners studying internet in India and in other comparable regions,
foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and
exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference series was held in February 2016. It was hosted by the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund. The second Internet Researchers' Conference was organised in partnership with the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus on March 03-05, 2017.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc18

Internet Researchers' Conference 2018 (IRC18): Offline - Call for Sessions

sneha-pp — 2017-11-29T12:30:13Z

Does being offline necessarily mean being disconnected? Beyond anxieties such as FOMO, being offline is also seen as disengagement from a certain milieu of the digital (read: capital), an impediment to the way life is organised by and around technologies in general. However, being offline is not the exception, as examples of internet shutdown and acts on online censorship illustrate the persistence and often alarming regularity of the offline even for the ‘connected’ sections of the population. The *offline* is the theme of the third Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC18). We invite teams of two or more members to submit sessions proposals by Sunday, November 19 (final deadline). The session selection process is described below. The Conference will be hosted by the Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics (Kandbari, Palampur, Himachal Pradesh) on February 22-24, 2018.

IRC18: Offline

Call for Sessions

Proposed Sessions (Conference Website)

Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics (External Link)

IRC18: Offline

For the third edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC18), we invite participants to critically discuss the offline. We invite sessions that present or propose academic, applied, creative, or technical works that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the offline.

For example, the sessions may explore one or more of the following themes:

Geographies of internet access: Infrastructural, socio-political, and discursive forces and contradictions
Terms, objects, metaphors, and events of the internet and their offline remediation and circulation
Minimal computing, maker cultures, and digital collaboration and creativity in the offline
Offline economic cultures and transition towards less-cash economy
Offline as democratic choice: the right to offline lives in the context of global debates on privacy, surveillance, and data justice
Methodologies of studying the *offline* at the intersections of offline and online lives

Please note that the above are not sub-themes or tracks under which a session should be proposed, but are illustrations of possible session themes and concerns.

Call for Sessions

We invite teams of two or more members to propose sessions for IRC18. All sessions will be one and half hours long, and will be fully designed and facilitated by the team concerned, including moderation (if any). Please remember this when planning the session. Everything happening during the session, except for logistical support, will be led and managed by the session team.

The sessions are expected to drive conversations on the topic concerned. They may include presentation of research papers but this is not mandatory.

We look forward to sessions that involve collaborative work (either in groups or otherwise), including discussions, interactions, documentation, learning, and making, are most welcome.

We also look forward to sessions conducted in Indic languages. The proposing team, in such a case, should consider how participants who do not understand the language concerned may engage with the session. IRC organisers and other participants shall help facilitate these sessions, say by offering translation support.

The only eligibility criteria for proposing sessions are that they must be proposed by a team of at least two members, and that they must engage with the *offline*.

The deadline for submission of sessions proposals for IRC18 is Sunday, November 19 (final deadline).

To propose a session, please send the following documents (as attached text files) to raw@cis-india.org:

Title of the Session: The session should be named in the form of a hashtag (check the IRC17 selected sessions for example).
Context of the Session: This should be a 300 words note discussing the context, the motivations, and the expectations behind the proposed session.
Session Plan: This should describe the objectives of the session, what will be done and discussed during the session, and who among the people organising the session will be responsible for what. This note need not be more than 300 words long. If your session involves inviting others to present their work (say papers), then please provide a description and timeline of the process through which these people will be identified.
Session Team Details: Please share brief biographic notes of each member of the session team, and contact details.

There is no registration fee for the Conference, but participants are expected to pay for their own travel and accommodation (to be organised by CIS) expenses. Limited funding will be available to support travel and accommodation expenses of few participants who are unemployed or under-employed.

Session selection process:

November 19: Deadline of submission of session proposals.All submitted sessions will be posted on the CIS website, along with the names and details of the session team members.
November 20 - December 17: Open review period. All session teams, as well as other interested contributors, are invited to review and comment upon each other's submitted proposals and revise their own. Read the proposed sessions here: Conference Website.
December 18-31: The selection process takes place. All session teams will select 10 sessions to be included in the IRC18 programme. The votes will be anonymous, that is no session team will know which other sessions have voted for their session.
January 08: Announcement of selected sessions.
February 22-24: IRC18 at Sambhaavnaa Institute!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc18-offline-call

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Selection of Sessions

sumandro — 2016-12-12T13:37:23Z

We have a wonderful range of session proposals for the second Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC17) to take place in Bengaluru on March 03-05, 2017. From the 23 submitted session proposals, we will now select 10 to be part of the final Conference agenda. The selection will be done through votes casted by the teams that have proposed the sessions. This will take place in December 2016. Before that, we invite the session teams and other contributors to share their comments and suggestions on the submitted sessions. Please share your comments by December 14, either on session pages directly, or via email (sent to raw at cis-india dot org).

The Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) will be organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in partnership with the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B).

Proposed Sessions

01. #NotFewNotWeird (Surfatial: Malavika Rajnarayan, Prayas Abhinav, and Satya Gummuluri)

02. #VirtualFringe (Ritika Pant, Sagorika Singha, and Vibhushan Subba)

03. #StudentIndicUsageOnline (Shruti Nagpal and Sneha Verghese)

04. #SpeakMyLanguageInternet (Anubhuti Yadav, Sunetra Sen Narayan, Shalini Narayanan, Anand Pradhan, and Shashwati Goswami)

05. #ArchivesForStorytelling (V Jayant, Venkat Srinivasan, Chaluvaraju, Bhanu Prakash, and Dinesh)

06. #SelfiesFromTheField (Kavitha Narayanan, Oindrila Matilal and Onkar Hoysala)

07. #OpenAccessScholarlyPublishing (Nirmala Menon, Abhishek Shrivastava and Dibyaduti Roy)

08. #DigitalPedagogies (Nidhi Kalra, Ashutosh Potdar, and Ravikant Kisana)

09. #DigitalMusicAndDigitalReactions (Shivangi Narayan and Sarvpriya Raj)

10. #RenarrationWeb (Dinesh, Venkatesh Choppella, Srinath Srinivasa, and Deepak Prince)

11. IndicLanguagesAndInternetCoHabitation (Sreedhar Kallahalla, Ranjeet Kumar, Mohan Rao, and Anjali K. Mohan)

12. #DigitalPedagogy (Padmini Ray Murray and Dibyaduti Roy)

13. #CopyLeftRightLeft (Ravishankar Ayyakkannu and Srikanth Lakshmanan)

14. #ObjectsofDigitalGovernance (Marine Al Dahdah, Rajiv K. Mishra, Khetrimayum Monish Singh, and Sohan Prasad Sha)

15. #MaterializingWriting (Sneha Puthiya Purayil, Padmini Ray Murray, Dibyadyuti Roy, and Indrani Roy)

16. #DotBharatAdoption (V. Sridhar and Amit Prakash)

17. #DigitalDesires (Dhiren Borisa, Akhil Kang, and Dhrubo Jyoti)

18. #TheDigitalCommonplace (Ammel Sharon and Sujeet George)

19. #DigitalIdentities (Janaki Srinivasan, Savita Bailur, Emrys Schoemaker, Jonathan Donner, and Sarita Seshagiri)

20. #ToolsToAMultitextUniverse (Spandana Bhowmik and Sunanda Bose)

21. #DigitalisingKnowledge (Sneha Ragavan)

22. #ICTDEthics (Bidisha Chaudhuri, Andy Dearden, Linus Kendall, Dorothea Kleine, and Janaki Srinivasan)

23. #RepresentationAndPower (Bidisha Chaudhuri, Andy Dearden, Linus Kendall, Dorothea Kleine, and Janaki Srinivasan)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selection

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Selected Sessions

sumandro — 2017-01-20T13:28:24Z

With great pleasure we announce the eleven sessions selected for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) to be held at the IIIT Bangalore campus during March 03-05. The Conference is being organised by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT Bangalore and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

Session Selection Process

A total of 23 session proposals were submitted for IRC17, which were published online. All the session teams, as well as any interested persons, were invited on November 16 to submit comments on the initial session proposals. We closed accepting comments on December 23, and the sessions teams had up to December 30 to re-submit their proposals. On January 01, we invited each team to nominate 10 sessions to be included in the final agenda of the Conference, and this nomination process ended on January 19.

We received 200 nominations from 20 teams. Two teams retracted their session proposals during the selection process - #CopyLeftRightLeft and #DigitalisingKnowledge. And one team proposed two sessions, and so it only submitted one set of nominations.

Selected Sessions

The following 11 sessions have received 10 or more nominations:

05. #ArchivesForStorytelling - 11 nominations
06. #SelfiesFromTheField - 10 nominations
07. #OpenAccessScholarlyPublishing - 11 nominations
08. #DigitalPedagogies - 10 nominations
10. #RenarrationWeb - 14 nominations
11. #IndicLanguagesAndInternetCoHabitation - 12 nominations
14. #ObjectsofDigitalGovernance - 10 nominations
15. #MaterializingWriting - 10 nominations
16. #DotBharatAdoption - 14 nominations
17. #HookingUp - 11 nominations
19. #DigitalIdentities - 13 nominations

Dates and Venue

The IRC17 will take place during March 03-05, 2017 at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus. It is being organised by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT-B and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

Conference Programme

The IRC17 programme will be published in early February. Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to get updates about IRC17 and to take part in the pre-conference conversations.

Accommodation and Travel

Accommodation of all non-Bangalore-based team members of the selected sessions, during the days of the Conference, will be organised by CIS. We will write to the teams concerned directly regarding this.

Separately, CIS will offer 10 travel grants, up to Rs. 10,000 each, for within-India travel. Participants who are unemployed or semi-employed, including students, would be given priority.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selected-sessions

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Call for Sessions

sumandro — 2016-12-12T13:40:08Z

It gives us great pleasure to announce that the second Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC17) will take place in Bengaluru on March 03-05, 2017. It will be organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in partnership with the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B). It is a free and open conference. Sessions must be proposed by teams of two or more members on or before Friday, October 28. All submitted session proposals will go though an open review process, followed by each team that has proposed a session being invited to select ten sessions of their choice to be included in the Conference agenda. Final sessions will be chosen through these votes, and be announced on January 09, 2017.

IRC17 Call for Sessions: Download (PDF)

IRC17 Selection of Sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selection

Deadline for submission was Friday, October 28.

IRC17: Key Provocations

Two critical questions that emerged from the conversations at the previous edition of the Conference (IRC16) were about the digital objects of research, and the digital/internet experiences in Indic languages. As we discussed various aspects and challenges of 'studying internet in India', it was noted that we have not sufficiently explored how ongoing research methods, assumptions, and analytical frames are being challenged (if at all) by the becoming-digital of the objects of research across disciplines: from various artifacts and traces of human and machinic interactions, to archival entries and sites of ethnography, to practices and necessities of collaboration.

We found that the analyses of such digital objects of research often tend to assume either an aesthetic and functional uniqueness or sameness vis-à-vis the pre-/proto-digital objects of research, while neither of these positions are discussed in detail. Further, we tend to universalise the English-speaking user's/researcher's experience of working with such digital objects, without sufficiently considering their lives and functions in other (especially, Indic) languages.

These we take as the key provocations of the 2017 edition of IRC:

How does the becoming-digital of the research objects challenge our current research practices, concerns, and assumptions?
How do we appreciate, study, and theorise the functioning of and meaning-making by digital objects in Indic languages?
What research tools and infrastructures are needed to study, document, annotate, analyse, archive, cite, and work with (in general) digital objects, especially those in Indic languages?

Call for Sessions

We invite teams of two or more researchers and practitioners to propose sessions for IRC17. We do understand that finding team members for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. Please feel free to share initial sessions ideas on the researchers@cis-india mailing list [1]. Also, please keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed.

All sessions will be one and half hours long, and will be fully designed and facilitated by the team concerned, including moderation (if any). The sessions are expected to drive conversations on the topic concerned. They may include presentation of research papers but this is not at all mandatory.

If you plan to organise a session structured around presentation of research papers, please note that we are exploring potential publication outlets for a collection of full-length research papers. If your session is selected for IRC17, we will notify you of guidelines to be followed for the submission and review of full-length papers prior to the conference. If you are interested in this publication possibility, please indicate that in your session proposal submission.

Sessions that involve collaborative work (either in group or otherwise), including discussions, interactions, documentation, learning, and making, are most welcome.

Further, we look forward to sessions conducted in Indic languages. The proposing team, in such a case, should consider how participants who do not understand the language can participate in it. IRC organisers and other participants will play an active role in making such engagements possible.

The only eligibility criteria for proposing sessions are that they must be proposed by a team of at least two members, and that they must engage with one (or more) of the three key provocations mentioned above. Further, the teams whose sessions are selected for IRC17 must commit to producing at least one post-conference essay/documentation on the topic of their session.

The deadline for submission of sessions proposals for IRC17 is Friday, October 28.

To propose a session, please send the following documents (as attached text files) to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org:

Title and Description of the Session: The session should be named in the form of a hashtag (check the IRC16 sessions for reference [2]). The description of the session should clearly state what the key focus of the session is, and which of the three central concerns it will address. The description should be approximately 300 words long.
Session plan: This should describe how the session will be conducted and moderated. Any specific requirements (technical, language support, etc.) of the session should also be noted here. This should not be more than 200 words long. If your session plan involves presentation of research papers, please indicate whether you would be interested in having these papers considered for academic publication.
Documentation plan: This should indicate how documentation will be done during the session, and more importantly what form the post-conference essay/documentation will take and what issue(s) it will address. This should not be more than 100 words long.
Short Abstracts (Only for Sessions with Paper Presentations): If your session involves presentation of research papers, please share a 250 words abstract for each paper.
Details of the Team: Please share brief biographic notes of each member of the session team, and contact details.

Session Selection Process

October 28: Deadline of submission of session proposals.

October 31: All submitted sessions will be posted on the CIS website, along with the names, biographic brief, and contact details of the members of the session teams.

November 01 - December 24: Open review period. All session teams, as well as other interested contributors, may review the submitted proposals and share comments directly with the session teams, or discuss the session on the researchers@cis-india list. The session teams may fully and continuously edit the proposal during this period, including adding/changing session teams.

December 25: Open review ends and voting begins. All session teams will select 10 sessions to be included in the IRC17 programme. The votes will be anonymous, that is which session team has voted for which set of sessions will not be made public.

January 05: Voting ends.

January 09: Announcement of selected sessions.

February 12: Deadline for selected session teams to submit a detailed session plan, information about which will be shared later. If a selected session involves presentation of papers, then the draft papers are to be submitted by this date (no need to submit a detailed session plan in that case).

Venue, Accommodation, and Travel

The conference will take place at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) during March 03-05, 2017 [3].

The conference does not have any participation fees. The organisers will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference. We look forward to offer a limited number of (domestic) travel fellowships for students and other deserving applicants. We will also confirm this on January 02, 2017.

About the IRC Series

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme [4] 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.

The IRC series is driven by the following interests:

creating discussion spaces for researchers and practitioners studying internet in India and in other comparable regions,
foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and
exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference series was held in February 2016 [5]. It was hosted by the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University [6], and was supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund [7]. The Conference was constituted by eleven discussion sessions (majority of which were organised around presentation of several papers), four workshop sessions (which involved group discussions, activities, and learnings), a book sprint over three sessions to develop an outline of a (re)sourcebook for internet researchers in India, and a concluding round table. The audio recordings and notes from IRC16 are now being compiled into an online Reader. A detailed reflection note on the IRC16 has already been published [8].

Endnotes

[1] See: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers.

[2] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16.

[3] See: http://iiitb.ac.in/.

[4] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/.

[5] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16.

[6] See: http://www.jnu.ac.in/SSS/CPS/.

[7] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/cscs-digital-innovation-fund.

[8] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/iirc-reflections-on-irc16.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-call

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17)

sumandro — 2018-07-02T18:29:55Z

With great pleasure we announce the second edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), an annual conference series initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS to gather researchers, academic or otherwise, studying internet in/from India to congregate, share insights and tensions, and chart the ways forward. The Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) will be held at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus on March 03-05, 2017. It is being organised by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT-B and the CIS.

Registration is closed now.

Propose open sessions here.

Agenda (final): Download (PDF)

Programme: Download (PDF)

Poster (high resolution): Download (JPG)

IRC17: Key Provocations

Two critical questions that emerged from the conversations at the previous edition of the Conference (IRC16) were about the digital objects of research, and the digital/internet experiences in Indic languages. As we discussed various aspects and challenges of 'studying internet in India', it was noted that we have not sufficiently explored how ongoing research methods, assumptions, and analytical frames are being challenged (if at all) by the becoming-digital of the objects of research across disciplines: from various artifacts and traces of human and machinic interactions, to archival entries and sites of ethnography, to practices and necessities of collaboration.

We found that the analyses of such digital objects of research often tend to assume either an aesthetic and functional uniqueness or sameness vis-à-vis the pre-/proto-digital objects of research, while neither of these positions are discussed in detail. Further, we tend to universalise the English-speaking user's/researcher's experience of working with such digital objects, without sufficiently considering their lives and functions in other (especially, Indic) languages.

These we take as the key provocations of the 2017 edition of IRC:

How does the becoming-digital of the research objects challenge our current research practices, concerns, and assumptions?
How do we appreciate, study, and theorise the functioning of and meaning-making by digital objects in Indic languages?
What research tools and infrastructures are needed to study, document, annotate, analyse, archive, cite, and work with (in general) digital objects, especially those in Indic languages?

This conference series is specifically driven by the following interests: 1) creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions, 2) foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, 3) accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and 4) exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

Dates and Venue

The conference is being hosted by the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) during March 03-05, 2017.

Address: 26/C, Electronics City, Hosur Road, Bangalore, 560100, location on Google Map.

Session Details and Notes

Day 01, Friday, March 03

#DigitalIdentities: Details and Etherpad

#IndicLanguagesAndInternetCohabitation: Details and Etherpad

#SelfiesFromTheField: Details and Etherpad

#HookingUp: Details and Etherpad

Day 02, Saturday, March 04

#DotBharatAdoption: Details and Etherpad

#DigitalPedagogies: Details and Etherpad

#MaterializingWriting: Details and Etherpad

#RenarrationWeb: Details and Etherpad

Day 03, Sunday, March 05

#ArchivesForStorytelling: Details and Etherpad

#ObjectsOfDigitalGovernance: Details and Etherpad

#OpenAccessScholarlyPublishing: Details and Etherpad

Session Selection Process

Call for sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-call.

Selected sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selected-sessions.

Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in pre- and post-conference conversations.

About the IRC Series

The IRC series is driven by the following interests:

creating discussion spaces for researchers and practitioners studying internet in India and in other comparable regions,
foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and
exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference series was held in February 2016. It was hosted by the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund. The Conference was constituted by eleven discussion sessions (majority of which were organised around presentation of several papers), four workshop sessions (which involved group discussions, activities, and learnings), a book sprint over three sessions to develop an outline of a (re)sourcebook for internet researchers in India, and a concluding round table. The audio recordings and notes from IRC16 are now being compiled into an online Reader. A detailed reflection note on IRC16 has been published.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17

Internet Researchers' Conference 2016 (IRC16) - Selected Sessions

sumandro — 2016-01-18T09:23:06Z

We are proud to announce that the first Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC16), organised around the theme of 'studying internet in India,' will be held on February 26-28, 2016, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are deeply grateful to the Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for generously supporting it. Here are the details about the session selection process, the selected sessions, the Conference programme (draft), the pre-Conference discussions, accommodation, and travel grants. The Conference will include a book sprint to produce an open handbook on 'methods and tools for internet research.'

Session Selection Process

We received 23 superb session proposals for the IRC16. All the teams that submitted sessions were invited to vote for their eight favourite session in a double-blind manner - the teams did not know the names of the people who proposed other sessions, and we at CIS did not know which team has voted for which particular set of sessions. After receiving all the votes, we could not help but change the format of the Conference (as planned earlier) to accommodate 15 sessions in total. All Discussion and Workshop sessions of the Conference are double track, except for the three Discussion sessions that received most number of votes.

Selected Sessions

#DigitalDesires: Received 8.15% votes. Proposed by Silpa Mukherjee, Ankita Deb, and Rahul Kumar.
#FollowTheMedium: Received 7.60% votes. Proposed by Zeenab Aneez and Neha Mujumdar.
#STSDebates: Received 7.60% votes. Proposed by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey.
#DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins: Received 7.06% votes. Proposed by Aakash Solanki, Sandeep Mertia, and Rashmi M.
#InternetMovements: Received 7.06% votes. Proposed by Becca Savory, Sarah McKeever, and Shaunak Sen.
#FutureBazaars: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Maitrayee Deka, Adam Arvidsson, Rohini Lakshané, and Ravi Sundaram.
#MinimalComputing: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Padmini Ray Murray and Sebastian Lütgert.
#WebOfGenealogies: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Ishita Tiwary, Sandeep Mertia, and Siddharth Narrain.
#WikiShadows: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Tanveer Hasan and Rahmanuddin Shaik.
#LiterarySpaces: Received 5.43% votes. Proposed by P.P. Sneha and Arup Chatterjee.
#ArchiveAnarchy: Received 4.34% votes. Proposed by Ranjani M Prasad and Farah Yameen.
#AFCinema2.0: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Akriti Rastogi and Ishani Dey.
#ManyPublicsOfInternet: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Sailen Routray and Khetrimayum Monish.
#PoliticsOnSocialMedia: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Rinku Lamba and Rajarshi Dasgupta.
#SpottingData: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Dibyajyoti Ghosh and Purbasha Auddy.

Dates and Venue

The IRC16 will take place during February 26-28, 2016, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are delighted to announce that the Conference will be hosted by the Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU, and will be generously supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF).

Conference Programme

Access the draft programme (v.2.1): Download (PDF).

Pre-Conference Conversations

Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in the pre-conference conversations: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers.

Accommodation

CPS and CIS will provide accommodation to all non-Delhi-based team members of the selected sessions, during the days of the Conference.

Travel Grants

We will offer 10 travel grants, up to Rs. 10,000 each, for within-India travel. The following non-Delhi-based team members of the selected sessions have been selected for travel grants: Aakash Solanki, Dibyajyoti Ghosh, Neha Mujumdar, Purbasha Auddy, Rahmanuddin Shaik, Rashmi M, Rohini Lakshané, Sailen Routray, P.P. Sneha, and Zeenab Aneez.

The travel grants are made possible by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-selected-sessions

Internet Researchers' Conference 2016 (IRC16)

sumandro — 2016-02-27T06:19:33Z

The first Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC16) will be organised at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi, on February 26-28, 2016. The focus of the Conference is on the experiences, adventures, and methods of 'studying internet in India.' We are deeply grateful to the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), JNU, for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for the generous support. It is a free and open conference. Please use the form to register.

It is our great pleasure to announce the beginning of the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), an annual conference series initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS to gather researchers, academic or otherwise, studying internet in/from India to congregate, share insights and tensions, and chart the ways forward.

This conference series is specifically driven by the following interests: 1) creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions, 2) foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, 3) accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and 4) exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Conference, IRC16, is engaging with the theme of 'studying internet in India.' The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.

Dates and Venue

The IRC16 will take place during February 26-28, 2016, at the Convention Centre of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are grateful to Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for its generous support.

Registration and Programme

Conference programme: Download (PDF).

Programme booklet: Download (PDF).

[Important] Invitation letter to help you enter JNU campus: Download (PDF).

Please register for the Conference here: Form (Google).

We apologise for not being able to provide travel or accommodation support.

Etherpads

#Methods&ToolsForInternetResearch : https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-InternetResearch

#DigitalDesires: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-DigitalDesires.

#InternetMovements: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-InternetMovements.

#WebOfGenealogies: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-WebOfGenealogies.

#MinimalComputing: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-MinimalComputing.

#STSDebates: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-STSDebates.

#ArchiveAnarchy: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-ArchiveAnarchy.

#ManyPublicsOfInternet: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-ManyPublicsOfInternet.

#DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins.

#FutureBazaars: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-FutureBazaars.

#PoliticsOnSocialMedia: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-PoliticsOnSocialMedia.

#SpottingData: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-SpottingData.

#WikiShadows: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-WikiShadows.

#FollowTheMedium: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-FollowTheMedium.

#AFCinema2.0: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-AFCinema2.0.

#LiterarySpaces: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-LiterarySpaces.

Resources

Call for sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call.

Proposed sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-sessions.

Selected sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-selected-sessions.

Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in pre- and post-conference conversations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Extended to Nov 22)

sumandro — 2015-11-15T07:48:17Z

With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). This first conference will focus on the theme of 'Studying Internet in India.' The word 'study' here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation. We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 22, 2015. Final sessions will be selected during December and announced by December 31, 2015. Below are the details about the conference series, as well instructions for proposing a session for the conference.

Call for Sessions document: Download (PDF)

Call for Sessions poster: Download (PNG)

Internet Researchers’ Conference

The last decades have seen a growing entanglement of our daily lives with the internet, not only as modes of communication but also as shared socio-politico-cultural spaces, and as objects of study. The emergence of new artifacts, conditions, and sites of power/knowledge with the prevalence of digital modes of communication, consumptions, production, distribution, and appropriation have expectedly attracted academic and non-academic explorers across disciplines, professions, and interests. Researchers 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, and boundaries.

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is very excited to invite you to take part in the first of a series of annual conferences for researchers (academic or otherwise) studying internet in India. These conferences will be called the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), with the abbreviation reminding us of an early protocol for text-based communication over internet. The first edition will be organised around the theme of ‘studying internet in India.’ The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.

This conference series is founded on the following interests:

Creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions.
Foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India.
Accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India.
Exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

Studying Internet in India

The inaugural conference will be held in Delhi (to be confirmed) on February 25-27, 2015. It will comprise of discussion and workshop sessions taking place during the first two days, and a writing sprint and a final round table taking place during the third day.

The conference will specifically focus on the following questions:

How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?
How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?
What tools and methods are made available by arts, humanities, social science, and technical disciplines to study internet in India; how and where do they fail to meet the purpose; what revisions and fresh tool building are becoming necessary; and how should the usage of such tools and methods be taught?
Given the global techno-economic contours of the internet, and the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the same in India, how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?

Sessions

The conference will not be organised around papers but sessions. Each session will be one and half hour long. Potential participants may propose sessions that largely engage with one of the questions listed above.

Each proposed session must have at least two, and preferably three, co-leaders, who will drive the session, and prepare a session document after the conference. The proposed session can either involve a discussion, or a workshop.

In a discussion session, the co-leaders may present their works (not necessarily of the academic kind), or invite others to present their works, on a specific theme, which will be followed by a discussion, as structured by the co-leaders.

In a workshop session, the co-leaders will engage the participants to undertake individual or collaborative work in response to a series of questions, challenges, or provocations offered by the co-leaders at the beginning of the session. The proposed work may involve writing, searching, copying, building, etc., but not speaking.

Both the kinds of sessions are open to presentations and collaborations in the textual format or in other formats, including but not limited to code-based works and multimedia installations.

Writing Sprint

At the writing sprint, on the third day morning, all the participants will collaboratively put together the first draft of a handbook on tools and methods of studying Internet in India. It will be created as an online, open access, multilingual, and editable (wiki-like) book, and will be meant for extensive usage and augmentation by students, researchers, and others.

Final Round Table

This will take place after the lunch on the third day to wrap-up the conversations (and propose new initiatives, hopefully) emerging during the previous days of the conference, to make plans for follow-up works (including the first IRC Reader), and to speculate about the shape of the next year’s conference.

IRC Reader

The IRC Reader will be produced as documentation of the conversations and activities at the conference. The Reader, obviously, will have the same theme as the conference, and will largely comprise of the session documentation (not necessarily textual) prepared by the co-leaders of the session concerned. Once all the session documentation is shared by the co-leaders and is temporarily published online, all the participants will be invited to share their comments, which will all be part of the final Reader of the conference.

Proposing a Session

To propose a session, each team of two/three co-leaders will have to submit the following documents:

The name of the session: It should be created as a hashtag, as in #BlackLivesMatter, or #RefugeesWelcome.
A plan of the proposed session that should clarify its context, the key questions/challenges/provocations for the session, and how they connect to any one of the four questions listed above. Write no more than one page.
If it is a discussion session: Mention what will be presented at the session, and who will present it. Share the abstracts of the papers to be presented (if any). Each abstract should not be longer than 300 words.
If it is a workshop session: Mention what you expect the participants to do during the session, and how the co-leaders will support them through the work. Write no more than one page.
Three readings, or objects, or software that you expect the participants to know about before taking part in the session.
CVs of all the co-leaders of the session.

We understand that finding co-leaders for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. One possible way for you to find co-leaders is by sharing your session idea on the researchers@cis-india.org mailing list. Alternatively, you may keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed. If you are facing any difficulty subscribing to the mailing list, please write to raw@cis-india.org.

All session proposals must be submitted by Sunday, November 22 (extended), 2015, via email sent to raw@cis-india.org.

Selection of Sessions

All proposed sessions, along with related documents, will be published online by November 30. All co-leaders of proposed sessions will be invited to vote for 8 sessions before December 15. The sessions with maximum votes will be selected for the conference, and the list of such sessions will be published on December 31, 2015.

Venue, Accommodation, and Travel

The conference is most likely to take place in Delhi on February 25-27, 2016. The place, dates, and venue will be confirmed by December 31, 2015.

The conference organiser(s) will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference.

Unfortunately, we are not sure if we will be able to pay for travel expenses of the participants. We will confirm this by December 31, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call

IIRC: Reflections on IRC16

sumandro — 2016-09-06T09:28:51Z

The first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) series was held on February 26-28, 2016. It was hosted by the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was supported by the CSCS Digitial Innovation Fund. Here we share our reflections on the Conference, albeit rather delayed, and lessons towards the next edition to be held in March 2017.

Note: IIRC stands for 'if I remember correctly' in ancient internet acronym culture. Thanks to Sebastian for the inspiration.

For several months, we have been trying to organise our thoughts, as well as post-conference documentation efforts, emerging from the Internet Researchers' Conference 2016. We have not been very successful in either till now. And like most unsuccessful ventures, it has been a robust learning experience. We are working on giving the IRC16 Reader a final shape, before it becomes more of an academic legend. We hope to launch the beta version of the Reader in mid-September. Here, let me quickly share my reflections on IRC16, at least what I remember of it.

A Game of Selections

The Conference departed from most other academic conferences in two obvious ways: 1) the sessions were not selected by a programme committee but through votes cast by all the teams that proposed a session, and 2) the Conference programme consisted of both panel discussions and workshop sessions, and there was no requirement for the panel discussions to be structured around papers (though some sessions did involve presentation of papers). At the feedback session of the Conference, and also in conversations afterwards, it was pointed out that this manner of session selection (not based on paper abstracts, and through voting by peers) is perhaps “too democratic / too wiki-like,” which undermines the ability to curate the Conference effectively. Several participants also presented the opposite viewpoint – that a more peer-driven selection of sessions better reflects the immediate interests and priorities of the community of internet researchers who are gathering at the Conference. As one participant articulated: “we must have faith in our ignorance.”

We at CIS are still confident about this mode of selection but at the same time we do recognise three key concerns in conducting the selection process:

Anonymity: The anonymous selection process breaks down since we expect the potential participants of the Conference to share early ideas about their potential sessions, and scout for potential session team members, through the mailing list (and elsewhere) before actually submitting the panel proposal. We still prefer that participants discuss the session before proposing it, so perhaps we will have to live with the incomplete anonymity when it comes to the session selection process. Perhaps we can make the votes non-anonymous too to keep parity – that is, all the proposed sessions would be published with the names of their proposers, and all the teams will publicly indicate which other sessions they are voting for.
Disciplinary capture: While peer-based voting works very well when it comes to reflecting the interests of the community, it might quite easily break down if there is a concentration of teams coming from a specific disciplinary background. How we approach research objects and questions, and hence how we appreciate how exciting a research object or question is, can be quite intimately shaped by our disciplinary locations. A dominance of a specific discipline among the peer-group (that is among all the teams that have proposed sessions) can potentially lead to a 'capture' of the Conference by research objects and questions of interest to specific disciplines. This is something we have to be more aware of when casting our votes.
Peer-review before peer-votes: The process followed last year only allowed a session team to vote on the sessions proposed by other teams, but not to review and comment on those proposals. This review process is not only useful to infuse the session proposals with ideas and concerns coming from other disciplinary and methodological locations, but also to support the teams to revisit their articulation and structuring of the session before their peers start to cast votes. This is something we must aspire to do during the selection process for IRC17.

A Clash of Disciplines

Continuing from the “disciplinary capture” point above, the presence of researchers and practitioners from various fields and disciplines was, according to me, the most exciting part of the IRC16, and also the part that led to significant frustration. I felt that we were able to gather people from various disciplinary backgrounds – academic and otherwise – but could not provide sufficient space or time for the inter-disciplinary conversations to a take more fuller form. We saw clear disagreements emerging between researchers coming from different disciplinary locations, though most of them did not have the opportunity to be developed into a detailed discussion.

This is quite a high ambition for a conference of this kind; that is given the conference was not focused narrowly on a set of topics. Nonetheless, this remains one of the key objectives of the IRC series, and we need to understand how better to create opportunities for participants to communicate their disciplinary concerns and create inter-disciplinary discussions.

One possible way to create context for more inter-disciplinary conversations is by requesting all the sessions’ teams to include members from different disciplines. Also, we can try to keep more open discussion space (but that means less selected sessions) to provide time for the discussions spilling over from the sessions. Thirdly, we can think of including “inter-disciplinary conversations” as one of the key themes for potential sessions of IRC17.

Further, though we experienced several clashes of disciplines, methods, and approaches, these were all limited to a completely anglophone intellectual environment. We failed substantially, as was pointed out by a participant at the feedback session, to create space at the Conference for Indic language practices and concerns – both for researchers and practitioners working in these languages, and the criticisms of anglophone academic framings and practices coming from such researchers and practitioners. This is something we must address proactively during the future editions of the Conference.

A Storm of Sessions

One of the often heard criticisms of the conference was regarding the decision to have parallel sessions. While the decision was taken purely to accommodate as many sessions as possible, this of course imposed an undesirable burden upon the participants to choose between two rather desirable sessions. We as organisers of IRC16 faced the same tough decision of choosing between sessions that should both be part of the Conference agenda, and conveniently decided to let the participants choose (instead of us choosing for them). It is quite likely that we would do this again, or at least would like to do this again – that is, we expect that for IRC17 too we would receive a lot of wonderful sessions and decide against a fully single-track conference.

The question of sessions, however, is not only one of tracks. It is also about formats. In the feedback session, there was a clear recognition of the value of “workshop” sessions – that is sessions that involved all the participants doing something – in a conference like this, which is explicitly interested in the conceptual and technical challenges of digital media research. There was also a demand that we have more workshop sessions in IRC17, as opposed to “discussion” sessions that involved paper presentations. While the original plan was that all the participants will primarily be learning or doing something at a workshop session, and will not be talking, as the discussion sessions were primarily meant for talking, the actual sessions in the Conference differed from each other essentially in terms of whether papers were presented or not.

Thus, it perhaps makes sense, for the IRC17 call for sessions, to not to separate out these session types in terms of workshop/discussion but in terms of paper-driven/non-paper-driven. Maybe this separation itself is avoidable and all that we need to say is that the Conference is fundamentally interested in sessions that drive conversations, both intra- and inter-disciplinary. While presentation of papers can surely drive conversations, they are not necessary at all.

A Feast for Researchers and Practitioners

A key objective, if not the key objective, of IRC16 was to build a temporary space for researchers and practitioners studying internet and society in India (though not necessarily from or located in India) to gather and share thoughts. While we felt that the conference has been quite effective in doing that, we have been rather clueless when it comes to sustaining the momentum of interactions that was achieved at the Conference, or documenting the various kinds and threads of conversations taking place there.

The first problem, we may say, is not something that CIS (as the organiser of the conference series) should be concerned with too much, since our aim and responsibility is to make possible this temporary space and not to host all conversations and collaborations coming out of it. In fact, we should not be interested in hosting and/or facilitating all such initiatives. The second problem, however, is a serious one for us. Since the Conference is not organised around pre-written papers, we will have to depend on the efforts by the participants either during, or after (or both) the Conference to produce an output that documents, narrates, and/or reflects on the conversations that took place. Such an approach, thus, is fundamentally based upon the trust that the participants will prepare and share these materials after the Conference. On a lighter note, we also hope that social embarrassment and pressure will also play a role here (but that only works when the majority of the participants are actually sharing).

There are two connected points here:

While the majority of the documentation happens either at the Conference or after that, what kind of pre-Conference efforts (by the participants) would be useful in ensuring productive sessions?
Who all contribute to this post-Conference Reader? Should it be restricted to teams/people whose sessions were selected, or all who proposed a session, and/or took part in the Conference?

A recommendation at the feedback session of IRC16 touched upon the first question, while the second question is derived from a critical question posed at the same session. The recommendation was that the teams whose sessions get selected for the Conference should share a more detailed session agenda note before the Conference to better inform the participants about the content and approach of the same. The critical question mentioned earlier was regarding the imagination of the community of researchers and practitioners being gathered at the Conference, and if it is only limited to the people whose sessions got selected. In our minds it is clear that everyone gathering at these conferences, and those who proposed sessions but could not attend, are all part of this imagined community, and thus should also contribute to the post-Conference Reader.

A Dance with Sustainability

IRC16 was supported very generously by the Centre for Political Studies at JNU (as part of an ongoing project titled UPE2 Project: Politics on Social Media), the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund, and CIS. The first provided us with the conference venue and accommodation, the second provided financial support towards food and travel expenses (and bit of accommodation too), and the third picked up all the remaining expenses and efforts. While we will keep doing what it takes to organise the next editions of IRC, we are dependent on academic and other institutes that are willing to host the event and accommodate the participants, and on various sources of funding that may be available to cover the miscellaneous expenses.

When we started planning for IRC16, we decided not to conceptualise this as part of an ongoing or future project – that is, the conference series should not itself become a deliverable under a project at CIS. While this gives us intellectual and functional independence, it entails serious financial limitations. We are of course open to the conference series becoming a site for developing or communicating a deliverable under an ongoing project at CIS or any other involved actor (especially the host and funding agencies) but such matters, we feel, are best discussed in a case-to-case basis. The bottom line remains that we need financial and human support to take this conference series forward. This is definitely something to be discussed further at IRC17.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/iirc-reflections-on-irc16