Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 127-147, June 2023.
The article employs the ethnographic portrait of the founder and co-owner of a chain of girls’ madrasas in a Muslim-dominated mofussil town in Uttar Pradesh to illuminate the current moment at which girls’ madrasas stand in a rapidly changing India. These madrasas use a range of imaginaries from the global ummah to the pious educated Indian Muslim woman to recast madrasa education, offering a mix of formalised religious education and modern schooling in safe ‘purdah’ institutions. The article illustrates how girls’ madrasas are both a source and result of the changing imagery of the kamil momina or ideal Islamic woman in India. It teases out the connections between these various strands to illustrate larger social implications and argues that contemporary girls’ madrasas do not conform to the binaries of social reproduction and empowerment that have been conventionally applied to studies on madrasas.
Disempowering Women and Constructing Muslims as ‘Other’: A Study of India’s Anti-Conversion Legislations
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 170-187, June 2023.
As a constitutional democracy, India remains committed to the cherished values of individual liberty and freedom of conscience which form the core of the fundamental rights enshrined in our constitution. However, in the last few years, we have witnessed a marked departure and foundational shift in the pursuit of these values. What we see in terms of the curtailment of women’s freedom, dictating personal relationship choices and maligning Muslims as a danger to Hindu women’s honour, delivers a severe blow to our pluralistic ethos and the cherished values of coexistence. The recently enacted legislations dressed up as anti-conversion laws to criminalise love choices bear a clear reflection of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws in many ways. Against the background of the state making intrusions into private spaces, denying the right to choose partners and acting as an oppressive surveillance agency, this study argues that these laws subvert the vision of our constitutional democracy and defy various judicial orders. It examines the literature on Hindu rights for women, analyses the contents of the legislation considering the contemporary discourse, to argue that these laws amount to undoing our achievements as a secular modern nation in the last seven decades.
As a constitutional democracy, India remains committed to the cherished values of individual liberty and freedom of conscience which form the core of the fundamental rights enshrined in our constitution. However, in the last few years, we have witnessed a marked departure and foundational shift in the pursuit of these values. What we see in terms of the curtailment of women’s freedom, dictating personal relationship choices and maligning Muslims as a danger to Hindu women’s honour, delivers a severe blow to our pluralistic ethos and the cherished values of coexistence. The recently enacted legislations dressed up as anti-conversion laws to criminalise love choices bear a clear reflection of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws in many ways. Against the background of the state making intrusions into private spaces, denying the right to choose partners and acting as an oppressive surveillance agency, this study argues that these laws subvert the vision of our constitutional democracy and defy various judicial orders. It examines the literature on Hindu rights for women, analyses the contents of the legislation considering the contemporary discourse, to argue that these laws amount to undoing our achievements as a secular modern nation in the last seven decades.
An Unjust Mercy: Locating the Illegalities in the Release of the Convicts in the Bilkis Bano Case
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 209-216, June 2023.
The Gujarat government’s decision on 15 August 2022, to release all 11 prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment in the Bilkis Bano case has serious implications, both for the rights of Bilkis Bano herself and the policy landscape around reformative prison measures like remission and premature release. Here I attempt to locate the release within a larger national context wherein carceral notions of justice, typified by longer and harsher prison sentences, are gaining currency both within the government and judiciary. I examine the deeply flawed process by which the prisoners came to be released, highlighting the arbitrariness and legal infirmities that render the government’s decision illegal.
The Gujarat government’s decision on 15 August 2022, to release all 11 prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment in the Bilkis Bano case has serious implications, both for the rights of Bilkis Bano herself and the policy landscape around reformative prison measures like remission and premature release. Here I attempt to locate the release within a larger national context wherein carceral notions of justice, typified by longer and harsher prison sentences, are gaining currency both within the government and judiciary. I examine the deeply flawed process by which the prisoners came to be released, highlighting the arbitrariness and legal infirmities that render the government’s decision illegal.
Politicizing witnessing: Testimonial user-generated content in the aftermath of Rousseff’s impeachment in Brazil
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This research presents the concept of testimonial User-Generated Content (tUGC): media content generated by ordinary citizens that witness an extraordinary event and publish it on their own channels. Rooted on the crossroads of UGC and Witnessing studies, this article provides a definition and a proposition of operationalization of tUGC in a case analysis, using two protests against former Brazilian president Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016 as case of study. Results suggest three main patterns of tUGC production, named as political, journalistic and expressive. Quantitative analysis points to a high frequency of production but to low levels of diffusion of tUGC overall in the context of the analysed case. Finally, results suggest external factors seem to have effect on general patterns of tUGC production and circulation. Discussion and further developments are offered.
This research presents the concept of testimonial User-Generated Content (tUGC): media content generated by ordinary citizens that witness an extraordinary event and publish it on their own channels. Rooted on the crossroads of UGC and Witnessing studies, this article provides a definition and a proposition of operationalization of tUGC in a case analysis, using two protests against former Brazilian president Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016 as case of study. Results suggest three main patterns of tUGC production, named as political, journalistic and expressive. Quantitative analysis points to a high frequency of production but to low levels of diffusion of tUGC overall in the context of the analysed case. Finally, results suggest external factors seem to have effect on general patterns of tUGC production and circulation. Discussion and further developments are offered.
New Resources
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 258-262, June 2023.
Falling Between the Cracks: Women’s Work and the Periodic Labour Force Survey
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 228-235, June 2023.
This article reflects upon the changes introduced in the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) and their impact on the visibility of women’s work in India. In 2017–2018, the National Sample Survey Organisation’s five-yearly employment–unemployment surveys (EUS) were replaced by the annual PLFS, and in the transition, the section that comprised probing questions was dropped. These questions had been introduced in 1972–1973 to highlight women’s productive activities, which otherwise remain invisible. The section was key to collecting information on not only women’s reproductive work but also the unrecognised productive work women undertake within the walls of their homes. It provided a window in a society where women’s work is underestimated as well as unappreciated.
This article reflects upon the changes introduced in the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) and their impact on the visibility of women’s work in India. In 2017–2018, the National Sample Survey Organisation’s five-yearly employment–unemployment surveys (EUS) were replaced by the annual PLFS, and in the transition, the section that comprised probing questions was dropped. These questions had been introduced in 1972–1973 to highlight women’s productive activities, which otherwise remain invisible. The section was key to collecting information on not only women’s reproductive work but also the unrecognised productive work women undertake within the walls of their homes. It provided a window in a society where women’s work is underestimated as well as unappreciated.
‘Help us better understand our changing climate’: Exploring the discourse of Citizen Science
Discourse &Communication, Ahead of Print.
In this article I claim that online Citizen Science projects are exemplars of a digital genre that acts as text and medium. To support this claim I apply a previously proposed two-dimensional genre analytical model and develop empirical procedures to identify how ‘communicative purpose’ is realised by functional units/links, which in turn are realised by rhetorical strategies (verbal and visual) in two dimensions, the reading mode and the navigation mode. Empirical data show that this genre fulfils a set of distinct communicative purposes, namely to build credibility and trust in scientific research, to make specialised contents accessible to audiences with different levels of scientific literacy, to convey emotion and to build and maintain citizen-volunteers’ engagement. Such multifunctionality fulfils the social exigence of the genre, that is, supporting participatory science. The study contributes to the empirical characterisation of non-linear, multimodal genres taking into account the roles of text producer and text receiver.
In this article I claim that online Citizen Science projects are exemplars of a digital genre that acts as text and medium. To support this claim I apply a previously proposed two-dimensional genre analytical model and develop empirical procedures to identify how ‘communicative purpose’ is realised by functional units/links, which in turn are realised by rhetorical strategies (verbal and visual) in two dimensions, the reading mode and the navigation mode. Empirical data show that this genre fulfils a set of distinct communicative purposes, namely to build credibility and trust in scientific research, to make specialised contents accessible to audiences with different levels of scientific literacy, to convey emotion and to build and maintain citizen-volunteers’ engagement. Such multifunctionality fulfils the social exigence of the genre, that is, supporting participatory science. The study contributes to the empirical characterisation of non-linear, multimodal genres taking into account the roles of text producer and text receiver.
Technoliberalism and the Complementary Relationships between Humanitarian, Conservation, and Entrepreneurial Dronework in Indonesia
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Criticism of commercial drones as violators of personal privacy or unsafe public annoyances continues to influence public and academic discourse. At the same time, the commercial drone’s benefits for humanitarian, conservation, industry, and emissions-reduced delivery have also become evident. That such a powerful technology which enhances vision, movement, and force-from-afar could have ambivalent properties appears contradictory. Drawing from the physics and diplomatic work of Niels Bohr, the article argue that drone dualities are complementary rather than contradictory. This theory of complementarity is supported by Bernard Stiegler’s theories including technicity, which argues for hominization or the coevolutionary complementarity of humans and technology, and pharmacology, a bifurcation of technicity into complementary sanitive and poisonous possibilities. This article brings complementarity into the present by linking it to the theory of technoliberalism which situates technicity’s bifurcation in the context of liberalism, namely, the complementary relationship between social liberalism for the collective good and economic liberalism for market benefit. This theory of technoliberal complementarity is examined through ethnographic research into humanitarian, conservation, and economic dronework on the Indonesian islands of Bali, West Papua, and Java in 2018. Complementarity does not elide the importance of dissonance. Instead, it reframes it as a result of interdependent tensions, not their opposition. In this manner, complementarity is a synthetic theory about the generative frictions inherent in technocultural production.
Criticism of commercial drones as violators of personal privacy or unsafe public annoyances continues to influence public and academic discourse. At the same time, the commercial drone’s benefits for humanitarian, conservation, industry, and emissions-reduced delivery have also become evident. That such a powerful technology which enhances vision, movement, and force-from-afar could have ambivalent properties appears contradictory. Drawing from the physics and diplomatic work of Niels Bohr, the article argue that drone dualities are complementary rather than contradictory. This theory of complementarity is supported by Bernard Stiegler’s theories including technicity, which argues for hominization or the coevolutionary complementarity of humans and technology, and pharmacology, a bifurcation of technicity into complementary sanitive and poisonous possibilities. This article brings complementarity into the present by linking it to the theory of technoliberalism which situates technicity’s bifurcation in the context of liberalism, namely, the complementary relationship between social liberalism for the collective good and economic liberalism for market benefit. This theory of technoliberal complementarity is examined through ethnographic research into humanitarian, conservation, and economic dronework on the Indonesian islands of Bali, West Papua, and Java in 2018. Complementarity does not elide the importance of dissonance. Instead, it reframes it as a result of interdependent tensions, not their opposition. In this manner, complementarity is a synthetic theory about the generative frictions inherent in technocultural production.
Machinic agency and datafication: Labour and value after anthropocentrism
Convergence, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we reassess Marxist notions of labour and value for our datafied societies, where data is allegedly becoming one of the dominant sources of economic value. Our contention is that the existing accounts of value, which assume that value is produced exclusively by human labour, are unable to fully account for the processes of exploitation that take place in our digital platform dominated economy. We begin addressing these shortcomings by critiquing the anthropocentric notion of agency that informs the Marxist account of labour. This notion of agency locates productive activity exclusively in human intentionality. After offering an overview of anthropocentric concepts of labour that still dominate (post-)Marxist theories today, we draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to develop a post-anthropocentric account of agency that we term machinic agency. Machinic agency sees activity as a matter of connectivity between different human and nonhuman actors (technologies, organisms, minerals etc.), which productively combine and amplify their capacities to act. These affective connections precede and shape, but often also completely bypass, human consciousness. We make a case for the concept of machinic agency by comparing it with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), an established theory that conceptualises agency as arising from compositions of both human and nonhuman elements. Our contention is that, unlike ANT, machinic agency is able to collapse both, the distinction between human and nonhuman, and that between mechanism and vitalism. We conclude by suggesting that machinic agency allows us to demonstrate that data capitalism exploits and appropriates not only the surplus value produced by conscious human effort, but also the co-production of affective, technological, and ecological aspects of our existence.
In this article, we reassess Marxist notions of labour and value for our datafied societies, where data is allegedly becoming one of the dominant sources of economic value. Our contention is that the existing accounts of value, which assume that value is produced exclusively by human labour, are unable to fully account for the processes of exploitation that take place in our digital platform dominated economy. We begin addressing these shortcomings by critiquing the anthropocentric notion of agency that informs the Marxist account of labour. This notion of agency locates productive activity exclusively in human intentionality. After offering an overview of anthropocentric concepts of labour that still dominate (post-)Marxist theories today, we draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to develop a post-anthropocentric account of agency that we term machinic agency. Machinic agency sees activity as a matter of connectivity between different human and nonhuman actors (technologies, organisms, minerals etc.), which productively combine and amplify their capacities to act. These affective connections precede and shape, but often also completely bypass, human consciousness. We make a case for the concept of machinic agency by comparing it with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), an established theory that conceptualises agency as arising from compositions of both human and nonhuman elements. Our contention is that, unlike ANT, machinic agency is able to collapse both, the distinction between human and nonhuman, and that between mechanism and vitalism. We conclude by suggesting that machinic agency allows us to demonstrate that data capitalism exploits and appropriates not only the surplus value produced by conscious human effort, but also the co-production of affective, technological, and ecological aspects of our existence.
Understanding CSR Campaigns Through the Lens of Culture Values and Moral Emotion
Journal of Creative Communications, Ahead of Print.
This study aimed to examine the persuasive influences of moral emotions on younger consumers’ judgments and decision-making and the roles of culture and self-construal in processing corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns. This study employed a between-subjects experiment where American and Chinese participants viewed one of the two CSR advertisement campaigns designed with ego-focused (e.g., an advertisement elicited anger emotion) and other-focused appeals (e.g., an advertisement elicited guilt emotion). By employing an elaboration likelihood persuasion model (ELM), the results indicated that negative moral emotions had significant positive influences on attitudes toward the advertisements and purchase intention through the peripheral route. In addition, results revealed the interaction effects between guilt emotion and cultural values (i.e., country) on attitudes. This study also highlighted the moderating role of self-construal individual values in the relationship between guilt and attitudes toward the campaign. This research provides insights for communication practitioners on designing effective CSR campaigns to reach culturally diverse target audiences.
This study aimed to examine the persuasive influences of moral emotions on younger consumers’ judgments and decision-making and the roles of culture and self-construal in processing corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns. This study employed a between-subjects experiment where American and Chinese participants viewed one of the two CSR advertisement campaigns designed with ego-focused (e.g., an advertisement elicited anger emotion) and other-focused appeals (e.g., an advertisement elicited guilt emotion). By employing an elaboration likelihood persuasion model (ELM), the results indicated that negative moral emotions had significant positive influences on attitudes toward the advertisements and purchase intention through the peripheral route. In addition, results revealed the interaction effects between guilt emotion and cultural values (i.e., country) on attitudes. This study also highlighted the moderating role of self-construal individual values in the relationship between guilt and attitudes toward the campaign. This research provides insights for communication practitioners on designing effective CSR campaigns to reach culturally diverse target audiences.