The paper offers an overview of the Indian DIY music ecosystem in relation to current broad debat... more The paper offers an overview of the Indian DIY music ecosystem in relation to current broad debates on DIY scenes, their connections to mainstream cultural industries, platform capitalism, and national policies. The paper specifically focuses on the impact of social media on India's artistic ecosystem as social media have been one of the most recent influencing socio-technological factors that have changed the dynamics of India's DIY music cultures. I examine how the Internet has fuelled and transformed DIY music in India with special attention to three trends-rise of the regional; rise of the small town; and rise of the independent. The paper also draws attention to concerning influences of social media on the art ecosystem ranging from precarity and exploitation, trolling and scams to compromising collective solidarity in favour of neo-liberal notions of individual success. The paper argues that social media participation for DIY artists is not equitable and fair. Social media, however, facilitates building of social and commercial capital for artists who have had no access to it in the deeply hierarchical conventional system in India. Social media also opens the possibility of negotiating the hegemonic cultural norms, be it with reference to gender, class, caste, or rules imposed on art by established powers. It is ultimately the techno-capitalist power that dominates the artistic ecosystems but through social media, DIY artists find and create small agentic and resistive opportunities, and make themselves a force to reckon with in the Indian art and entertainment ecosystem.
We examine how globally oriented-influencers from India utilize specific strategies of content cr... more We examine how globally oriented-influencers from India utilize specific strategies of content creation to negotiate with the dominant logic of platform affordances to engage with global audiences. It involves individual negotiations by the influencers with the platform affordances in creating content that foregrounds their cultural realities and aspirations while remaining relevant to global audiences. We do so by deploying the critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) framework to understand influencers’ strategic choices and discursive practices as they interact and negotiate with the platform affordances. Our analysis shows two processes that help the influencers communicate their content to the global audience and sustain their local connections and followership: (1) Templatization: a process through which influencers from the global South attune themselves to the technological possibilities of the platform and utilize its features to produce content with a set of replicable patterns, formats, and practices; and (2) Cultural brokering: a negotiation strategy which allows the influencers to foreground and express their quotidian lived realities and cultural experiences in an increasingly globalized digital environment.
The paper offers an overview of the Indian DIY music ecosystem in relation to current broad debat... more The paper offers an overview of the Indian DIY music ecosystem in relation to current broad debates on DIY scenes, their connections to mainstream cultural industries, platform capitalism, and national policies. The paper specifically focuses on the impact of social media on India's artistic ecosystem as social media have been one of the most recent influencing socio-technological factors that have changed the dynamics of India's DIY music cultures. I examine how the Internet has fuelled and transformed DIY music in India with special attention to three trends-rise of the regional; rise of the small town; and rise of the independent. The paper also draws attention to concerning influences of social media on the art ecosystem ranging from precarity and exploitation, trolling and scams to compromising collective solidarity in favour of neo-liberal notions of individual success. The paper argues that social media participation for DIY artists is not equitable and fair. Social media, however, facilitates building of social and commercial capital for artists who have had no access to it in the deeply hierarchical conventional system in India. Social media also opens the possibility of negotiating the hegemonic cultural norms, be it with reference to gender, class, caste, or rules imposed on art by established powers. It is ultimately the techno-capitalist power that dominates the artistic ecosystems but through social media, DIY artists find and create small agentic and resistive opportunities, and make themselves a force to reckon with in the Indian art and entertainment ecosystem.
Our article unpacks the emergent and dynamic relationship between learning needs and approaches a... more Our article unpacks the emergent and dynamic relationship between learning needs and approaches and the evolving landscape of the gig economy in the country. This research seeks to comprehend the contextual collapse of generic, utility-driven, and structured educational models to create space for a personalized and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach to acquiring skills and competencies. We argue that the platformization of learning, user-generated learning resources, and peer networks of communication and collaboration enable this DIY model of learning. We interviewed 16 young digital designers (graphic designers and user experience (UX) designers) from three cities in India-Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. We complemented our interview data with social media ethnography to understand how young urban learners who work or aspire to join the gig economy design their learning experiences. Our goal was to understand how young artists who worked as gig workers or wanted to enter the gig economy defined education and learning in the context of the changing forms of employment and professional aspirations in the global South's digitally connected and emerging market. Our analysis reveals the chasm between the rigidity of formal education and the future of work in India, including the evolving learning needs of young workers in a rising platform economy.
The Palgrave Handbook of Global Citizenship and Education, 2018
In this chapter, I address the possible contribution of social media in global citizenship educat... more In this chapter, I address the possible contribution of social media in global citizenship education (GCE) to reflect the contemporary shifts in the notions of citizenship and education. GCE initiatives should consider two equally important routes in using the affordances of social media: One, to facilitate civic experiences that can optimally use the informal and spontaneous participatory cultures of the digital native youth and two, to design non-formal and classroom based educational experiences using social media that can bring about civic learning not produced by the typical informal social media use. In each case, media and information literacy, competency in agonistic negotiations/contestations, critical geo-political and historical literacy, and public engagement skills are crucial for an effective use of social media for civic purposes.
In this chapter, we have outlined a postcolonial pedagogic framework for global citizenship educa... more In this chapter, we have outlined a postcolonial pedagogic framework for global citizenship education (GCE). We argue for GCE rooted in lived realities of individuals and communities and shaped by histories of colonization and conflict. The most important contribution of the framework is to enable citizens to acknowledge the unjust histories of colonization and the conflict-ridden past of countries and communities as they learn how to work together to rupture the perpetual cycle of dominance and marginalization. Our hope is that young people will create an inclusive and equitable future through critical remembrance and conscious forgetting.
Our article advances filter-ing as a vital affordance to understand how and which aspects of soci... more Our article advances filter-ing as a vital affordance to understand how and which aspects of social lives dynamically manifest (or are excluded) from online settings. We demonstrate filter-ing’s conceptual potency in context-collapse studies, examining contextualization and context-collapse negotiations online. Drawing from Goffman’s writings on self, identity, and sociality, we demonstrate filter-ing in the self-presentational practices of young, urban Indians on popular online platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. Our research illustrates the ongoing, relational, communicative, performative, situational, contingent, and boundary-drawing activities of filter-ing. We highlight the collaborative role enactments of relational friends through team filter-ing. Our discussion and coda discuss the influence of platform design and interface, normative and nonnormative filter-ing, the (in)stability of contextualization, the scope for contextspecific inquiries and creative ...
International Journal of Communication, Oct 29, 2021
In this study, we examine the ways in which young girls from low-income communities exercise thei... more In this study, we examine the ways in which young girls from low-income communities exercise their autonomy and agency in their engagement with digital technologies and, at times, show compliance with social norms when online. Based on our findings from our ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that young girls' engagement with digital technologies reflects both submission to the dominant gender, class realities, and a sustained desire to create a fraying around the edges of systems for gendered surveillance-discipline. We develop the concept of "quotidian playful resilience" (QPR) to unpack the influence of gender norms and class-based experiences on young girls' everyday digital practices. We define QPR as a meta practice that informs how girls access, use, and navigate digital technologies-including the infrastructural affordances and limitations and the realm of the digitalscape. The study explores the productive associations between gender, class, and technology in young girls' digital encounters in India.
Challenging Discriminatory Practices of Religious Socialization among Adolescents, 2019
In this chapter, we elaborate how religion operates as a social institution of governance and dis... more In this chapter, we elaborate how religion operates as a social institution of governance and discipline in the society. We introduce our readers to the theory of governmentality by unpacking some key concepts such as the dominant rationality, macro- and micro-level of governance, regimes of knowledge and power, politics of truth, and others and elucidate these with empirical examples. The aim is to explain how the ideology of religious discrimination is circulated, reinforced, and reified by both the macro-systems of governance and everyday lived realities of individuals in societies.
In this chapter, I address the possible contribution of social media in global citizenship educat... more In this chapter, I address the possible contribution of social media in global citizenship education (GCE) to reflect the contemporary shifts in the notions of citizenship and education. GCE initiatives should consider two equally important routes in using the affordances of social media: One, to facilitate civic experiences that can optimally use the informal and spontaneous participatory cultures of the digital native youth and two, to design non-formal and classroom based educational experiences using social media that can bring about civic learning not produced by the typical informal social media use. In each case, media and information literacy, competency in agonistic negotiations/contestations, critical geo-political and historical literacy, and public engagement skills are crucial for an effective use of social media for civic purposes.
Challenging Discriminatory Practices of Religious Socialization among Adolescents, 2019
In this chapter, dialogic practices of engagement are identified as a technology of counter-condu... more In this chapter, dialogic practices of engagement are identified as a technology of counter-conduct because they are rooted in democratic strategies of participation and preserve the autonomy of all the stakeholders participating in the process. These practices are deployed to enable students to acknowledge why and how their subjective identities influence their classroom participation and their attitude toward the “religious other.” As a result, students experience alternate subjectivities and often require a platform to enact/act out their newly acquired identities. In this chapter, we demonstrate how theater can be appropriated for creating a new reality and a new set of experiences in and through a story to subvert particular forms of action. We demonstrate how as children enact the role of the “other,” the dominant rationality is disturbed, their subjectification is challenged, and they are encouraged to study the coalition of multiple contexts in which the performance was conc...
The paper offers an overview of the Indian DIY music ecosystem in relation to current broad debat... more The paper offers an overview of the Indian DIY music ecosystem in relation to current broad debates on DIY scenes, their connections to mainstream cultural industries, platform capitalism, and national policies. The paper specifically focuses on the impact of social media on India's artistic ecosystem as social media have been one of the most recent influencing socio-technological factors that have changed the dynamics of India's DIY music cultures. I examine how the Internet has fuelled and transformed DIY music in India with special attention to three trends-rise of the regional; rise of the small town; and rise of the independent. The paper also draws attention to concerning influences of social media on the art ecosystem ranging from precarity and exploitation, trolling and scams to compromising collective solidarity in favour of neo-liberal notions of individual success. The paper argues that social media participation for DIY artists is not equitable and fair. Social media, however, facilitates building of social and commercial capital for artists who have had no access to it in the deeply hierarchical conventional system in India. Social media also opens the possibility of negotiating the hegemonic cultural norms, be it with reference to gender, class, caste, or rules imposed on art by established powers. It is ultimately the techno-capitalist power that dominates the artistic ecosystems but through social media, DIY artists find and create small agentic and resistive opportunities, and make themselves a force to reckon with in the Indian art and entertainment ecosystem.
We examine how globally oriented-influencers from India utilize specific strategies of content cr... more We examine how globally oriented-influencers from India utilize specific strategies of content creation to negotiate with the dominant logic of platform affordances to engage with global audiences. It involves individual negotiations by the influencers with the platform affordances in creating content that foregrounds their cultural realities and aspirations while remaining relevant to global audiences. We do so by deploying the critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) framework to understand influencers’ strategic choices and discursive practices as they interact and negotiate with the platform affordances. Our analysis shows two processes that help the influencers communicate their content to the global audience and sustain their local connections and followership: (1) Templatization: a process through which influencers from the global South attune themselves to the technological possibilities of the platform and utilize its features to produce content with a set of replicable patterns, formats, and practices; and (2) Cultural brokering: a negotiation strategy which allows the influencers to foreground and express their quotidian lived realities and cultural experiences in an increasingly globalized digital environment.
The paper offers an overview of the Indian DIY music ecosystem in relation to current broad debat... more The paper offers an overview of the Indian DIY music ecosystem in relation to current broad debates on DIY scenes, their connections to mainstream cultural industries, platform capitalism, and national policies. The paper specifically focuses on the impact of social media on India's artistic ecosystem as social media have been one of the most recent influencing socio-technological factors that have changed the dynamics of India's DIY music cultures. I examine how the Internet has fuelled and transformed DIY music in India with special attention to three trends-rise of the regional; rise of the small town; and rise of the independent. The paper also draws attention to concerning influences of social media on the art ecosystem ranging from precarity and exploitation, trolling and scams to compromising collective solidarity in favour of neo-liberal notions of individual success. The paper argues that social media participation for DIY artists is not equitable and fair. Social media, however, facilitates building of social and commercial capital for artists who have had no access to it in the deeply hierarchical conventional system in India. Social media also opens the possibility of negotiating the hegemonic cultural norms, be it with reference to gender, class, caste, or rules imposed on art by established powers. It is ultimately the techno-capitalist power that dominates the artistic ecosystems but through social media, DIY artists find and create small agentic and resistive opportunities, and make themselves a force to reckon with in the Indian art and entertainment ecosystem.
Our article unpacks the emergent and dynamic relationship between learning needs and approaches a... more Our article unpacks the emergent and dynamic relationship between learning needs and approaches and the evolving landscape of the gig economy in the country. This research seeks to comprehend the contextual collapse of generic, utility-driven, and structured educational models to create space for a personalized and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach to acquiring skills and competencies. We argue that the platformization of learning, user-generated learning resources, and peer networks of communication and collaboration enable this DIY model of learning. We interviewed 16 young digital designers (graphic designers and user experience (UX) designers) from three cities in India-Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. We complemented our interview data with social media ethnography to understand how young urban learners who work or aspire to join the gig economy design their learning experiences. Our goal was to understand how young artists who worked as gig workers or wanted to enter the gig economy defined education and learning in the context of the changing forms of employment and professional aspirations in the global South's digitally connected and emerging market. Our analysis reveals the chasm between the rigidity of formal education and the future of work in India, including the evolving learning needs of young workers in a rising platform economy.
The Palgrave Handbook of Global Citizenship and Education, 2018
In this chapter, I address the possible contribution of social media in global citizenship educat... more In this chapter, I address the possible contribution of social media in global citizenship education (GCE) to reflect the contemporary shifts in the notions of citizenship and education. GCE initiatives should consider two equally important routes in using the affordances of social media: One, to facilitate civic experiences that can optimally use the informal and spontaneous participatory cultures of the digital native youth and two, to design non-formal and classroom based educational experiences using social media that can bring about civic learning not produced by the typical informal social media use. In each case, media and information literacy, competency in agonistic negotiations/contestations, critical geo-political and historical literacy, and public engagement skills are crucial for an effective use of social media for civic purposes.
In this chapter, we have outlined a postcolonial pedagogic framework for global citizenship educa... more In this chapter, we have outlined a postcolonial pedagogic framework for global citizenship education (GCE). We argue for GCE rooted in lived realities of individuals and communities and shaped by histories of colonization and conflict. The most important contribution of the framework is to enable citizens to acknowledge the unjust histories of colonization and the conflict-ridden past of countries and communities as they learn how to work together to rupture the perpetual cycle of dominance and marginalization. Our hope is that young people will create an inclusive and equitable future through critical remembrance and conscious forgetting.
Our article advances filter-ing as a vital affordance to understand how and which aspects of soci... more Our article advances filter-ing as a vital affordance to understand how and which aspects of social lives dynamically manifest (or are excluded) from online settings. We demonstrate filter-ing’s conceptual potency in context-collapse studies, examining contextualization and context-collapse negotiations online. Drawing from Goffman’s writings on self, identity, and sociality, we demonstrate filter-ing in the self-presentational practices of young, urban Indians on popular online platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. Our research illustrates the ongoing, relational, communicative, performative, situational, contingent, and boundary-drawing activities of filter-ing. We highlight the collaborative role enactments of relational friends through team filter-ing. Our discussion and coda discuss the influence of platform design and interface, normative and nonnormative filter-ing, the (in)stability of contextualization, the scope for contextspecific inquiries and creative ...
International Journal of Communication, Oct 29, 2021
In this study, we examine the ways in which young girls from low-income communities exercise thei... more In this study, we examine the ways in which young girls from low-income communities exercise their autonomy and agency in their engagement with digital technologies and, at times, show compliance with social norms when online. Based on our findings from our ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that young girls' engagement with digital technologies reflects both submission to the dominant gender, class realities, and a sustained desire to create a fraying around the edges of systems for gendered surveillance-discipline. We develop the concept of "quotidian playful resilience" (QPR) to unpack the influence of gender norms and class-based experiences on young girls' everyday digital practices. We define QPR as a meta practice that informs how girls access, use, and navigate digital technologies-including the infrastructural affordances and limitations and the realm of the digitalscape. The study explores the productive associations between gender, class, and technology in young girls' digital encounters in India.
Challenging Discriminatory Practices of Religious Socialization among Adolescents, 2019
In this chapter, we elaborate how religion operates as a social institution of governance and dis... more In this chapter, we elaborate how religion operates as a social institution of governance and discipline in the society. We introduce our readers to the theory of governmentality by unpacking some key concepts such as the dominant rationality, macro- and micro-level of governance, regimes of knowledge and power, politics of truth, and others and elucidate these with empirical examples. The aim is to explain how the ideology of religious discrimination is circulated, reinforced, and reified by both the macro-systems of governance and everyday lived realities of individuals in societies.
In this chapter, I address the possible contribution of social media in global citizenship educat... more In this chapter, I address the possible contribution of social media in global citizenship education (GCE) to reflect the contemporary shifts in the notions of citizenship and education. GCE initiatives should consider two equally important routes in using the affordances of social media: One, to facilitate civic experiences that can optimally use the informal and spontaneous participatory cultures of the digital native youth and two, to design non-formal and classroom based educational experiences using social media that can bring about civic learning not produced by the typical informal social media use. In each case, media and information literacy, competency in agonistic negotiations/contestations, critical geo-political and historical literacy, and public engagement skills are crucial for an effective use of social media for civic purposes.
Challenging Discriminatory Practices of Religious Socialization among Adolescents, 2019
In this chapter, dialogic practices of engagement are identified as a technology of counter-condu... more In this chapter, dialogic practices of engagement are identified as a technology of counter-conduct because they are rooted in democratic strategies of participation and preserve the autonomy of all the stakeholders participating in the process. These practices are deployed to enable students to acknowledge why and how their subjective identities influence their classroom participation and their attitude toward the “religious other.” As a result, students experience alternate subjectivities and often require a platform to enact/act out their newly acquired identities. In this chapter, we demonstrate how theater can be appropriated for creating a new reality and a new set of experiences in and through a story to subvert particular forms of action. We demonstrate how as children enact the role of the “other,” the dominant rationality is disturbed, their subjectification is challenged, and they are encouraged to study the coalition of multiple contexts in which the performance was conc...
En la actual sociedad de la información, encontrar, valorar y utilizar la comunicación es una est... more En la actual sociedad de la información, encontrar, valorar y utilizar la comunicación es una estrategia fundamental de supervivencia. Los medios tradicionales y nuevos como las bibliotecas, archivos, medios de masas o Internet tienen una función crucial para las sociedades como fuentes de información. Este trabajo presenta los resultados de un estudio llevado a cabo en Egipto, India, Finlandia, Argentina y Kenia. Basado en una investigación empírica, ofrece una visión general de cómo los jóvenes de hoy en día utilizan diversas fuentes para la búsqueda de información y cuáles son sus implicaciones para los programas de alfabetización mediática. En concreto se explora cómo los jóvenes utilizan los medios digitales (nuevos y convencionales) tanto para buscar información como para difundirla. Los investigadores del proyecto recogieron los diarios de medios de comunicación de 175 niños de Argentina, 100 de Egipto, 160 de la India y 144 de Finlandia. Con la ayuda del Nokia Research Centre también pudimos obtener 48 diarios completos de Kenia. Todos los diarios fueron recogidos durante el primer semestre de 2010. Los hallazgos giran en torno a los esfuerzos internacionales, especialmente de la UNESCO, de fomentar la formación docente en alfabetización mediática, creando una conciencia mundial sobre este tipo de alfabetización en los profesores.
This book examines how religion operates as an institution of governance and discipline in societ... more This book examines how religion operates as an institution of governance and discipline in society. The authors unravel the ways in which adolescents are socialized into adhering to the dictates of their religious identities, which often translates into practices of micro-aggression enacted in and through their interaction with the ‘religious other’ in schools and classrooms. Through ethnographic immersion in villages in the Gujarat, the authors identify media as a powerful source through which the dominant ideology of religious discrimination is perpetuated among adolescents. Subsequently, a critical media education framework was developed in order to equip these young people with the critical skills needed to challenge power relations and to identify resources for resistance within themselves and their immediate media environments. Using pedagogic techniques such as spatial and cultural mapping, content creation and applied theatre practices to create a reflective yet practical guide, the findings of this book can be applied to a wide range of socio-cultural contexts.
Global Citizenship Education in the Global South, 2022
In this chapter, we initiate a transformative practice in postcolonial studies with the propositi... more In this chapter, we initiate a transformative practice in postcolonial studies with the proposition that global citizenship education, especially involving countries of the Global South, must acknowledge how the history of colonial trauma influences the quotidian forms of meaning-making and practice. This has two implications. First, shared/collective memory of trauma and oppression can lodge into the body of the nation and its people and how they make sense of and engage with others from different religious, cultural, national, and other backgrounds. Second, encounters with the colonial powers and the sustained dominance of the Anglo-European systems of knowledge production privilege and legitimize Western systems of knowledge production over indigenous and Global South-based theories of meaning-making. We propose a postcolonial approach to introducing “geopolitical epistemes” within systems of global citizenship education as an initiative to examine material forms of knowledge production and the resultant practices with the intentionality of disrupting the dominant epistemes. Drawing from our experience in India and study of other regions in the global South, we contend that for global citizenship education to be truly effective, scholars must acknowledge the role of geo-political elements, including but not limited to a) the historical reality of the regions and its implication on contemporary socio-political and cultural exchanges between different localities, nations, and across the globe and b) the productive associations between geopolitical conditions and translocal, transnational, and global relations.
In this chapter, we argue that young people use their social media spaces to participate in and i... more In this chapter, we argue that young people use their social media spaces to participate in and interact with globally oriented and culturally diverse peer groups in meaningful ways. Young people should be equipped with civic engagement skills required to harness opportunities of public gainfulness from their social media platforms. To illustrate how educators can leverage the potential of social media to expand access to opportunities for transcultural civic engagement and learning among young people, we have designed a theoretical media literacy framework based on the existing canon of theories and practices. While online civic engagement practices have global potential, they are also informed by the local experiences and lived realities of young people. In order to examine this phenomenon, we have introduced the term transcultural citizenship.
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Papers by Manisha Pathak-Shelat