Gender, Citizenship, and Identity in the Indian Blogosphere

Gender, Citizenship, and Identity in the Indian Blogosphere
Author: Sumana Kasturi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2019-08-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000682471

This book examines the role of women bloggers in the Indian Blogosphere. It explores how women use new media technologies to create online spaces that share knowledge, raise awareness, and build communities. A unique work at the intersection of digital culture, feminist theory, and diaspora/transnationalism studies, this book brings to light layered and complex issues such as identity, gender performativity, presentation of self, migration, and citizenship. This volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, political studies, gender studies, women’s studies, sociology, diaspora studies, feminist theory, media and communication studies.

The Political Relevance of Food Media and Journalism

The Political Relevance of Food Media and Journalism
Author: Elizabeth Fakazis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2023-01-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000830098

Interrogating the intersections of food, journalism, and politics, this book offers a critical examination of food media and journalism, and its political potential against the backdrop of contemporary social challenges. Contributors analyze current and historic examples such as #BlackLivesMatter, COVID-19, climate change, Brexit, food sovereignty, and identity politics, highlighting how food media and journalism reach beyond the commercial imperatives of lifestyle journalism to negotiate nationalism, globalization, and social inequalities. The volume challenges the idea that food media/journalism are trivial and apolitical by drawing attention to the complex ways that storytelling about food has engaged political discourses in the past, and the innovative ways it is doing so today. Bringing together international scholars from a variety of disciplines, the book will be of great interest to scholars and students of journalism, communication, media studies, food studies, sociology, and anthropology.

Digital Expressions of the Self(ie)

Digital Expressions of the Self(ie)
Author: Avishek Ray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1003847374

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways. This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world. An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies.

Globalization and Sense-Making Practices

Globalization and Sense-Making Practices
Author: Simi Malhotra
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2023-09-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000953017

This book presents a critical analysis of sense-making practices through an exploration of acoustic, creative, and artistic spaces. It studies how local cultures of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are impacted by global discourses and media, such as television, popular music, digital media, and literature. The authors look at sense-making practices and spatial discourses through an interconnected discussion on thought and experience that seeks to present a multidimensional cartography of the global, the local, and the glocal, to closely analyze the phenomenon of globalization. The volume is an investigation of the possibilities of alternate, sustainable modes of being and existing in a world which requires a unified, ethical, biopolitical worldview that challenges the disparity of its fragments while speculating on their synesthetic conditionality. A unique contribution, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, media studies, cultural studies, literary cultures, post-colonial studies, globalization studies, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, and social anthropology.

The State of Resistance

The State of Resistance
Author: Assal Rad
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009239783

While the Iranian nation-state has long captivated the attention of our media and politics, this book examines a country that is often misunderstood and explores forgotten aspects of the debate. Using innovative multi-disciplinary methods, it investigates the formation of an Iranian national identity over the last century and, significantly, the role of Iranian people in defining the contours of that identity. By employing popular culture as an archive of study, Assal Rad aims to rediscover the ordinary Iranian in studies of contemporary Iran, demonstrating how identity was shaped by music, literature, and film. Both accessible in style and meticulously researched, Rad's work cultivates a more holistic picture of Iranian politics, policy, and society, showing how the Iran of the past is intimately connected to that of the present.

Creativity as Progressive Pedagogy: Examinations Into Culture, Performance, and Challenges

Creativity as Progressive Pedagogy: Examinations Into Culture, Performance, and Challenges
Author: Raj, Ambika Gopal
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2021-11-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1799882896

In every era, global progressive thinkers have used creativity as a means for cultural reformation and social justice in response to oppressive regimes. For example, theater, cartoons, social art, film, and other forms of representative arts have always been used as critical instigation to create agency or critical commentary on current affairs. In the education sector, teachers in schools often say one of two things: they are not creative or that they don't have the time to be creative given the curricular demands and administrative mandates that they are required to follow. Each day, educators are working to find exceptionally creative ways to engage their students with limited resources and supplies, and this becomes even more of a challenge during turbulent times. Creativity as Progressive Pedagogy: Examinations Into Culture, Performance, and Challenges primarily focuses on pedagogical creativity and culture as related to various aspects of social justice and identity. This book presents experience-based content and showcases the necessity for pedagogical creativity to give students agency and the connections between cultural sensitivity and creativity. Covering topics such as the social capital gap, digital spaces, and underprivileged students, this book is an indispensable resource for educators in both K-12 and higher education, administrators, researchers, faculty, policymakers, leaders in education, pre-service teachers, and academicians.

Feminist Media

Feminist Media
Author: Elke Zobl
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2014-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839421578

While feminists have long recognised the importance of self-managed, alternative media to transport their messages, to challenge the status quo, and to spin novel social processes, this topic has been an under-researched area. Hence, this book explores the processes of women's and feminist media production in the context of participatory spaces, technology, and cultural citizenship. The collection is composed of theoretical analyses and critical case studies. It highlights contemporary alternative feminist media in general as well as blogs, zines, culture jamming, and street art.

Affective Feminisms in Digital India

Affective Feminisms in Digital India
Author: Meena T Pillai
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2022-09-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000637301

This book studies digital feminist activism in contemporary India. It provides a close and comprehensive analysis of the postmillennial digital moment in India which has given rise to new modes of women’s digital dissent. The volume examines how anti-rape narratives, Feminichy scandals, #MeToo movements, and menstrual activisms, amongst a host of other performative feminist dissent and their discursive medialities create ‘affective digital feminisms’ which both break with and continue the residual and emergent practices within feminisms in India. It looks at digital womanspeak from India and focuses on vernacular forms of dissent, through which the author aims to decolonize feminist imaginaries from their moorings in the West. The author explores new digital, cultural, and social geographies where politically untamed women use their precarity to unsettle deep sexist structures and mount a gendered critique of the political economy of the nation state. An important contribution to the study of feminism in India, the volume will be useful for students and researchers of gender and women’s studies, cultural studies, digital sociology, intersectional feminism, transnational feminism, digital humanities, and South Asian studies. It will also be appeal to readers interested in the history of women’s dissent in India.

Gender and Sexuality

Gender and Sexuality
Author: Momin Rahman
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-12-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0745633773

This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality provides fresh insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to recent research and theory, and wider social concerns throughout the world.

High-Tech Housewives

High-Tech Housewives
Author: Amy Bhatt
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295743565

Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft promote the free flow of data worldwide, while relying on foreign temporary IT workers to build, deliver, and support their products. However, even as IT companies use technology and commerce to transcend national barriers, their transnational employees face significant migration and visa constraints. In this revealing ethnography, Amy Bhatt shines a spotlight on Indian IT migrants and their struggles to navigate career paths, citizenship, and belonging as they move between South Asia and the United States. Through in-depth interviews, Bhatt explores the complex factors that shape IT transmigration and settlement, looking at Indian cultural norms, kinship obligations, friendship networks, gendered and racialized discrimination in the workplace, and inflexible and unstable visa regimes that create worker vulnerability. In particular, Bhatt highlights women’s experiences as workers and dependent spouses who move as part of temporary worker programs. Many of the women interviewed were professional peers to their husbands in India but found themselves “housewives” stateside, unable to secure employment because of visa restrictions. Through her focus on the unpaid and feminized placemaking and caregiving labor these women provide, Bhatt shows how women’s labor within the household is vital to the functioning of the flexible and transnational system of IT itself.