Academic Appointments
2023 – Present: Professor Global Media, Director of Digital Narratives Studio, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
2020 – 2022: Director of Research and Outreach, Professor of Aesthetics and Cultures of Technology, ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands.
2020 – Present: Faculty Associate 2020-21, Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society, Harvard University, USA.
2020 – 2023: Bijzonder Hoogleraar (Professor by Special Appointment), Faculty of Arts, Radboud University, The Netherlands.
2016 – 2020: Member of the Executive Board (CvB lid.) / Dean Graduate School, ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands.
2014 – 2018: Professor Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media, Faculty of Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies, Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany.
2014 – 2017: Academic Director, Leuphana Digital School, Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany.
2012 – 2014: International Tandem Partner, Inkubator for Digitisation, Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany.
2009 – 2014: Co-founder and Director-Research, Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, India.
Professional Appointments
2020 – 2022: Knowledge Partner, Oxfam-Novib, The Netherlands.
2020 – 2022: Research Partner, Point of View, Mumbai, India.
2018 – 2021: Research Mentor, Feminist Internet Research Network, Association of Progressive Communication (APC), Sri Lanka/ UK.
2018 – Present: Academic Advisor, Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action (CREA), USA/India.
2016 – 2018: Senior Research Fellow, Institute for the Advanced Study of Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS), Leuphana University, Germany.
2017 – 2019: Fellow, Centre for Internet & Human Rights, Berlin, Germany.
2016: Visiting Summer Fellow, Mudra Institute of Communication (MICA), Ahmedabad, India.
2015: Scholar in Residence, Indian Institute of Technology, Ahmedabad, India.
2012: Visiting Fellow, Institute of Social Sciences, Erasmus University, The Hague, The Netherlands.
2010 – 2011: Asia Foundation Fellow, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, China.
2010 – Present: Digital Strategies Advisor, Khoj Studios / Art Think South Asia, India.
2009 – Present Knowledge Partner, Hivos, Social Justice Organisation, The Netherlands.
2005- 2006: Visiting Scholar, Sex Studies Centre, National Central University, Chungli, Taiwan.
Network Affiliations
Radboud Institute for Culture & History,Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Digital Asia Hub, Hong Kong/ Singapore.
Connected Learning Alliance, at the University of California, Irvine, USA.
Network of Centres for Internet & Society initiated at the Berkman-Klein Centre for Internet and Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.
Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium, Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
FemTechNet, A global distributed online research network Femtechnet.
Schloss Solitude Akademia, Stuttgart, Germany.
Key (Personal) Research Projects
2020 – 2022: Doing things with stories: Narrative Change and Collective Action. Oxfam, The Netherlands.
2018 – 2020: Digital Earth Fellowship: Imagining a Planetary Sensorium. Hivos, The Netherlands & Swedish International Development Agency, Sweden.
2019 – 2022: Policy Prototyping for Artificial Intelligence. Facebook. In collaboration with Sunil Abraham, Elonnai Hickock.
2019 – 2020: Forces of Art: Between Memory and Storage. Prins Klaus Foundation, European Cultural Foundation, Hivos. In collaboration with Maya Indira Ganesh.
2018- Present: Cyber security for data activists. Microsoft. In collaboration with Sunil Abrhaham
2018 – 2020: Critical digital policy and design practice for Artificial Intelligence.
towards the creation of an endowed professor, Global Partnership in Artificial Intelligence.
2015 – 2018: Making Change: Exploring digital potentials for freedom of speech and expression for change makers in the Global South. Leuphana University Digital Incubator funds, Hivos.
2010 – 2013: Digital Natives with a Cause. Hivos, IDRC.
2009 – 2015: Histories of the Internets in India. Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, India. Kusuma Trust, IDRC, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation
Research Publications
Monographs
Shah, N., Rajadhyaksha, A., & Hasan, N. (2022). Overload, Creep, Excess: An Account of Internet(s) from India Institute for Network Cultures: Amsterdam.
Shah, N. & Juhasz, A.(2021). Really Fake. University of Minnesota Press.
Heeks, R., M. Amalia, Kintu, R. & Shah, N. (2013) Inclusive Innovation: Definition, Conceptualisation and Future Research Priorities. Centre for Development Informatics: Manchester.
Shah, N. (2013) Whose Change is it Anyway? Towards a future of digital technologies and citizen action in network societies. Hivos: Den Haag #Practices of Collectivity
Shah, N. (2013) The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace. Manipal University Press: Bangalore.
Shah, N., Wright, G., Prakash, P. and Abraham, S. (2010). Open Government Data Study: India. Open Society Foundation: London.
Academic peer-reviewed publications
Shah, N. (2020 ). “(Dis)information Blackouts: Politics and practices of Internet Shutdowns”, International Journal of Communication, (ed). Rolien Hyong & Ehmat Murat.
Shah N. (2019). “Digital humanities on the ground: post-access politics and the second wave of Digital Humanities”, South Asian Review (eds.) Roopika Risam & Rahul K. Gairola. Vol, 39 (1).
Shah, N. (2017). “The cup runneth over: The body, the public and its regulation in digital activism”, Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 13,2. Pp. 187-198.
Shah, N. (2015) “Identity and Identification: The Individual in the time of Networked Governance”, The Socio Legal Review, vol. 11 (2), pp. 22 – 40.
Shah, N. (2015) “Thrice Invisible in its invisibility: Queerness and user generated ‘kand’ videos “, Ada A Journal of Gender New Media and Technology, vol. 8.
Shah, N. (2015) “When Machines Speak to Each Other: Unpacking the “social” in “Social Media”, Social Media + Society, Vol. 1 (3).
Shah, N. (2015) “The Selfie & The Slut: Bodies, technology, and public shame”, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 1 (17), pp.86-93.
Shah, N. (2015) “Sluts ‘R’ Us: Intersections of gender, protocol and agency in the digital age”, First Monday, Vol.(4) 6. #Technosocial Subject
Shah, N. (2014) “Asia in the Edges: A narrative account of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies summer school in Bangalore”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 15 (2), pp. 306-314.
Shah, N. (2013) “Citizen Action in the Time of the Network”, Development and Change, 44: 665–681
Shah, N. (2012) “Resisting Revolutions: Questioning the radical potential of citizen action”, Development Vol.55(2): pp 173-180.
Shah, N. & F. Jansen (2011) “Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism”, Democracy and Society,Vol.8 (2): pp 2-15.
Shah, N. (2010) “Internet and Society in Asia: challenges and next steps”, Inter Asia Cultural Studies Journal. Vol.11(4): pp 105-115.
Shah, N. (2010) “The promise of Invisibility: Making of an IT City”, Asia Scholarship Foundation Journal. Routledge: London .
Shah, N. (2009) “Now Streaming on your nearest screen: Contextualising New Digital Cinema through Kuso”, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Vol.3(1): pp 15-31
Shah, N. (2009) “Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries: Formulating the cyborg as a translator”, European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 12 (2): pp 211-225.
Shah, N. (2009) “Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the condition of collaborative authorship“, Journal of Moving Image, Number 8.
Shah, N. (2008) “Of fooling around: Digital Natives and Politics in Asia”, Bangalore: Centre for Internet & Society.
Shah, N. (2007) “Subject to Technology: Internet Pornography, cyber-terrorism and the Indian State”, Inter Asia Cultural Studies Journal, Vol. 8 (3): pp 349-366.
Shah, N. (2006) “Once Upon a Flash”, Turbulence: Sarai Reader. Sarai: New Delhi, pp 131-138.
Academic Book chapters
Shah, N. (2022). ‘Formulating Fake Futures: The tomorrow through the filters of a computational network’, Art as Forum in print, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen/ ArtEZ Press, The Netherlands.
Shah, N. (2022). “Meme”, Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies, (ed) Timon Beyes & Robin Halt; UK: Oxford University Press.
Shah, N. (2022). ‘Disarticulating Infrastructure: Towards Touchstones for Infrastructural Enquiries’, Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art, (eds.) Bassam El Baroni, Gerrie van Noord, and Edith Russ Haus, Oldenberg: Sternberg Press.
Shah, N. (2022). ‘Between Intensity and Scale: Finding our place in digital transformations’, Cultural Management in the Digital Age, (ed.) Marguerite Rumpf, Munich: Goethe Institute.
Shah, N. (2021). “Measure or Measure up: Preparing for Unpopulated Futures”, A Nourishing Network, (eds.) Davide Bevilacqua, Alice Strete, & Manetta Berends, Linz: Art Meets Radical Openness.
Shah, N. (2021). “Weaponization of Care: Or how art and culture institutions refuse dismantling their structures of power”,( German), Theater and Macht: Beobachtungen am Übergang, (Tr.) Christian Römer, Berlin: Nachtkritik.
Shah, N. & Ganesh, M. (2020). “Between memory and storage: Digital transitions for Art Organisations”, Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World (eds.) Carin Kuoni, Jordi Balta Portoles, Nora Khan & Serubiri Moses, Amsterdam: Valiz Books.
Shah, N. (2020). “In-habituation as a design practice”, Designing for Precarious Citizen – Building on the Bauhaus Legacy, (eds.) Jeroen van de Eijnde & Jorn Konijn, The Netherlands: ArtEZ Press.
Shah, N. (2019). “Interface… is as Interface does”, Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies, (eds.) Timon Beyes, Claus Pias & Robin Holt, London: Oxford University Press.
Shah, N. (2019). “The cog that imagines the system: Data migration and Migrant bodies in the face of Aadhaar”, Handbook of Media and Migration, (eds.) Kevin Smets, Koen Leurs, Myria Georgiu, Saskia Witteborn & Radhika Gajjala, London: Sage Publications.
Shah, N. (2019). “The Nerve of the Algorithm: Unmaking myths to dismantle algorithmic anxiety”, Algorithmic Anxieties, (eds.) Karolien Buurma, Florian Mecklenburg, & Monika Gruzite, Amsterdam: NXS Publications.
Shah, N. (2018). “The Selfie is as the selfie does: Three propositions for the selfie in the digital turn”, Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice, (eds.) Chinar Shah & Aileen Blaney, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 175-191.
Shah, N. (2017) “From GUI to No UI: Locating the Interface as a site of inquiry”, Digitisation: Theories and Concepts for Empirical Cultural Research k, (ed.) Gertraud Koch, London: Routledge.
Shah, N. (2017). “The State of the Internets: Notes for a New Historiography of Technosociality”, The Routledge Companion of Global Internet Histories, (eds.) Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland, London: Routledge, pp. 71-82.
Shah, N. (2017) “In Access: Online video practices in Asia”, Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global, (eds.)Bhaskar Sarkar & Joshua Neves, USA: Duke University Press.
Shah, N. (2017). “Putting the “C” in MOOC: Of Crises, Critique, and Criticality in Higher Education.”, MOOCs and their afterlives: Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education, (ed.) Elizabeth Losh, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shah, N. (2016). “Open Politics and Education”, Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, (ed.) Peters M., Singapore: Springer.
Shah, N. (2016). “Von der Userschnittstelle zur Schnittstelle ohne User: auf der Suche nach der Schnittstelle für das Internet der Dinge”, Digitalisierung: Theiroen und Konepte für die empirische Kulturforschung, Ed. Gertraud Koch. Köln: Halem.
Shah, N. (2015). “Das quantifizierte Selfie: Über die Handlungsmacht unserer digitalen Selbstporträts”, Springerin, Issue 4, pp 12 – 24.
Shah, N. (2015) “Exposing Pornography: The body between the old and the new”, New Media/Old Media (ed.) Chun, W.H.K. et al , NY: Routledge.
Shah, N. (2015) “Beyond Infrastructure: Rehumanizing Digital Humanities in India”, Between Humanities and the Digital, (eds.) David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svenson, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Shah, N. and G. Bachmann (2015) “Hacking the Classroom: Rethinking learning through social media practice”, Routledge Companion to the Humanities and Social Sciences in Management Education, (eds.) Chris Steyaert, Timon Beyes, and Martin Parker, London: Routledge.
Shah, N. (2015) “Of Heathens, Perverts and Stalkers: Examining the learner in the MOOC”, World of Learning, London: Routledge.
Shah, N. (2015) “Queer Mobiles and Mobile Queers: Intersections, Vectors, and Movements in India”, Handbook of New Media in Asia, (Eds.) Larissa Hjorth and Olivia Khoo, Routledge: London.
Shah, N. (2015) “Networked Margins: Revisiting Inequality and Intersections”, Digitally Connected: Global Perspectives on Youth and Digital Media, (eds.) Sandra Cortessi and Urs Gasser, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University: Cambridge.
Shah, N. (2014) “See me Talk, Hear me Listen”, Talk To Me.(ed.) Rasa Smite, London: Mute Publications.
Shah, N. and L. Hjorth. (2013) “The Neighbour before the House: Digital Surveillance and Art in a network society”, Palestinian Video Art: Constellation of the Moving Image, (ed.) Makhoul, Bashir, Jerusalem: Palestinian Art Court.
Shah, N. (2010) “Knowing the Name: Methodologies and Challenges”, Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon Position Papers, Hivos Publications : The Hague, pp. 11-34.
Shah, N. (2005) “Playblog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace”, The Net-Porn Reader. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam: pp 31-44.
Editorial work
Shah, N., Beckenbauer, L., Zhong, V., & Nair, A. (eds.) (2023) Doing Things with Stories,ArtEZ Press.Shah, N., Malhotra, N.A., & Hussen, T.S. (eds.) (2021) Feminist By Design, ArtEZ Press.
Shah, N. & Rasch, M. (eds.) (2020) Urgent Publishing: Tactics and Strategies for critical times, ArtEZ Press.
Shah, N. (2020), (ed). Crisis Education: Critical Education, Podcast on online learning, Netherlands: ArtEZ University of the Arts.
Shah, N., Chattopadhyay S. & Sneha. P.P. (eds.) (2015) Digital Activism in Asia: A Reader, Lueneburg: Meson Press.
Shah, N. & F. Jansen (eds.) (2011) Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Vol. 1-4, The Hague: Hivos Publications.
Shah, N. (ed.) (2010) Digital Natives with a Cause? Position papers. The Hague: Hivos Publications.
Shah, N., and Abraham, S. (2009) Digital Natives with a Cause? A knowledge survey and framework. The Hague: Hivos Publications.
Shah, N. (Ed). (2009 -2012), Book Series Histories of the Internets in India, Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society.
Selected Public Engagements 2014 -2020
(Including Keynotes, workshops, presentations, lectures)
It is not fake if it fools you – 3 theses on unsticking fakeness, Keynote lecture at the Nürnberg Digital Festival, 2020.
The Quantified Future was Always Scarce: Constant Catastrophization and Computational Culture, Keynote lecture for the Transformation series at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany. 2020.
Intimacy and its (technological) discontents: 3 theses while social distancing – Opening Keynote for the Art Meets Radical Openness festival, Austria. 2020.
Not At Home, Online keynote lecture for the Asia Digital Hub, Hong Kong/ Singapore. 2020.
Designing for Survival – How postcolonial feminism will save the world – keynote and workshop as the WTMC Spring School, The Netherlands. 2019.
The Hollow Promise of Inclusion: Towards a Manifesto of Care, Keynote lecture at the HLSC Conference on ‘Is Europe Inclusive?’ at Radboud University, The Netherlands. 2019.
Who are we when we speak to machines? – Keynote for the Digital Earth: Aesthetic Warfare workshop at Khoj Artist Collaboratory, India. 2019.
Disinformation Overload: ‘Truthing it’ in Algorithmic Networks, performance lecture at Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong. 2019.
The future of living materials – Input talk – Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven. #Infrastructure of Digital Cultures 2019.
Living in Unpopulated Spaces: human futures of digital cities. Lecture at the Nuremberg Digital Festival, and at CUHK, Hong Kong 2018.
Algorithmic Governance – UC Irvine, SOAS London, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. 2018.
Keynote Lecture at Madeira Institute of Technology, in ‘progressive products for social europe’ Designing technologies for survival: Touchstones for the digital future. Madeira, Portugal. 2018.
Keynote speaker. 1st Istanbul Privacy symposium: Data Protection and Innovation, Istanbul, 2018.
Keynote lecture at the Innovation Diversity and the Digital Turn symposium on The Innovation Blackbox: Technologies, Temporalities, and Topographies at the University of Oslo 2018.
Keynote speaker at Webstock 2018, NewZealand,
Keynote speaker at the TransEuropa Festival 2018, Germany.
Plenary lecture at the Collaborative for the Critical Study of Technology, UIUC, USA 2017.
Keynote hosting and moderation at Transmediale 2018, HKW, Call out, Protest, Speak Back with Lisa Nakamura.
Performance conversation with Maya Indira Ganesh: Data Discrimination, Dystopia, and the Future of Citizenship – Dangerous Conjunctures. 2018. HKW, Berlin.
Democracy Under Siege: Digital Espionage and Civil Society Resistance – Spui25, Datactive, University of Amsterdam 2018.
Keynote speaker at the Transmediale Berlin 2013, 2016, 2018.
Keynote speaker – Inclusion in the age of AI – at the Global Symposium for Artificial Intelligence and Ethics, Networks of Centre for Internet & Society, Brazil. 2017.
Keynote speaker in Design Dialogue Series, at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications , University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA, 2017.
Head to Head conversation with Wendy Chun, “network science, segregation, and the emergence of political extremes’, American Academy of Berlin 2017.
Keynote Lecture titled ‘The object of our Affection: Pornography, Perversion, and Pleasure’ at the ‘Did you feel it?’ Symposium, Designhuis, Eindhoven 2015.
Workshop on Social and Cultural Dimensions of Hinglish at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2015.
Plenary speaker at the Theatre & the Net conference by the Heinrich Boele Institute Berlin, 2015.
Expert inputs at The Biometrics Conference London, 2014.
Performance Lecture titled ‘To share is to s©are: networks of Reuptation and machines of Repetition’ Academy of Asociality Graz, Austria, 2014.
Expert talk on ‘Cracking the code: Learning how to as the question again’ at Code Acts in Education seminar at Stirling University Stirling, 2014.
Expert talk on ‘Between the Local and the Global: Notes Towards thinking of the nature of Internet Policy’ at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy, focused on ‘The Third Man Theme Revisited: Foreign Policies of the Internet In a Time of Surveillance and Disclosure’ , Vienna, Austria, 2014.
Advisor and keynote speaker at the Digitally Connected Symposium, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, 2014.
Expert input at the workshop on Big Data and Positive Change in the Developing world, organized by the Oxford Internet Institute, at the Rockefeller Bellagio Centre, Italy, 2014.
Capacity Development and Consultations (Selected)
Cutting Through the Noise – Capacity Building for Arts and Cultural Managers in the face of digitalization, Goethe Institute, Mumbai, India. 2020.
Digital Capacity Development Partner, for the city of Nurenburg’s bid to be the European Cultural Capital 2025: Past Forward. 2020.
Digital Fellowships Jury Member The sole jury member for the Digital Fellowships at Schloss Solitude Akademie, Stuttgart, Germany – Global digital artists and practitioners 2017, 2019.
Truthing It: Transition and transformative narratives in the age of information overload (2018), Training session Disinformation and Discourse: Rebuilding Trust in Institutions, Platforms, and Civic Spaces summer Institute, Jakarta, Indonesia by Digital Asia Hub, Hong Kong– Asian News media practitioners, content creators, media curators, editors.
Digital Narration in a post-truth milieu, A performance lecture in ‘The way your blue light lights my face in the dark’ by the Forum – Schlossplatz, Aarau, Switzerland – Artists, curators, museum visitors. 2018.
Aesthetic Warfare Workshop at Human Rights Funders Networks, Mexico City, Mexico – Global Human Rights programmers, policy actors, activists, and artists. 2018.
Algorithms for Survival: Feminist Touchstones for the future workshop at Algorithmic Anxieties Design and Research Bootcamp, organized by NXS, Amsterdam at The Grey Space in the Middle, Den Haag, The Netherlands – Global Artists, designers and new media practitioners. 2018.
Who are we when we speak to machines? Feminist protocols for the future, Lecture and workshop at the ‘Me, We, and the Machine Institute for Technology, Gender, Sexuality, and Rights’ organized by CREA (U.S.A.) and POV (India) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands – Global Gender and Sexuality practitioners, activists, and policy actors. 2018.
Technologies of Survival, A 2-session reading group and discussion workshop as a part of the The Reading Room, Den Haag – Technology practitioners, artists, creators, and professionals. 2017.
Making Change: Future of Citizen Action. Conducted 2, seven day workshops and maker sprints with 50 civil society organisations and activists in Asia and Latin America, in Bangalore (India) and Bogota (Colombia) – Civil Society representatives, activists, academics, artists, change makers in Latin America, and South and East Asia. 2014-15.
The Digital and the Viral’ & ‘Beyond the Memetic’ Art Think South Asia summer institute, Goethe Institute and British Council, New Delhi, India – Art Managers, curators, policy makers, artists, and creative professionals from South Asia. 2012, 2013, 2015.
Reclaim Open Learning Symposium Judge and panelist for the Digital Media and Learning contest and conference, University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, USA – Global Educators, academics, researchers, and learners. 2013.
Digital Natives with a Cause 3 regional workshops in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as a part of Hivos Knowledge Programme – Young change actors, activists, institution leaders, movement organisers from the Global South. 2010-11.
A Selection of Courses Developed and Taught
Bachelor level courses
| Course Name: Figuring out the User Faculty / Institution: Major Digital Media, Leuphana University, Germany Keywords: Digital cultural practices, cybernetics, Internet History, Software Studies Course Outputs: Term-paper, a gallery of users and interfaces Course Abstract: Our relationship with digital devices is often as users. Users are framed as agential decision makers around whom the digital world is customised. Users are presented both as imbued with potentials of freedom and the capacity to make change. In this course we see how different social, political, regulatory, and technological choices shape the user. Approaching the idea of the user through four contested digital subjectivities: Pirates, pornographers, terrorists, and conspiracy theorists, we understand both the materiality and the history of how we became the users of the Internet. |
| Course Name: Technologies of Control & Domination: Gender, Sexuality, Race in the digital. Faculty/Institution: Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media / Leuphana University, Germany Keywords: Feminism, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Digital Cultures, Course Outputs: Research Term Paper, A class-blog Course Abstract: When the World Wide Web was created, there was a romantic notion that it was a space where all the inequities of the world will be forgotten and we had a chance to start things from scratch. But for anybody who has been online, we know that the Internet is a space that not only reflects the systems of exclusion, domination, control, and policing in the offline world, but it sometimes amplifies them and creates new ways of discrimination and oppression. This course focuses on contemporary relationships between technology and control of bodies that are marked by class, race, and gender, to understand the politics of control and systems of domination that surround us. Examining a range of contemporary debates around phenomena like ‘slut-shaming’, racial violence, class-based discrimination and cyber bullying and abuse, the course draws from post-colonial theory, software studies, and gender and sexuality studies to help understand the relationship between body and technology, but also to look at new strategies of coping and resisting the ways in which our bodies are governed and shaped in digital cultures. |
| Course Name: The Digital Turn: Keywords for the 21st Century. Faculty/Institution: Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media, Leuphana University, Germany. Keywords: Digital Turn, User Generated Content, Digital Research Methods Course Outputs: Research Paper, online mixed-media publication Course Abstract: The 21st Century is the Century of accelerated change. As digital technologies change the scale, scope, and speed of our communication, and as information becomes newly coded in our digital networks, it is time to figure out what are the keywords that define our times. This collaborative course focuses on the learner as the producer of knowledge. Drawing from the digital zeitgeist, the course invites the learners to pick up new phenomena, crises, urgencies, and emergencies from their everyday digital interaction and develop them as keywords through which we can make sense of the times that we live in. The course supports individual research defined by the sensitivity and sensibility of each participant, and makes the possibility of ‘user generated research’ possible. While developing research skills, the course also trains students into digital cultures research methods, and collaborative co-production. |
| Course Name: History and Epistemology of the Computer (Part 1, 2) Faculty/Institution: Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media, Leuphana University, Germany. Keywords: Computer History, Postcolonial computing, Affective Computing, Digital Epistemologies Course Outputs: A biography of a figure from computing history, wikistorming to populate ‘uncovered’ figures from computation history, a digital map marking the ‘next big silicon valley’, a research paper on the present day computer as shaping history of the future. Course Abstract: The computer has become ubiquitous in our practice and imagination. It emerges as an ‘invisible technology’ as it becomes naturalized in our everyday practice. However, the computer as we experience it now is a product of historical, technological, and design choices. In this 2 part course, we unpack the idea of the computer across two axes: History and Epistemology. We look at the conventional and counter cultural histories of the computer to understand it as an historical object and look at the unfolding crisis on surveillance, privacy, data filtering, and algorithmic networking to locate the computer as also making histories. We begin with the Silicon Valley epistemologies of the computer and expand it to 20 other locations that are competing to be the next big Silicon Valley, to examine the geo-political and cultural practices of computation as it becomes a global force. |
Master level courses
| Course Name: The Digital Subject: Being Human in the age of Big Data Faculty / Institution: Haniel Seminars, St. Gallen University, Switzerland Keywords: Big Data, Algorithmic networks, data justice, database governance Course Outputs: Research term-paper, A taxonomy of digital subjects Course Abstract: In network societies, the individual has emerged simultaneously as a data subject and a quantified self. The quantified self is contingent upon big data harvesting mechanisms that embed the individual not only as willing subjects to technologies of measurement and computing, but also participating in processes of quantification, becoming agents to the regimes of technology that operate upon the body. The data subject is closely related to the quantified self but specifically refers to the ways in which the individual finds expression, identity, subjectivity, and modes of negotiation with the networked technologies that operationalise the domains of life, labour, and language. This seminar examines the making of this digital subject and maps the challenges of privacy, autonomy, freedom, and agency in the face of big data futures. |
| Course Name: Once There Was the Internet: Stories & Histories of Internets in India. Faculty/Institution: Centre for the Study of Contemporary Culture, Tata Institute of Social Sciences University, India. Keywords: Internet History, Feminist theory, Digital Story-telling, Database politics Course Abstract: Can we make sense of the Internet not as a technological object but as something that is constructed through histories and stories? If we focus on the Internet as a social technology rather than a technological artefact, we can move from the dominant narratives of usage, adoption, access, participation, and penetration and instead recognise it as a complex set of negotiations that have embodied, affective, and material consequences on our lived realities. This seminar constructs the Internet through a series of contested, conflicting, paradoxical, and perverse stories and histories, to reclaim the space of Internet studies for media and cultural studies research. |
| Course Name: Repeat, Remix, Remediate: The Criminal Object Faculty/Institution: Research Centre for Media and Communication, Hamburg University, Germany Keywords: Cultural Production, Intellectual Property Regimes, User Generated Content, Knowledge Production, Digital Humanities Course Outputs: Research term paper, A group portfolio of unoriginal objects Course Abstract: If you are reading this course description online, whether you like it or not, you are a criminal. Like almost everybody online, you have pirated information, downloaded copyrighted material, accessed unauthorized Internet, used hacked software, bought jail-broken electronics, stored banned content, and consumed cultural products that might be in the grey zone of moral acceptance and legal existence. Being criminal seems to be a precondition of being digital. The seminar argues that Cultural Objects are often celebrated as expressions of creative, individual genius, concentrating on the art, craft and technique that go into cultural production. New experiments in culture industries are characterized through positive attributes like innovation and evolution. However, a cultural analysis of the media forms tells us a different story – a story of contestation, regulation, conflict, and criminalization. For every media form that survives, there are many others that are made to die. The dominant cultural expressions, and especially their proliferation through new media of digital distribution often hides the fact that there is a huge infrastructure of censorship, control and containment that is in the service of foreclosing possibilities of creating cultural commons. |
Doctoral level courses
| Course Name: Cooking Data: Future of technologies in ‘other’ parts of the world Faculty / Institution: Seminar for Experimental Critical Theory, UC Irvine, USA & University of Cape Town, South Africa In Collaboration with: David Theo Goldberg, Adam Haupt Keywords: Data manipulation, data discrimination/inequality/justice/interventions Course Outputs: Research term paper, Cartography of ‘data others’ Course Abstract: When it comes to data systems, there is a clear idea that there are some places where data is made and some where it is implemented. The digital geographies of data mimic older colonial and capitalist regimes, reducing some spaces as data owners and some as data makers and cleaners. Looking at the ways in which computational data gets created, cleaned, sorted, circulated, and regulated, specifically by looking at the back-processing offices and data centres in ‘other’ parts of the world, this seminar maps the data ecosystems and geographies which are often absent from our understanding of digital information and data. Through looking at regulations, policies, global discourse and decision making, and implementation of big data projects, the seminar looks at the ‘data others’ and makes concrete connections between data patterns and data lives. |
| Course Name: Living in Unpopulated Spaces Faculty/Institution: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Yonsei University, South Korea In Collaboration with: Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, KuanHsing Chen Keywords: Digital Cultures, e-governance, networked identities, political organisation Course Outputs: Research Term Paper, Masters thesis proposal Course Abstract: The promissory notes of a digital future are often in non-biological immortality or neo-colonisation of extra-planetary resources. In both the cases, there is an undeniable erosion and erasure of the human as we understand it now. By thinking through the principles that help naturalise this process, and examining both the historical and material logics of computation, ‘Living in unpopulated futures’ reformulates the challenge of imagining ‘humane digital futures’. It breaks through the staging of the human and the technological, the biome and the digital, and instead helps us understand the transition that we are going through as the past of the future that is increasingly getting foreclosed. |
| Course Name: Scale, Governance, and Data Subjects Faculty/Institution: Summer Institute, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark In Collaboration with: Wendy HK Chun, Kelly Dobson Keywords: Digital Methods, Big Data scales, Digital Governance, Subjectivity Course Outputs: Thesis Proposal Course Abstract: At the heart of computation are scales of measurement. The computational devices measure human subjects, experiences, interactions, and intensities to produce scales for governance and behaviour control. This research seminar thinks through the ‘scale-free’ systems of computation that are shaping the current discourse on governance, sociality, and collective organisation. Drawing from economic theory, statistical modelling, physical computation, cultural theory, and feminist epistemology of science, the seminar seeks to unpack the nature of measurement and the production of scale-free structures that shape our everyday practices of computation. In the process it critiques the shifts to digital governance and its consequences to data subjects. |
Modular specialized courses and lectures
‘Post-Body Reflections’ at the House of Performing Practices, ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands. 2020.
‘Cyborg Theories’ at the Masters of Interior Architecture, ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands. 2020.
‘Digital Cultural Productions’ in the Circular Fashion MOOC, with more than 12,000 participants in 3 iterations, Wageningen University and Research, 2019.
‘Do Digital Humans Die a Data Death?’ at the Data Wise: Data in Science and Society minor, Groningen University. 2019.
‘Habits of Living’, at Faculty of Media and Culture, Brown University, USA. 2018.
‘Prototyping for Survival’ at the Research School for Media Studies Summer School, The Nehterlands. 2018.
Managing the Arts: Marketing for Cultural Organizations in Transition, Goethe Institute, Leuphana Digital School – MOOC with more than 25,000 participants over two years.2015 -2017.
‘Youth, Technology, Activism, Safety’ at the Berkman-Klein Centre for Internet & Society Fellows Programme, Harvard University, USA. 2010, 2012, 2014.