[Reader-list] [Announcements] Sensor-Census-Censor: International Colloquium at Sarai-CSDS on Information, Society, History, Politics

[Aarti Sethi]

Dear Friends,

This is to announce a three day International Colloquium on  
Information, Society, History and Politics, titled - 'Sensor-Census- 
Censor : Investigating Regimes of Information, Registering Changes of  
State' at Sarai-CSDS (29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054) on 30th November,  
1 & 2 December.

A detailed programme of the three days is given below. Participation  
by registration at the venue. Limited seats available.

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PROGRAMME

Day 1: 30 November 2006
9:30 - 9:45  Introduction
Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai-CSDS, Paul Keller,Waag Society
Kerstin Lindberg, Delegation of the European Commission to India,
Bhutan and Nepal [Introduces the EU-India ECCP project]

9:45 - 11:15  Panel 1: Information, Mobility and Exclusion:
Borders, Passports and Identification Documents
Moderator: Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Sarai-CSDS

Passport, Ticket and Rubber Stamp: The “problem of the
pauper Hajji”, c. 1882-1926
Radhika Singha
Associate Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social
Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi

Passports, Literacy, Phantasm: The States of Writing Nation
Vazira Fazila Yacoobali Zamindar
Assistant Professor of History, Brown University, Providence

11:15 - 11:30 Tea

11:30 - 2:00Panel 2: Monitoring Surveillance
Moderator: Tapio Mäkelä
Media Artist/Researcher, Helsinki

Exposure: Surveillance and the Political Economy of  Interiority
Kirstie Ball
Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Open University Business  
School, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes

Machetes, Electrodes and Databases
Sam De Silva
Independent Media Maker and Facilitator, Colombo/Melbourne

Security Culture and the Economy of Fear
Konrad Becker
Cultural Organiser/Artist/Activist, t0 Institute of Culture
Technologies, Vienna

2:00 - 3:00 Lunch

3:00 - 4:45 Panel 3: The Artist As Information Practitioner
Moderator: Rana Dasgupta  Writer, Delhi

Archival Malpractice and Counter-Strategies
Charles Merewether
Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research,
Australian National University, Canberra

Information versus Dissemination: Artistic and Activist  Strategies  
of Information Practice
Ewen Chardronnet
Artist/Critic/Information Activist, Tours

Across Borders and beyond Definitions: Creating Concepts  and  
Syndicating Content
Florian Schneider
Artist/Activist, kein.org, Munich

4:45 - 5:00 Tea

5:00 - 6:00  Film Screening
Temporary Loss of Consciousness, 2005
Directed by Monica Bhasin
Independent Filmmaker, Delhi
Colour, 35 min.

6:00 - 6:15 Tea

6.30 - 7.45: Keynote: Histories of Identification
Introduction: Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Sarai-CSDS
Why Did Fingerprinting Emerge in Colonial India?
Governmentality, Surveillance and the Fear of the “Native”
Chandak Sengoopta
Professor, Department of History, Birkbeck College, University of   
London

Day 2: 1 December 2006

10:00 - 11:15Keynote: The Record of Power
Introduction: Prabhu Mahapatra
Department of History, Delhi University
Seeing Like a State: State Controls in Europe Since 1500
Leo Lucassen
Professor, Leiden University/University of Amsterdam

11:15 - 11:30 Tea

11:30 - 1:30Panel 2: The Daily Life of Information
Moderator: Jeebesh Bagchi
Sarai-CSDS

 From the Chowkeydari Act to Biometric Identification:
Passages from the History of the Information State in India
Taha Mehmood
Sarai-CSDS

Garib Aadmi ko Kaun Dekhta Hai (Who Looks at the Poor
Person)?TheKhullam-Khulla (Transparency) Principle and
Beyond on the Streets of Delhi
Aman Sethi
Journalist, Frontline Magazine

Documents as Date-Lines: The Making and Unmaking of
Urban Settlements
Shveta Sarda, Priya Sen and Jaanu Nagar (presented by Shveta Sarda)
Cybermohalla Project, Ankur/Sarai-CSDS

1:30 - 2:30 Lunch

2:30 - 3:30 Panel 3: Neo-Liberal Governmentality and Risk:  
Information and Surveillance in India
Uma Maheshwari Kalpagam
Professor, G.B. Pant Social Studies Institute, Allahabad
Respondent: Awadhendra Sharan
Sarai-CSDS

3:30 - 3:45 Tea

3:45 - 5:45 Panel 4: Truth, Transmission and Technology
Moderator: Ravi Sundaram
Sarai-CSDS

The Technology of Telegraphy and the Telegraphy of
Technology: Magic and Speculation in the First Half of the
Last Century
Deep Kanta Lahiri Chaudhuri
Historian, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi

... And Nothing But the Truth: So Help Me Science
Lawrence Liang
Legal Theorist/Researcher, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore

Unofficial Secrets Act: The Administration of Certainty and  Ambiguity
Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Sarai-CSDS

5:45 - 6:00 Artist Presentation
KhirkeeYaan, 2006
Shaina Anand
Independent Filmmaker, Chitra Karkhana, Mumbai
6:00 - 6.30 Tea

6.30 - 7.45 Keynote: Histories of Information
Introduction: Radhika Singha
Illegibility: Reading and Insecurity in 19th-Century Law and Government
Jane Caplan
Professor of Modern European History, St Antony’s College,
University of Oxford

8:00 pm onwards: Conference Dinner, CSDS Lawns

Day 3: 2 December 2006
10:00 - 12:15 Panel 1: Censorship and Memory
Moderator: Nivedita Menon
Department of Political Science, Delhi University

Conversing the Cut: A Chronicle of Censorship in Egyptian
Cinema
5 Channel Video (2005)
Babak Afrassiabi
Artist/Media Practitioner, Teheran/Rotterdam

The Silence of the Arabs
Mansour Jacoubi
Activist/ Information Practitioner, Beirut

Listening in the Archive, Listening for the Archive: History,
Memory and the Archive
Sadan Jha
Sarai-CSDS

12:15 - 12:30 Tea

12:30 - 2:00 Panel 2: Network Effects
Moderator: Monica Narula
Sarai-CSDS

Imagined Networks: Rhetoric, Poetics and Politics in
Electronic Communities and Online Networks
Wendy Chun
Associate Professor, Brown University

Resisting System Subjectification: Paranoia as a Culturally
Specific Affect of Network Use
Tapio Mäkelä
Media Artist/Independent Researcher, Helsinki

2:00 - 3:00 Lunch

3:00 - 4:30 Panel 3: The Accession Register: Information  Abundance,  
Scarcity and Libraries
Moderator: Geert Lovink
Institute for Network Cultures, Amsterdam

The Class Library of Babel: Digital Librarianship and
Copyright Circumvention
Sebastian Lütgert
Writer/Programmer/Artist, Berlin

Memoirs of Information Work
Avinash Jha
Librarian, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
“Because It’s There! Because I Can!” Desire and Information
Economies of Abundance

Felix Stalder
Media Scholar, Zurich; Researcher/Organiser, Vienna and New York

4:30 - 4:45 Tea

4:45 - 6:00 Holes, Erasures, Silences: Archives and Absences
Shahid Amin, Professor, Department of History, Delhi University
In conversation with Mahmood Farooqui, Sarai-CSDS
Introduction: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai-CSDS

6:00 - 6:15 Tea

6:15 - 7:00 Conference Conclusion: Open Session
Moderator: Ravi Vasudevan, Sarai-CSDS

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The colloquium is a part of 'Towards a Culture of Open Networks'  
<http://www.opencultures.net> a collaborative initiative of Sarai- 
CSDS, (Delhi), Waag Society (Amsterdam) and t0 (Vienna). 'Towards a  
Culture of Open Networks' is supported by the EU-India Economic and  
Cultural Programme. The contents of the colloquium can under no  
circumstances however be regarded as reflecting the position of the  
European Union.



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