[Reader-list] Talk: 20 April: Distributed Networks: On Security, Terror, Mobility and Other Sensations

[Shilpa Phadke]

The Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Mumbai and Jnanapravaha, Mumbai

invite you to a Talk

Distributed Networks
On Security, Terror, Mobility and Other Sensations
by
Amit S. Rai


Venue: Jnanapravaha, Queens Mansion, 3rd Floor, G Talwatkar Marg, Fort,
Mumbai
Date: Wednesday, April 20, 2010
Time: 6 p.m.


Abstract of the Talk:
This lecture is based on research conducted in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai on
mobile phone cultures over the past nine months. This research has focused
on changing patterns of use emerging from shifts in relations of power
between government, network providers, content producers, value added
companies, and communities of active users across urban and rural space. The
wager of my research is that a new ecology of sensation is emerging through
an evolving, globally distributed security apparatus. This apparatus has
become centered on controlling populations as searchable digital
information, while mutating the biopolitical project of maximizing
productive capacity and minimizing risk.

About Amit S Rai:
Dr. Amit S. Rai is an associate professor of film, media, and postcolonial
studies at Florida State University. He received his PhD in Modern Thought
and Literature, from Stanford University in 1995, and has taught at the New
School for Social Research, and Florida State University. He is the author
of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, and Power (Palgrave: 2002). He has
written on Indian masculinity in film, anthropologies of monstrosity,
discourses of colonial sympathy, and the swerves of media (clinamedia). His
study of new media in India, entitled Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and
India’s New Media Assemblage was published by Duke University Press in May
of 2009. His blog on media assemblages and the politics of perception can be
found athttp://mediaecologiesresonate.wordpress.com. He is presently in
India on a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship located at the Centre for
Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
diagramming the perceptual mutations involved in mobile phone networks in
urban areas.