[Reader-list] [Sarai] Call for Abstracts-The Act of Media: Workshop on Law, Media And Technology in South Asia

The Sarai Programme dak at sarai.net
Sat Sep 19 02:01:58 CDT 2015


Call for Abstracts-
The traditional understanding of ‘media law’ has gradually given way to
approaches that show us that ‘law’ and ‘media’ are not separate domains but
constantly overlap, define and redefine each other. The law seeks to define
and regulate media practice, inciting a discursive space which brings
media, its relationship to social order and subversion, its materiality and
evidentiary status, into the very folds of the law. And the law is relayed,
debated and disputed through media publicity and tested by media acts that
regularly challenge legal regulation.

Following in this trajectory, this workshop will explore the historical
relationship between law and media, as it is constituted in culture,
politics and performance and on the shifting ground of sovereignty in South
Asia.

The period leading up to the Partition, the framing of the Indian
Constitution and the establishment of two sovereign nation states in the
subcontinent, was an important reference point for the debates that
occurred round the law, and its relationship to the circulation of
information, media and free expression. In India, the debates in the
Constituent Assembly and during the First Amendment to the Constitution are
testament to how concerns around the political viability of the nation and
public order rode roughshod over concerns of civil liberties and freedom of
speech and expression.

Arguably, we have transited to a new political setting, in which the
earlier concentration of power in the sovereign state and its legal
institutions have become substantially complicated by the transformation of
the media sphere. This workshop will aim to explore the role of the law and
censorship through, as William Mazzarella puts it, a theory of performative
dispensations, when political authority can no longer reside in the
physical body of a singular sovereign and finds itself in the anonymous
space of mass publicity.

It is with this background in mind that The Act of Media workshop will
explore the histories of technological development in the subcontinent and
the manner in which both the promise of, and anxieties around technology
have framed legal discourse and regulation.

The workshop will examine how media-enabled subjectivities produce new
sites of departure in the law. The shift from theatre to cinema; cinema to
video; and video to satellite television have been productive sites for
law’s engagement with technology. The understanding of traditional notions
of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and a public sphere defined by rational
discourse have been challenged by the contemporary post Web 2.0 moment and
the sheer speed, reach and inter-media circulation that this moment has
enabled, breaking the bubble sphere of the old Internet. The increasing use
of cell phone enabled technologies, and the evolution of cultural practices
around the cell phone, pose a massive challenge to older forms of control,
policing and the terms of political engagement. The workshop will explore
debates, both in South Asia and globally, around trolling, hate speech,
violence, the ‘dark net’ and ‘unsocial media’, and the emergence of new
infrastructures of governance and surveillance.

The Act of Media workshop will bring together law and media practitioners,
legal and media theorists, scholars from the law and social sciences, media
and visual studies and media anthropology. The workshop will be a space to
throw open and explore new ideas and work in these fields, and engage with
ongoing research in this area, while keeping in mind the nuances of legal
and media practice.

Workshop themes will include:

1. Evidence, Truth and Legal Procedure

2. Histories of Media, Law and Technology

3. Law and the Media Event

4. Censors and their Sensibilities

5. Consent, Technology and Gendered Violence

6. Circulation, Virality, Rumor

*The Sarai Programme invites submission of abstracts for ‘The Act of Media’
workshop. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words, and should be sent
to dak at sarai.net <dak at sarai.net>** by 15th October, 2015, with the subject
heading ‘Proposal for The Act of Media Workshop.’ Authors of the selected
abstracts will be notified by 1st November 2015.*

*The workshop will be held from 8th to 10th January 2016, at Sarai-CSDS, 29
Rajpur Road, Delhi. The Sarai Programme will cover three days of
accommodation for outstation participants. In addition, participants from
India will be eligible for travel support.*

For further details please refer to the following link-
http://sarai.net/call-for-abstracts-the-act-of-media-workshop-on-law-media-and-technology-in-south-asia/


More information about the reader-list mailing list