Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), for our final research seminar of 2025.
Location: University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus (Room MG14).
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Details
Over the past decade, forms of popular politics once seen as confined to the geographical south or the historical past have come to threaten liberal tenets and institutions everywhere. From the Brexit referendum in 2016 to the phenomena of ‘Trumpism’ and ‘Putinism’, there has been much speculation about the role played by new media technology in this apparent return of illiberal politics and primordial identities. In India and elsewhere, an earlier optimism about decentralised forms of collective mobilisation enabled by social media has by now curdled into anxieties about more insidious types of manipulation and control of information.
In The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India: Paper Chains and Viral Phenomena, Pragya Dhital argues these developments could best be understood by not taking identity for granted as a static and exclusive form of affiliation. She also emphasises how the technical and material are interwoven into human thought and action rather than acting upon them externally. She accordingly focuses on the technopolitical means by which groups have been ventriloquised during critical periods in Indian political history, across various media – from newspapers and magazines to radio broadcasts, speeches and online platforms.
Chapters cover prison writing produced during the emergency of 1975-77, regulation of public speech during the 2014 general election, and the Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019-20. Through these case studies, Dhital works towards an alternative, more reflexive, basis for popular representation, one that does not sacralise 'the people' and assume power in their name.
The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India: Paper Chains and Viral Phenomena is published by Bloomsbury.
Biographies
Pragya Dhital is a lecturer in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She joined SAS from the UK National Archives, where she was Records Specialist for Empire and Commonwealth, and UCL, where she taught in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre. She has also been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2018-22), worked as a Hindi and Urdu cataloguer in the British Library (2016-17), and taught in the Politics and Anthropology departments at SOAS for several years.
