June 2020

New York based Henry Luce Foundation has awarded ONLINERPOL project team (Sahana Udupa, Salma Siddique, Max Kramer and Miriam Homer) with a new grant under the program, “Religion in International Affairs”, to build a multimedia installation project on digital dignity.

27 May 2020
At the International Communication Association Annual Conference 2020, Sahana Udupa has organized a panel, “Aggressive Emotion, Precarious Labour and Colonial Continuities: Theoretical Debates on Disinformation and Extreme Speech Online”. The panel contributes to debates around online vitriol and disinformation by advancing theoretical insights into aspects of emotionality, cultural variation and political economy in a contextually rooted and historically sensitive global framework.
21 May 2020
In the one-day preconference “Digital Cultures of South Asia: Inequalities, Infrastructures, Informationalization” organised by Radhika Parameswarnan, Indiana University, Kalyani Chadha, University of Maryand and Sangeet Kumar
20 May 2020
Sahana Udupa is invited to give the keynote address at the international conference on politics of social media in South Asia, organized by David Gellner, Ralph Shroeder and Amogh Sharma. The title of her talk is, “Disinformation, Misinformation or None? Images and Videos in a Nationalist WhatsApp Group”.
Apr 2020

European Research Council has awarded project PI Sahana Udupa Proof of Concept award for the proposed AI4Dignity project. With a team of international collaborators and software architects, Udupa will develop AI4Dignity as a collaborative Artificial Intelligence model to tackle online extreme speech. For more on the award, see here (in German)

15 Dec 2019

The Academic Network on Peace, Security and the United Nations, program of the Social Science Research Council, commissioned project PI Sahana Udupa to prepare a comprehensive review of current scholarly debates on hate speech, information disorder and conflict. The review, co-authored with Iginio Gagliardone, Alexandra Deem and Laura Csuka, is published here.

19 Oct 2019
Kramer examines the online communication of the reformist Islamic organization Jamaat-e-Islami Hind and argues that their online-ethics
11 Oct 2019
European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Media Anthropology Network and Project ONLINERPOL have co-organized a one-day international workshop at LMU Munich to critically explore
2 Oct 2019
ONLINERPOL core team member Max Kramer will analyze the theory and practice of social media ethics of the Indian reform Islamic organization Jamaat-e-Islami Hind in his upcoming talk on January 22. He is going to compare the ethical understanding of the Jamaat with other traditions of ethics that deal with questions of social media on
May 2019
A special public policy series on tackling online extreme speech edited by Sahana Udupa, Elonnai Hickok and Edward Anderson is now live on Scroll.in. Articles scan the digital sphere in India…
13 July 2019

Under the Cambridge-LMU Strategic Partnership Program, ONLINERPOL researchers and members of the Cambridge Digital Humanities Center will meet in Cambridge to discuss research methods and ethical questions concerning digital media research.

27 June 2019

In an international workshop, “Digital media, politics and elections in India”, jointly organized by the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), Sahana Udupa will deliver the keynote address, and also participate in a public panel discussion on the topic in Singapore.

03 June 2019

In an invited presentation, Sahana Udupa will speak about decolonial perspectives on online extreme speech at the two-day international workshop..

May 2019

A special public policy series on tackling online extreme speech edited by Sahana Udupa, Elonnai Hickok and Edward Anderson is now live on Scroll.in. Articles scan the digital sphere in India…

27 April 2019

At the multidisciplinary workshop on youth and new media turn in politics and policy organized by the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH) and Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology…

16 April 2019

In an invited lecture at Freie University, Berlin, Sahana Udupa will speak about the complex tangle of precarious labor, political manipulation, and fun that lies behind right-wing populist cultures online.

05 April 2019

The Centre for Internet & Society and Project ONLINERPOL are jointly organizing an International symposium on internet speech and regulation at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi.

24 March 2019

At the international Conference on Social Media and Indian Democracy organized by the Kofi Annan Commission and Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Sahana Udupa will give a talk on digital labor and electoral politics, highlighting the role of precarious entrepreneurs and volunteers who are engaged for digital campaigning in India.

23 – 26 January 2019

Max Kramer will participate at the Conference on Asian Linguistic Anthropology (CALA 2019), “Revitalization and Representation,” to be held January 23 -26, 2019, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, with the following contribution: “Online Discourse and Reformist Islam in India”

07 January 2019

Nadja-Christina Schneider from Humboldt Universität Berlin will give a talk on Indian women’s struggle to gain access to public spaces and the interrelationship and mutual constitution of urban public space and emerging publics in contemporary India, at the Oberseminar, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich

10 – 11 December 2018

International Workshop “Global Perspectives on Extreme Speech Online”
Papers are invited for a two-day funded workshop on online extreme speech (10-11 December 2018) organized by ONLINERPOL at the House of Artists in Munich

26 November 2018

In a special discussion hosted by Project ONLINERPOL, for the LMU Oberseminar series, Uday Chandra, Georgetown University, Qatar, and Chandan Gowda, Azim Premji University, Bangalore, will speak about the trajectory of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India.

18-19 October, 2018

At the international symposium, “Politics of Participation”, organized by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, Sahana Udupa joined the panel with Asif Agha, University of Pennsylvania and Andrew Graan, University of Helsinki, and presented a paper on the participatory logics of online right wing movements.

11 October 2018

Salma Siddique will present her work in “Rethinking World War II”, Full day symposium convened by Isabel Huaceja at 47th Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison October 11-14, 2018

28-29 September, 2018

Salma Siddique has been invited to present a research paper at Turning Points, Two-day Symposium convened by Aswin Punathambekar at University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, September 28-29, 2018

14 – 17 August 2018

This panel recognizes the digital turn as a paradigm shift in the anthropological study of media, and aims to push further the ethnographic knowledge into the role that digital media play in people’s everyday life and broader sociopolitical transformations.

10 August 2018

Sahana Udupa joined the panel on “Social media, conflict and extreme speech”, with Nicole Stremlau, Head, The Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, at the Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute, University of Oxford.

22 – 24 February 2018

Recent political upheavals in Europe and the US have once again highlighted the paradoxical nature of contemporary digital communication. The celebratory discourse of digital technologies’ potential for openness and democracy is now eclipsed by the “dark side” of new media as a platform for promoting hate speech, fake news, terrorism, misogyny and intergroup conflict.

24 – 28 May 2018

Sahana Udupa will be presenting her work on digital media and politics in India at the annual ICA conference to be held in Prague this year.

18 May 2018

This month we speak to Craig Calhoun about the public sphere and Sunil Abraham about digital privacy.

04 May 2018

Sahana Udupa will be presenting at the University of Helsinki’s Social and Cultural Anthropology Seminars – Spring 2018.

03 April 2018

This month we speak with Carole McGranahan about lies and Atul Khatri about comedy.

03 April 2018

This blog post is the second in a series of blog posts from the project “Law, religious violence and Internet and social media regulation in India” funded by ONLINERPOL.

22 February 2018

This month we speak with Radhika Gajjala about cyberfeminism and Sofia Ashraf about online content creation.

15-17 March 2018

The phenomenal expansion of Internet media in India in the last two decades has enabled new forms of political participation in the public domain, while also facilitating hitherto unimagined ways of consolidating domination and state power

12 March 2018

This blog post is the first in a series of blog posts from the project “Law, religious violence and Internet and social media regulation in India” funded by ONLINERPOL.

22 – 24 February 2018

Recent political upheavals in Europe and the US have once again highlighted the paradoxical nature of contemporary digital communication. The celebratory discourse of digital technologies’ potential for openness and democracy is now eclipsed by the “dark side” of new media as a platform for promoting hate speech, fake news, terrorism, misogyny and intergroup conflict.

15 February 2018

In this episode we speak with Nick Couldry about the Mediated Construction of Reality and Nida Hasan from Change.org India about e-petitions.

14 February 2018
In an invited talk, Sahana Udupa will discuss enterprise Hindutva and social media in urban India at the Center of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.
7 February 2018

Sahana Udupa will present ideas on polymedia ruptures in Asia at the international workshop on Shaping Asia/s: Connectivities, Comparisons, Collaborations, jointly hosted by the University of Beilefeld and University of Heidelberg.

5 February 2018

Edward Anderson, University of Cambridge, will give a talk on the Indian diaspora in the UK and transnational Hindutva, at the Oberseminar, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich.

January 10, 2018
Come visit the Indian Sex Headquarters and spread some rumours with us with Episode 4 of Online Gods. This month we speak with Irfan Ahmad about rumour and Paromita Vohra about the Agents of Ishq. Listen here.
December 7, 2017

Imagine what anthropology might look like today if Marcel Mauss had chosen hospitality rather than the gift as the subject of his famous essay, in which he identified the three obligations to give, receive and return as constitutive of the gift relationship.

November 29, 2017
Morgenstierne Lecture at the University of Oslo by Sahana Udupa December 1 2017 The expansion of social media in India has marked a distinct debate culture among the middle classes, shaping a new milieu of ideological affiliations.
November 20, 2017

We have entered a new era of the divisible data subject, requiring us to rethink outdated concepts of the self, argued Nishant Shah, dean of Research at the ArtEZ Univesity, the Netherlands, at the LMU Oberseminar lecture hosted by For Digital Dignity Project ONLINERPOL. Shah said a rethinking of the concept of self is needed

November 14, 2017

Our new Podcast Episode for October is out, in which Victoria Bernal talks about digital diaspora politics and Rishi Bagree about being a right wing twitter superstar. Check it out here.

November 14, 2017
Rumor cannot be understood as a plebeian form of resistance because mainstream media work like rumor machines and serve the power elite, argued anthropologist Dr Irfan Ahmad, who is currently researching media and rumor in the Indian parliamentary elections of 2014. At the Oberseminar lecture hosted by For Digital Dignity Project ONILNERPOL at LMU this
November 14, 2017

We are happy to announce that Krishanu Bhargav Neog has been selected for the Internet memes fellowship to carry out a study on memes and their competitive claims on the religious and secular, and politics of belonging in digital India. Learn more about it here.

October 19, 2017

A write up on the LMU website on ONLINERPOL project and the podcast series. http://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2017/udupa_podcast.html

August 21, 2017

Submit abstracts for the upcoming international symposium “Digital Politics in Millennial India” (15-17 March 2018) organized jointly by Project ONLINERPOL and IIITD Delhi. Deadline for abstracts 15 October 2017. Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich, Germany. Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi (IIIT-Delhi). Conveners: Sahana Udupa, Professor, LMU, Germany Aasim Khan, Asst. Professor, IIIT-Delhi

June 28, 2017

The Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty for the Study of Culture invites applications for one postdoctoral and two doctoral positions for ONLINERPOL, a five year research project (2017-22) on political cultures of new media in India and among the diaspora. The project is funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant

June 25, 2017

Recent political upheavals in Europe and the US have once again highlighted the paradoxical nature of contemporary digital communication. The celebratory discourse of digital technologies’ potential for openness and democracy is now eclipsed by the “dark side” of new media as a platform for promoting hate speech, fake news, terrorism, misogyny and intergroup conflict. Researchers

June 23, 2017
Sahana Udupa and Steve McDowell’s edited volume Media as Politics in South Asia is now available from Routledge (London). This book is the first overview of media expansion and its political ramifications in South Asia during the years of economic reform since the 1990s. Routledge describes the book: “From the puzzling liberalization of media under military
June 20, 2017
Sahana Udupa has started as the co-convenor of Media Anthropology Network at the European Association for Social Anthropologists. The Media Anthropology Network aims to foster international discussion and collaboration around the anthropology of media. The network also hopes to contribute to the theoretical and empirical development of this anthropological subfield.
June 18, 2017
ONLINERPOL is commissioning a project on Internet memes and the politics of national belonging. Internet memes play a crucial role in shaping digitally mediated political discourses. They have elements of humor and wit, but also propaganda and influence. What messages and themes are they sending out? Who produces them? What narratives do they elicit? We
June 20, 2017
In a talk on June 12 at an oberseminar at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich, Sahana Udupa presented ‘”Everything has become politics”: New media, millennial politics and the middle class in urban India’. As one of the fastest growing digital economies in the world, India is witnessing
June 5, 2017
Sahana Udupa spoke at Georgetown University Qatar on “Debating the Nation: Social Media and Middle Class Politics in India” on April 17. From Facebook to Twitter and myriad other platforms, the expanding social media have led to a vibrant debate culture among the middle class in India, sparking hopes of
June 5, 2017
In March, Sahana Udupa gave several talks about online debate cultures in India. On 21 March, Udupa gave an invited talk entitled ‘Imagining the Nation on Social Media: Facts, Play and Politics’ at the Annual Anthropology Research Seminar, University of Bern, Switzerland. Examining the rise of online debate cultures in
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