The word 'baithak' comes from 'baithna', which in Urdu or Hindi means ‘to sit’. In Mughal India, 'baithak khanas' were drawing rooms in many havelis or mansions where guests would congregate. Traditionally, baithaks would often be long drawn out evenings of poetry, music, discussion and debate, but the word has come to mean any semi-formal or informal gathering where people sit and talk or discuss issues of the day. With the present crisis and everyone indoors, it would be nice to do something to keep connected and stay intellectually stimulated, motivated, and sane.
We'tr now hosting two baithak once per week: one for the Anglo-North American sphere (based on New York time in the US), and one for the South Asian-MENA-East Asian region (scheduling along Bangalore's time zone). No registration is required - the Zoom link will be up on the site next to the lecture information below, just click on it to drop in!
So, we're going to try and make the time as possible for most people, but we can always discuss this and change things around if needed, and folks can drop in and out as they wish. You can Zoom in at the link provided below specific for each meeting. The time zone might not work out great for everyone, but I hope that people in other parts of the world can do their own baithaks! The times we do have, for New York and Bangalore respectively, are:
North America: 6:00p to 7:30p, New York Time.
South Asia: 6:00p to 7:30p, Bangalore Time.
These are semi-formal open discussions. Each week a different host uploads a reading onto this website, introduces the topic for the day, and we take the discussion from there! We're also open to the idea of having people come in in some sessions and give more formal talks for about half an hour and having more Q&A type sessions, or mixing it up and having collective viewings of content (movies, documentaries, etc.) every now and then. Since the audience is mostly students, scholars, and professionals in the creative arts and design, we usually talk about those in the context of creative (reconfigurative) practice.
We can't ensure that meetings won't be zoombombed, but all participants will move from a waiting room into the active call, so if someone fishy shows up the host won't let them in; similarly, if anyone in the meeting does misbehave or attempt to bomb it, they will be immediately kicked out and not allowed back in. We will lock the meeting 5 minutes into the forum. I would really urge people coming in to attend to have their full name on display, and ideally, their institution, e.g. Ahmed Ansari (NYU).
Anglo-European Sphere, 6:00p - 7:30p, New York Time, Fridays
Week 1, Friday the 27th of March. Ahmed Ansari & Judith Farqahar, Eating Chinese Medicine or here.
Week 2, Friday the 3rd of April. Jabe Bloom & Francois Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy, Chapters One and Two.
Week 3, Friday the 10th of April. Lorraine Randell & Esther Pereen, You Must (Not) Be Bored!.
Week 4, Friday the 17th of April. Cameron Tonkinwise & Allan Stoekl, Gift, Design & Gleaning.
Week 5, Friday the 24th of April. Dan Lockton & Ruth Levitas, Chapters 2 and 10 of Utopia as Method.
Week 6, Friday the 1st of May. Sandjar Kozubaev & Chernysheva, Sezneva, Commoning Beyond Commons.
Week 7, Friday the 8th of May. Tony Fry & Yuk Hui, Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics.
Week 8, Friday the 15th of May. John Thackara & Donatella Ratta, Digital Socialism Beyond the Digital Social.
Week 9, Friday the 22nd of May. Laura Forlano & Christina Cogdell, Products or Bodies?
Week 10, Friday the 29nd of May. Francisco Laranjo on the Politics of Graphic Design Education.
Week 11, Friday the 05th of June. Terry Irwin & Gideon Kossoff on Transition Design & COVID-19.
Week 12, Friday the 12th of June. Shannon Mattern & Brian Goldstein, The Search for New Forms.
Week 13, Friday the 19th of June. Michael Mages & Lucy Suchman, Do Categories Have Politics? w/ Winograd & Flores for context.
Week 14, Friday the 26th of June. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Week 15, Friday the 3rd of July. Carl Di Salvo & Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic & The Masters Tools.
Week 16, Friday the 10th of July. Tammar Zea Wolfson & Ursula le Guin, Is Gender Necessary, & The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.
Week 17, Friday the 17th of July. Hajira Qazi & William E. Paden, Sacrality & Worldmaking.
Week 18, Friday the 31st of July. Damian White & William Morris, A Factory As It Might Be & Labor Centered Eco-Design.
Week 19, Friday the 7th of August. Silvia Mata-Marin and Matthew Hull, Documents & Bureaucracy.
Week 20, Friday the 14th of August. Elizabeth Chin and Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being & Indigenous Protocol & AI.
Week 21, Friday the 21st of August. Deepa Butoliya & Arjun Appuradai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.
Week 22, Friday the 4th of September. David Graeber, Excerpt from Bullshit Jobs and his video here.
Week 23, Tuesday the 8th of September. #scholarstrike. Reflection on systemic injustice. (Video recording here)
Week 24, Friday the 2nd of October. George Lakoff. Moral Politics, Ch 1:The Mind & Politics, Ch 9: Moral Categories in Politics or watch this video.
South Asian Sphere, 6:00p - 7:30p, Bangalore Time, Fridays
Week 1, Friday the 24th of April. Saurabh Tewari & Ray and Charles Eames, The India Report.
Week 2, Friday the 1st of May. Ahmed Ansari & Tetsuro Watsuji, Pgs 1-8, 144-147, Fudo.
Week 3, Friday the 8th of May. Adam Kallish & John Heskett, Chapter 7, Design and the Creation of Value.
Week 4, Friday the 15th of May. Padmini R. Murray & Lakshmi Murthy, The Art of Communicating for Health.
Week 5, Friday the 22nd of May. Anand Wadwekar & Shaman, Datta, Towards ‘Slow’ and ‘Moderated’ Urbanism.
Week 6, Friday the 29nd of May. Naveen Bagalkot & Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care, Chapters 2 and 3 (highlighted sections).
Week 7, Friday the 3rd of July. Tejas AP & the design of fake news and misinformation, Biases Make People Vulnerable to Misinformation Spread by Social Media - recommended watching: Akash Banerjee: Deshbhakt, Mann ki Baat
Week 8, Friday the 10th of July. Vaibhav Bhavsar & Reimagining Activism: A Practical Guide for the Great Transition (chapters 1, 2, 4).
Week 9, Friday the 17th of July. Aishwarya Viswanathan & The ‘saviour complex’/ How to think differently about doing good as a creative person. Other relevant readings: Craftivism: A Manifesto/Methodology. Links shared
Week 10, Friday the 24th of July. Jahnavi Koganti, Saili Gupte & Assorted readings on "Questioning the values that we as designers hold" in the context of 'online' collaborative and participatory design.
Week 11: Friday the 31st of July. Upasana Bhattacharjee & "Hacking as the Performance of Technology" from Hacker Culture and Be the Street: On Radical Ethnography and Cultural Studies in the context of locating politics within the process of building technology, with insights from hacker culture and FOSS communities.
Week 12: Friday, the 7th of August. Paul Anthony & Cute Cats and a Rape in Cyberspace (TW: rape, profanity, obfuscation).
Week 13: Friday the 14th of August. Palashi Vaghela & Susan Leigh Star, Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions w/ "Birds of Brahmanical Feather Flock Together: How MPs Reinforce a Casteist Network on Twitter" for context.
Week 14: Friday the 21st of August. A short break.
Week 15: Friday the 28th of August. Shreyas Srivatsa, Gail Coelho & Seth Schindler on Towards a paradigm of Southern urbanism and Placing Indigeneity: Betta Kurumba Narratives of Territory and Clan Structure .
Week 16: Friday, the 4th of September. Janaki Srinivasan & James E. Scott, Introduction + Chapter 1: Nature and Space from Seeing Like a State.
Week 17: Friday, the 11th of September. Kush Patel & Manalansan IV, Martin F; Alvi, Asad; Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Queer Lives, Queer Baithak.
Week 18: Friday, the 18th of September. Varun Kurtkoti & assorted readings featuring Taussig, Tolentino and others, What's the point if we can't have fun?
Week 19: Friday, the 25th of September. We sit, under a metaphorical 'katte', to discuss about discussing: What does baithak mean to us? And how can we continue to foster discussions, debate, and collective reflection in the baithaks?
Week 20: Friday, the 2nd of October. TB Dinesh & Renarration. Readings: Coyotes in the fortress. Ay! & AnnotateThis.
Week 21: Friday, the 9th of October. Noopur Raval & Carol Cohn, Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.
Week 22: Friday, the 30 of October. Micah Alex & Paul Anthony on The Impostor Among Us: "What will Twitch do to Politics??".
Week 23: Friday, the 13 of November. Ayushi Tandon & Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Researcher Speaks or Squeaks! We meet here: https://meet.google.com/zys-jpea-fdq