Conference Details

Are experiences of the digital in the Global South identical with those in the Global North? If not, is it possible to explore the structural and discursive limitations of digital experiences and digital identities, across different cultures and time periods, using dominant and primarily Global North/Minority World based theoretical frameworks? In spite of Majority Worlds/Global South communities being home to the largest user base of digital technologies, discourses around digital use are still dominated by the frameworks modelled on instances from the Global North. What may theories/praxes of digital subjectivities from the Global South look like? The term digital subject/ivity refers to both, the creative, interventional role that digitality plays in the public sphere and the everyday, and the populations that partake in digital cultures. In this conference, the Inter-Disciplinary Research Platform (IDRP) of Digital Humanities, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations (DHARTI), proposes to explore contemporary discourses on digital cultures in the Global South, with special emphasis on India. 

With the technological boom of the past century, India has emerged as a key player in the innovation and widespread use of digital technologies. The Government of India’s policy initiatives around Digital India – alongside the programs undertaken to promote the use of digital technology in the everyday, ordinary and the extra-daily, formal, and administrative institutional processes – point toward a future where the use of digital technology will be ubiquitous in society. 

In contrast, in the Indian context (as in the rest of the Global South), there are also major challenges at the individual and social levels when it comes to the implementation of digital technology use: affordability (digital divide); accessibility (the discourse around open access, paywall with Global North software); Make in India in terms of IT; digital literacy; digital ethics (cybersecurity, phishing, data privacy, cyber fraud, data leaks, fake news, deep fakes, cancel culture, and cyber bullying); and socio-cultural prejudices/biases around digital resources. This creative and proliferated use of technology is not adequately reflected/represented in contemporary socio-cultural discourses: the geopolitics of knowledge systems continues to orient technological knowledge around the Global North in colonial continuums. In spite of Digital Humanities being an emerging discipline in the Global South there already exists a deeply transdisciplinary knowledge ecosystem around it. The conference intends to explore newer articulations/conceptualizations of digital subjectivities that can emerge out of such ecosystems. 

The theme of the proposed conference also builds upon DHARTI’s last conference in 2022, which explored ‘digital divides’ in DH spaces across India and the globe. In the process, it hopes to create a platform for crucial dialogue between the scientific-technological discourses, and humanities and sociological research so that they may act together, in complementary ways, affecting timely interventions. Because of, or even despite the digital divide we witness, it is important, to not just study digitality in Global South societies, but also how cultural meaning- making play a key role in negotiations of agency and accessibility of resources across social networks within the Global South, and vis-a-vis the Global North.

Paper/Panel/Poster submissions are welcomed (but not limited to) the following trajectories/verticals:

1. Digital Identities and Their Intersections (Race, Caste, Class, Disabilities, Gender, Linguistic, Ethnic Identities, and Others)

2. Digital Spatiality/Cyberspaces and Cyberpower

3. Digital Pedagogy

4. Digital Healthcare and Well-Being

5. Digital and the Environment

6. Digital Popular Culture: Comics and Games 

7. Digital Storytelling 

8. Digital Arts & Aesthetics

9. Digital Archiving

10. Green Computing and Minimal Computing

11. Critical Code/Data/Algorithm Studies

12. Digital Divide and Economy

13. Decoloniality and DH

14. Computational Linguistics and Under-Served/Low-Resource Languages