Radhika Gajjala (PhD, University of Pittsburgh, 1998) is Professor of Media and Communication (joint appointed faculty in American Culture Studies) at Bowling Green State University.

She has published books on Cyberculture and the Subaltern (Lexington Press, 2012) and Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women was published (Altamire, 2004). She has co-edited collections on Cyberfeminism 2.0 (2012), Global Media Culture and Identity (2011), South Asian Technospaces (2008) and Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice (2008).

She is currently continuing work on two interrelated projects on microfinance online, digital financialization to P2P lending and borrowing based in social media practices, marketing, philanthropy and neoliberal entreprenuership with a focus on “women’s work”, value and tacit practices/contributions in transitioning economic times through an (auto)ethnographic focus on craft communities (book in-progress as of 2013 Summer). This project continues to link with examinations of the ITization and NGOization of Global socio-economic work and play environments started in Cyberculture and the Subaltern and examines the connections between money and presentations of self/identity and value in global work-space, virtual worlds and on coding and placement of affect and labor in DIY and craft networks.

She is also a member of the Fembot Collective and FemTechnet and is co-editor (with Carol Stabile) of ADA: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology.

Note on Digital Humanities

My work with what has now come to be termed as “Digital Humanities” dates back to the 1990s when we used to call it “Humanities for Computing,” “Technology and the Humanities” and so on. Early collaborations supported by the Institute Advanced Technology in the Humanities (when John Unsworth was Director of the institute) included my work with the Spoon collective (as moderator of the Postcolonial listproc and founder of a couple other listprocs focused on women) and explorations in the PMCMOO and Lingua MOO. My research into South Asian Digital Diasporas through postcolonial and subaltern studies framewords resulted in further engagements in various digital environments. In addition I have used immersive environments such as textbased MUDs and MOOs, secondlife, various social media tools and gaming environments in my teaching at both graduate and undergraduate levels. My research continues to investigate issues around “digital subalternity” and women’s digital labor in contemporary global spaces of work and play. Explorations around cyberculture and the subaltern have led me to offline spaces in rural India and to look at issues around craft communities, women and microfinance, women and mobile phone apps, carework and gendering of space/place through the deskilling of labor. I am particularly engaged in researching contradictions around digital inclusion and the production of archives of subalternity and asking what the “decolonizing” of “Digital Humanities” would look like.

Source

Links

Bowling Green State University – Faculty Page

Cyberdiva Blog

Twitter

Fembot Collective

ADA: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology

Rahul Krishna Gairola, Ph.D. (U of Washington, USA), is Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS) at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India.

He is the author of Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging (Rowman & Littlefield International, London & New York, Sept. 2016) and co-editor (with Amritjit Singh and Nalini Iyer) of Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, & Politics (Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, October 2016/ Lexington Books, Washington, D.C., June 2016).

He is currently working on two book projects: the first critically re-thinks shifting meanings of “home” in digital identities & cultures of 21st-century South Asia, while the second examines gender and home economics in recalibrated kinship relations of migrants from rural regions of Garhwal to urban metropoles in North India. He is an Article Editor for Postcolonial Text.

Note on Digital Humanities

I have been interested in digital humanities and culture, and where and how both intersect with postcolonial and South Asian studies, for many years. I began curating these interests while a Lecturer at the University of Washington, where I attended DH sessions at The Simpson Center for the Humanities, and later held a modest Mellon Fellowship for The Humanities and Technology Camp (THAT Camp) at UW Bothell. Soon after, I organized and presented at MLA 2013 on “South Asian-izing the Digital Humanities,” the first panel of its kind to bring DH into dialogue with South Asian Studies. Since then, I have been involved in a number of DH events and workshops, most recently the Digital Humanities Summer School at Oxford University and the European Summer University in Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, Germany, in summer 2017. My current interests in DH include digital pedagogy, social and new media, digital literacy, mapping, and theoretical paradigms for re-thinking human subjectivity and its constitutive identities in the digital milieu.

Keywords

Postcolonialism, migration, diaspora, home, race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, intersectionality, cultural studies, social media, critical theory, world literature, ethnic American literature, film studies, Partition, South Asia, digital humanities, DH tool, DIY, mapping.

Projects

I am developing a few projects that deal with partition, Indian art history, digital literacy/ pedagogy, and and counter-mapping archives, and are in process over the next few years – including DH special topic issues of two reputable, peer-reviewed journals: South Asian Review and Asiascape.

Links

IIT Rookee – Faculty Page

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Google Scholar

Postcolonial Text

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