Public Talk by Prof Tejaswini Niranjana: “Digital Intimacies, Gendered Modernities”
Date
3 June 2024 (Mon)
Time
4:00 – 5:30pm
Venue
LKK107
Language
English
We are excited to invite you to an upcoming talk on “Digital Intimacies, Gendered Modernities” by Prof Tejaswini Niranjana, an esteemed scholar and Director of the Centre for Inter-Asian Research and Dean of Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University, India. Join us as Prof Niranjana explores the intricate relationship between digital technologies, gender, and societal transformations in Asian contexts. Gain valuable insights into the evolving landscape of digital mediations and their impact on our understanding of intimacy and modernity.
Event Details:
Title: Digital Intimacies, Gendered Modernities
Speaker: Prof Tejaswini Niranjana
Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research, and Dean of Online Programmes, Ahmedabad University, India; Adjunct Professor, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University
Moderator: Prof Roberto CASTILLO, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University
Date: 3 June 2024 (Mon)
Time: 4:00 – 5:30pm
Venue: LCH105 (in-person only)
ILP : 1.5 units in Social and Emotional Well-being
Abstract:
Digital mediations of everyday life in Asian contexts must be situated within regimes of liberalisation and the deepening of consumer culture which is spawning all kinds of value transformations, potential selves and futures to normalise aspiration as a form of social belonging, with female selves in particular being re-made as aspiring individuals. How do the newer cultural practices around the digital relate to longer histories that entwine gender and sexuality with constructions of nation and modernity in Asia?
The present-day context of digital mediation is undergirded by processes of social transformation that unfurled as societies worldwide became modern from the nineteenth century onwards. While this was indeed a worldwide process, the specific emergence of modernity within Asian contexts helps us better understand the contemporary dynamics of digital mediation. These dynamics are both similar and different across Guangzhou, Bangalore, Singapore and Hong Kong, the sites that our project examines. Drawing out trajectories of modernity and the constitutive role of gender and sexuality in their formations provides a crucial frame for understanding the contemporary transformations that continue to shape and reshape these locations. 19th and early 20th century debates around culture, tradition, women and modernity in our four locations intersect with the formation of ‘national’ identities. Our contention is that the specific and dense historical trajectories we investigate are crucial for understanding how the digital is experienced by the young women at the centre of our project.
Biography:
Tejaswini Niranjana is Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research, and Dean, Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University, India. Before taking up this position, she was Professor and Head, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Director, Centre for Cultural Research and Development. Professor Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial context (University of California Press, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Duke UP, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (Duke UP, 2020). Her most recent edited volumes include Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Orient Blackswan, 2015) with Wang Xiaoming; and Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford University Press, 2020). She is curator of the Saath-Saath Project, a musical collaboration between Indian and Chinese performers: http://saathsaathmusic.com, and producer of three documentary films based on her music research, directed by Surabhi Sharma.