Established in 2000, the Sarai media programme of CSDS in Delhi has been a critical space in the Global South for work on media culture and cultural theory. Sarai was the first space to examine internet culture in the Global South. This is a call for abstracts for a workshop in Delhi, in March 2024. Hope you can join us! The abstract deadline is December 10, 2023.
Twenty-First Century Media? Affective Bodies, Crowds and Collectives, 21-23 March 2024, Delhi, India
In the last two decades, digital media infrastructures have spread worldwide, including the global South. Despite inequalities of access, low-cost mobile devices and cheaper broadband have connected large subaltern populations to media infrastructures. The effects are increasingly planetary, initiating a series of debates in media scholarship and cultural theory. Mediatisation has emerged as a material field that drives circulation, sharing, and modification, generating intense rhythms of political engagement and action. We are interested in this junction, the combinations of sensory media infrastructures with political metamorphoses.
These shifts channel in novel ways the “structure of feeling” theorized in the last century by Raymond Williams.  Digital media infrastructures have been productive of affective body politics, where haptic engagement, the intuitive technicity of devices, and psychic collective are routinely entangled. Everyday experiences of governance, the rapid flow of news through devices, algorithmic prediction, the triggers of war, trauma and phatic online connections are all part of this landscape of 21st-century media. At the same time, artists, activists and filmmakers involved in social movements across the world have been eclectic in their practices, scrambling divisions between 20th and 21st-century media through mashup and mixing techniques.
The emergence of digital media in the 21st century was hailed as opening new avenues of participation, immersion and resistance. Recent diagnostic critiques have focused on the ‘feed-forward’ nature of 21st-century digital media, the “shift from a past-directed recording platform to a data-driven anticipation of the future” (Hansen), the routinisation of spectacle in everyday life and the destruction of sleep(Crary), the expansion of surveillance and control with platforms(Zuboff). The contagious nature of social media generates cycles of imitation: shaping social movements, populist collectives, mis/disinformation, info wars, and political stardom. Digital media animates bodies, and connects technical and natural environments, posing pressing questions for techno-social milieus worldwide.  Global media platforms produce remarkable interventions: troll farms from Russia periodically intervene in overseas debates, South Asian internet users have been active in online flame wars and misinformation on Israel/Gaza. We see a blurring of older divisions between diasporic, international, and domestic publicity; mis/disinformation pipelines are increasingly dynamic.
In this workshop, we are interested in site-specific contributions mapping 21st-century media, addressing material and environmental questions for media and political aesthetics. While we are open to diagnostic and media-theory contributions, we will give weightage to abstracts that bring in original research.  In particular, we welcome contributions from the Global South.
Themes:
The forensic turn in media scholarship: case studies.
Structures of Feeling: feed-forward, addictive media, and new time-spaces of media events.
Inhabiting Mis/disinformation: Beyond True and False.
Persistence of 20th-century media? Cinema, video, sound and the contemporary.
Circulation techniques: Pipelines, Info-war and comparative studies of 21st Century propaganda and publicity.
21st century celebrity culture: influencers, microcelebrities and the political.
Affective Bodies: audiences, publics and collectives in an emergent digital universe of political aesthetics.
21st Century television: media events, political spectacle, liveness.
Law and 21st-century media: platforms, content moderation and takedown notices.
Please submit a 500-word abstract by 10 December 2023, along with a paragraph-length bio to digitalnetworksworkshop@gmail.com. In your abstract please mention at least one of the themes mentioned above. Practice-based contributions that address the conceptual lens of the workshop are also welcome.  Selected speakers will be required to share a draft paper with discussants before the workshop.
This workshop is organised by the the Indo-German research collaboration ICAS-MP and its thematic module Media and the Constitution of the Political (TM7). The workshop will take place at the Sarai media programme of CSDS, in Delhi from 21-23 March 2024. An advanced research centre, the CSDS is a network partner of ICAS-MP and Sarai a part of TM7. Accommodation and meals for the duration of the workshop will be covered by ICAS-MP. Selected speakers from India will also be eligible for travel support to Delhi. Overseas speakers are encouraged to cover travel expenses from their home institutions. We may be able to part-support a small number of need-based travel grants for selected speakers based in the Global South.

Die britische Zeitschrift Times Higher Education (THE) und die chinesische ShanghaiRanking Consultancy veröffentlichen jedes Jahr unabhängig voneinander Ranglisten der besten Universitäten weltweit. Jüngst sind die sogenannten „Subject Rankings“ beider Anbieter erschienen. Darin werden unterschiedliche Forschungsfelder anhand einzelner Leistungsindikatoren bewertet. Die Rankings betrachten unter anderem die Reputation der Institutionen in Forschung und Lehre sowie die Zahl der Publikationen und Zitationen.
In beiden Fächerrankings schneidet die Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg sehr gut ab. „Die differenzierte Bewertung nach Forschungsfeldern reflektiert die Vielfalt der Forschung an der JMU. Die sehr guten Bewertungen der Bereiche mit eingereichten Exzellenzclusterskizzen gibt Rückenwind. Gleichzeitig belegen die Rankings eine erfreuliche Vielfalt von exzellenten Ideen und Forschenden an unserer Universität. Das ist die strukturelle und kulturelle Basis unseres Erfolgs“, so Universitätspräsident Paul Pauli.
THE: Stark in den Lebenswissenschaften
Das „THE World University Ranking by subject“ vergleicht die Leistung von über 1.900 Universitäten weltweit in elf unterschiedlichen Fachbereichen. Dabei werden Aspekte wie Forschungsqualität, Forschungsbedingungen, Lehre, Internationalisierung und Transfer berücksichtigt.
Das neueste THE-Fächerranking bewertet die Lebenswissenschaften der Uni Würzburg am besten: Weltweit reiht sich die JMU in der Ranggruppe 101 bis 125 ein. In Deutschland positioniert sie sich unter den besten elf Universitäten, in Bayern belegt sie den dritten Platz. Ihre Exzellenz in den Lebenswissenschaften zeigt die Universität insbesondere in der Forschungsqualität, in der sie den Gesamtwert 95,5 (von 100) erzielt.
Auch beim Transfer punktet die JMU hervorragend mit einem Wert von 86,1. Darüber hinaus konnte die Universität ihre Platzierung in Physik, Psychologie und Computerwissenschaften verbessern. In diesen Fächern gehört sie nun international zu den Top 10 Prozent.
ShanghaiRanking: Top in Ökologie und Medizintechnik
Das ShanghaiRanking bewertet die Leistungsfähigkeit von über 1.900 Universitäten aus 104 Ländern in 55 unterschiedlichen Forschungsfeldern. Es vergleicht die Anzahl, Zitationshäufigkeit und Internationalität von Fachpublikationen sowie die Anzahl erhaltener Wissenschaftspreise.
In der vor kurzem veröffentlichten Ausgabe für einzelne Forschungsfelder, dem „Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (GRAS)“, erreicht die JMU in Ökologie und Medizintechnik ihre besten Platzierungen.
In der Ökologie- und Biodiversitätsforschung rangiert sie unter den 75 weltweit führenden Universitäten, unter den besten sechs Universitäten in Deutschland und an zweiter Stelle in Bayern.
Ähnlich gut schneidet die JMU in der Medizintechnik ab, die neben Labortechnologien auch die Gebiete Neuroimaging, Nuklearmedizin und Radiologie umfasst: Hier liegt sie weltweit unter den besten 75 Universitäten; in Deutschland belegt sie Rang neun und in Bayern Rang drei.
Die JMU glänzt mit weiteren wissenschaftlichen Spitzenleistungen in der Biologie und reiht sich hier unter die besten 100 Universitäten der Welt ein. In Deutschland liegt sie auf Platz fünf, in Bayern auf Platz zwei.
Das GRAS spiegelt auch die exzellente Forschungsleistung der JMU in der Physik wider. Sie gehört hier international zu den besten zehn Prozent und belegt in Deutschland Platz zehn, in Bayern Platz drei.
In Humanbiologie, Zahnmedizin und Kommunikationsforschung hat die Universität weitere herausragende Platzierungen erreicht. Hier zählt sie zu den besten 150 Universitätsstandorten. Gegenüber 2022 verbesserte sich die JMU vor allem in der Klinischen Medizin; hier rückte sie 2023 in die Gruppe der Top 200 Universitäten vor.

Weblinks
THE World University Ranking by subject
Shanghai Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (GRAS)

As a part of our exploration of the open movement, last May, we hosted a workshop with a small group of the movement’s leaders. It was co-organised by our partners at Open Future and Wikimedia Europe. The convening built up on what was found out in Shifting Tides – quality research about the state of the movement conducted a few months prior.

The participants were activists, experts, and critical thinkers representing different fields of open. Together, we wanted to make sense of the challenges facing the open ecosystems and propose solutions that could be adopted by organisations and activists supporting openness and the commons. Participants represented a broad range of views that allowed us to identify the strategic tensions within the movement relating to, a.o., its politics, socio-economic constraints, digital rights, and equity. You can read the full report as a PDF or online.

Read the report

The workshop corresponded with our ongoing process of updating the Open Definition. It also helped us expand on the key challenge we first identified in Open Future’s founding essay, the Paradox of Open – that in today’s digital environment, openness serves as both a challenge to concentrations of power and its enabler.

We hope for this conversation to continue at different open movement convenings in the months to come. In the meantime, we welcome all forms of feedback and hope that the report will prove to be a useful tool for everyone involved in the open movement.