DIMAS Brownbag Session | Avishek Ray (Silchar, India) Digital Mediation and Urban Spatialities in Post-Pandemic India

• Vortrag

DIMAS Brownbag Session

Following the pandemic, the ways in which mobile bodies are being administered and governed are in sync with advanced techniques of demographic control and digital surveillance on mobilities. Conversely, the neo-liberal economic order reifies speed/mobility and ‘flows and networks’ as important paradigms in a globalized world. From within this apparent dichotomy emerges a thrust toward normativizing digitally-aided mobility, which has a profound impact on how urban spaces are being reconfigured, curated and navigated. This talk examines the evolving nature of urban spatialities in the context of post-pandemic India. It explores the recent interferences of digital infrastructures, their ‘affordances’ in light of the pandemic, and how digitality as a phenomenon brings into ‘being’ certain conditions of spatialities otherwise illegible.
 Avishek Ray is an assistant professor at the National Institute of Technology in Silchar, India. He works at the intersection of literary, media and cultural studies. He is author of the book The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Representation, Agency & Resilience (2021, Routledge) and co-editor of the volume Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India (SAGE, 2020).

All interested are welcome. Admission is free.