Kavita Phillip

ABSTRACT

In recent years, every August 15th (Independence Day), the Indian Prime Minister invokes technology and the farmer, urban growth and rural subsidies, global strength and local development, in a stirring Independence Day speech. These are the central elements of modern India. But they do not all fit together comfortably. The rifts among them show up in farmer suicides, expanding slums, digitized land records, national identity card schemes, and the rush to manage rural digital connectivity. This project tracks the new narratives of Asian technoscientific politics, with particular reference to India. How will Asia’s new “global influence” be exercised? How does India’s history of socialist-oriented non-alignment (in comparison with, say, China’s history of a communist command economy), shape its strategies to take new leadership positions in the global economy? What will it mean for India’s small “emerging generation” of entrepreneurs and technologists, and for its agrarian and subaltern groups (still the majority of its population), to be cathected by citizenship’s new technoscientific narratives? In what new ways will US markets forge links with Asia’s growing economies? Is there a reversal in progress, in which western economies seek to hook their now uncertain economic engines to healthier “developing” ones? “New” conflicts will emerge at the nexus of science, technology and economic development within these “emerging” global configurations; this project seeks frames of analysis adequate to this complex landscape of change, to historicize developmental imaginations along with their residues, & to critically analyze technoscientific futures along with their remainders.

SUGGESTED READINGS

Kavita Philip, Postcolonial Technopolitics, in the Johannesburg Salon (PDF)

Kavita Philip, Lilly Irani, Paul Dourish, Postcolonial Technopolitics, in Science Technology and Human Values (PDF)

ADDITIONAL READINGS

Gabriella Coleman, Digital Media Review (PDF)

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (PDF)

Derrida, Whilte Mythology, from Margins of Philosophy (PDF)

George Caffentzis, on Immaterial Labour, from Ephemera (PDF)

Jodhka and Newman on Caste, in Economic and Political Weekly (PDF)

Spivak, Megacity, in Grey Room (PDF)

Kavita Philip, miscellaneous, downloadable at http://www.humanities.uci.edu/critical/kp/writing.html