Author: santanudutta03

The idea of a course web log is to note down the thoughts in-the-making and on-the-go by the participants, as emerging through engagements and conversations. It is the key essential reflective activity towards formulation of ideas, and I presume is the purpose of this current space. I hoped to use this space with more vigour, but it has not been easy in this case, particularly at this time. My last post on the winter institute blog was seven days ago, though I was committed to penning my thoughts down regularly about DH and various connections as they reveal to me. I am tremendously disturbed over the last few days of what has been unfolding in India—the academic, social and personal spaces. I write to duly note the urgency of the national situation before any commentary on topical ideas scheduled for this academic event can be brought in.

Foremost, I note that the country is facing an imminent collapse of the democratic and social welfare structure that its law enshrines. Attack on educational institutes and students and the introduction of citizenship laws are antitheses to the idea that is India. In no unambiguous terms, I condemn the brutality that has been inflicted in our academic spaces, especially institutes that harbour minority scholars. In the wider social realm, the public ethos of religious minorities have been pushed to the brink. The rabid violence by the police-state is being meted out as an extension of the dominant anti-minority settler-colonial mentality that this pernicious government stands for. Not only are these attacks on a very fragile societal composite, they are glaring attacks on educational and egalitarian ideals which are equally in shambles in the country. Public education has been in complete tatters by glocal neolib forces, and the nexus of communal polarity by fascist elements degrades it the point of no return. The current events are spurred by vengeance not just on marginal communities but on the very idea of academy and scholarship as well. University spaces are the bastions of free thinking, the refuges of hope, deliverance and expression, more so for many of the underserved and disprivileged. We would be complicit beyond redemption if we stand watch them and these spaces scarred and vilified as such.

While the situation might seem ‘normal’ at the institute from where I hail and the institute where the current event is taking place, that gives us no sanction to overlook the emergency. Rather it demands of me to be more cautious and mindful of it all. It is to be acknowledged that we are functioning like we are, at the talks and discussions as they are happening over the past few days, with the privilege of not being immediately violated. The security of the spaces we are inhabiting currently while other similar spaces are at a risk of obliteration is a precious luxury that is to be acknowledged.

The last few days and nights have been spent on social media and personal communication channels, in anguish and despair. Colleagues and friends spread across the country and outside have tried to coordinate and update others of their situations and news. The anarchy ranged from incommunication, internet shutdowns, open firing, gender violence, lynchings, chaos and descended into helplessness. There is only as much as one can do from a distance. There is only as much respite one can have in this mess.

The resistance of students and the civil society over the past few days, and particularly today the 19th all across the Indian cities, needs to be highlighted. In face of barbarity by police and forces, emblematic of authoritative governments across globe, the dissidents have shown resolve and solidarity that is most necessary. The snippets of atrocities on ground kept me awake, the scenes of resistance helped regain confidence, the collective zeal to push back, as it unfolded today, gave me hope.

I draw our collective attention towards some points of salience, to be identified at the backdrop of the larger social churning that we are witnessing. One would appreciate the importance of plurality of voices, from disciplines, geographies, social locations and cultures in the making of this winter institute. Leading scholars came from a different part of the globe and from across the breadth of the country, as did enthusiasts from varying backgrounds. Recurring within our talks are ideas of knowledge exchange, the necessity of collectives, notions of pushing back the hegemonies that plague, and the need of reclaiming land lost to conservative thought. Democracy, collaboration, diversity and social justice seems to be the cornerstones of the work that this domain aspires for. As getting revealed through the exchanges, it seems for sure DH provides asylum to migrants, dissenters, alt-opinionated straying from traditional scholarship. It tries to find overlaps of how certain scholastic communities would come in aid to certain other, and that intersections exist only to make academic pursuits better and more fruitful. These are at the very heart of what is being attacked in India by the current dispensation. Not only is there a larger overtone of global right-wing rise and demolition of socialist values, the violence vitiates the basis on which this WIDH space is operating. The very nature of space and comfort that any university culture can provide—free fair dialogue, non-hierarchical scholarship, tolerance towards multiplicity of thought—are being curbed and shut beyond belief. Student-led protests are showing facets of what liberal, higher educational spaces can do to transform the collective voices into a shout worth reckoning. In the light it all, I must acknowledge the resistance that is currently on streets, even if I am not immediately a part of it. This is a hat-tip and a clenched-fist for those who have put us at a privilege to continue the discussion, and those many who are not yet here, and are yet to arrive.

My foray into the space of DH emerges out of my academic inclinations towards learning, design, technology and cognition at large. Does DH tie up these seemingly contentious topics into some coherence? What exactly are the definitions and possibilities of DH for me is the bigger question that I intend to track through this engagement. I am going to write a string of posts, titled ‘Towards a possible synthese’, as emerging out of conversations over the duration of the institute. I would primarily reflect from certain standpoints in design studies and learning sciences, which are my current locations, though divergences and indulgences would swarm in.

Jim’s talk on transnational history laid bare his research work using digital repositories. Putnam provided the necessary exposition. Rupture of power-centres towards the making of fluid scholastic spaces is the much-needed decolonial drive. The magisterial mandates of colonial powerhouses to grant a POC researcher to take a peek into the archives is not longer a necessity. The emergence of digital objects also means that the gaze can be returned back at the historical oppressor, even without his sanction. Such signifies the shift of the centre to the peripheries. And thus the boundaries are becoming the newer playgrounds.

How the digital sphere proliferated with Jim’s own investigative journey points to the scope of digital artefacts in the making of academia to come. The synthesis of various forms of visual data into his reading of history also points to an important skill for the humanities researchers— interpretive positions concerning visuality. Is it a good excuse to plug in some mandatory Tufte, if he has not already featured in relevant discussions? (And also, Mirzoeff from Media Studies domain)

There were some pertinent encouragement for my personal interest of vernacular and decolonial design history ideas, which I would detail in another post. However, some key concerns remain, which I would like humanities researchers to reflect upon.
(a) Would we still be over with the hierarchies of local/ regional historians/ cultural enthusiasts vis-a-vis researchers from Global North, given the reign of democratic digital objects?
(b) Whose authorship still remains of salience into making of local archives (based on which transcultural/transnational histories would be written/ narrativized)?
These ideas will be revisited, I suppose. But now I would use this space to flesh out in detail the comment I made in response to Atanu’s talk.

There needs to be a shift from the normative technocentric stance of using technology as a panacea. While critiques around this line exist aplenty, focus needs to be on the definition of learning that we derive from such tech instantiations. Is the fascination for an hitherto unexplored piece of artefact a marker of actual learning taking place, (apropos to Mitra’s body of research and similar projects, of which there are several critiques, just for starters)? Is social connectivity and app/device usage any indicator of either social development or personal epistemic growth? As for the Indian context, we need to be particularly careful (even of citing Hole-in-the-wall as an academic talk reference!) while deploying ICT4D initiatives for underserved communities and geographies, where the benign face of internet-enabled connected devices and services somewhat automatically mean transformation taking place. Humanities at large would debate with questions of criticality in the usage of the digital in the landscape of transformation. However, we also need to look at the aims of such interventions from the assumptions of ‘changes happening.’ Transformation in the realm of personal epistemic trajectory of a learner needs to adopt the cultural cognitive stance if it is to make itself relevant. The gigantic aspirations of technological philanthropy misses finer attention to cognitive underpinnings of the individual learner.

Further, we need to dwell on the question of what a technology can do and how best are we using them towards our purposes. What is the meaningful change that these technologies can afford? How best is any technical artefact utilising specificities and modalities of the technology? If the tech-enabled educator replicates the notes and definitions on the Google Slides, which the recipients are to copy a la old-school pen-and-paper style [1], is it worth calling technology-enabled learning? Would then digital learning be worth its name?

Notes:

[1] Peter De Bolla notes that “our primary engagement with the digital is at the level of its effects and affordances with respect to communication, information storage and retrieval, statistical inference and manipulation. And the overwhelming majority of us use the digital as if it were analogue: the interfaces we are comfortable with simulate analogue forms.” (Emphasis added) This is precisely the critique of the nature of technology adoption—continuation of same practices on different platform. Newer platform of the computational media brings newer modes of cognitive associations, which are rich to be leveraged. We are unable to elevate our imagination to accommodate the powerful dictum of ‘medium itself being the very core message’, h/t Marshall McLuhan.