This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. ... more This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. In late February 2002, when the fieldwork for this thesis commenced, an Express train carrying many Hindu-nationalist activists caught fire outside a small-town station in the West-Indian state of Gujarat. The incident set off the most brutal and most clearly state-sponsored violence against the Muslim minority (more than 2000 dead, 200 000 displaced) in India's post-Independence history. It was the first communal violence that was 24x7 reported nation-wide by commercial television, and it was the first pogrom on a global scale that was covered live and uncensored by competing networks from the same country (rather than international media "uncovering" such a form of organised violence and persecution).
Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion.
Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances.
In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.
Pasmanda' is arguably the most explosive term that the more recent anti-caste discourse in India ... more Pasmanda' is arguably the most explosive term that the more recent anti-caste discourse in India has produced. It is assembled from the Persian words pas ('back') and manda ('left behind'), thus describing somebody 'at the back' (of society), who 'has been left behind'. Like 'Dalit', 'Pasmanda' is essentially a political term, which means that it only comes into being and develops significance if people decide to acquire it and to identify themselves as different and as discriminated-in this case as lower-caste and 'Dalit Muslims'. 'Pasmanda' is hence intrinsically reliant on being communicated and mediated so as to enable its acceptance among the signified and to normalise the creation of a respective reality through a newly collectivising identity. This essay approaches 'Pasmanda' as 'a term to think with', in tracing the very possibility, among deprived and discriminated groups, to openly communicate, negotiate, and mediate this identity that challenges claims of religious (comm) unity and demands for national loyalty. This possibility varies greatly even across north India. As I examine 'Pasmanda' through three different local prisms, the term thus also becomes a dialectical index for the political conditions of its realisation: the conditions of its emergence and, however increasingly precarious, its thriving (in the state of Bihar) as much as the conditions for its suppression (in the capital Delhi) and even of its complete absence (in the state of Gujarat)-i.e. of the conditions that render Pasmandas non-existent. A different form of regional comparison thus emerges.
in: Academic Freedom and Precarity in the Global North: Free as a Bird (ed. Asli Vatansever, Aysuda Kölemen), Routledge, 2022
With contributions from six leading scientific countries of the Global North and from the general... more With contributions from six leading scientific countries of the Global North and from the general European Higher Education Area, this book questions the predominant view on academic freedom and pleads for a holistic approach.
While academic freedom has been a top agenda point for the global scientific community in recent years, the public and academic discourse has often been marked by a negative interpretation of the term understood merely as exemption from state intervention and censorship. The contributions in this edited volume demonstrate, however, that this is not where the story ends: the ability to exercise academic freedom not only involves the freedom of expression in its abstract sense but should involve the capability to determine research agendas and curricula independently from market pressures or threats of career sabotage, and to resist workplace misconduct without fear of losing future career chances.
Providing a differentiated picture of contemporary structural limits to academic freedom in advanced democracies, this volume will be of great interest for not only scholars of higher education, but for the entire academic community.
Thirty years after shooting their student documentary on cinema and media change in India, one of... more Thirty years after shooting their student documentary on cinema and media change in India, one of the three (female, Western) filmmakers contemplates the gendered and cultural conditions of creating the film and how they resonate with the trajectory that Indian politics has taken over these past few decades. The film is a self-reflective journey into different protagonists' relations to images and various media in an era of globalization that was sold as promising, liberating, and empowering as much as it was rife with apprehensions of westernization. The essay fleshes out that, in hindsight, the film bears many early signs of the socioeconomic frictions, the forms of entitlement, and the ultimately brutal transformation that neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism have since enforced.
Editorial introduction to the special issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture. The edito... more Editorial introduction to the special issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture. The editorial is a 7000 word essay that takes the question of "regional cinema and media" from merely problematising to situating the category in the intersecting nodes of technology, place and form. Through the thematically curated essays we argue that the region in film and media is a relational concept that are often mobilised through interlaced histories of movement of media technologies and social labour
Departing from the extensive internet shutdown (2019-2021) that the Indian government imposed on ... more Departing from the extensive internet shutdown (2019-2021) that the Indian government imposed on the annexed state of Jammu and Kashmir, this essay traces a historical trajectory of Kashmir's invisibilisation in India's popular imagination. Focusing film and television serial productions from the 1960s onwards, my argument proceeds from the forming of the cinematic master narrative on Kashmir towards the forcefully aborted TV serial Kashmeer (2003). I contend that in order to understand the large public acceptance both of Kashmir's annexation and its digital closure, we need to engage a more capacious conceptualisation of censorship that captures the variety of its political influences in everyday entertainment and its formative role for audiences. Moving beyond the official interference with imagery and story lines (through the Central Board of Film Certification, CBFB) I examine on the one hand, how the visual framing of Kashmir, and its absence, has been dependent on a structurally, ideologically and economically shifting televisual field that bore interlinked modes of vertical/state and horizontal/populist censorship as well as manipulative corporate intervention. On the other hand, in conjuncture with these conditions, I argue for a stronger consideration of the functional significance, at specific historical moments, of different formats and genres in fictitious storytelling, whose respective logics of production and consumption are themselves carriers of emancipative opening and closure.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine and Health, 2021
Implementing virtually overnight one of the strictest lockdowns on a global scale, Prime Minister... more Implementing virtually overnight one of the strictest lockdowns on a global scale, Prime Minister Narendra Modi completely ignored local preconditions and requirements of the large poorer sections of society, notably the homeless and migrant daily wage labourers. While we know biopolitics as a ‘technology of power’ that governs the physical and political lives of populations ( Foucault 1997 ), rather than outright agitating against them, Modi resorted to a neoliberal ‘biopolitics of disposability’ ( Giroux 2008 ) that rendered Muslims, lower castes, and the poor superfluous.
Understanding the relationship between media and communication as increasingly conflictive under ... more Understanding the relationship between media and communication as increasingly conflictive under conditions of de-democratization in India, this essay proposes a focus on violence-induced conditionalities of political communication among the affected. I introduce the term 'media/violence' as I look at two spaces in North Indian cities that have been turned into 'Muslim ghettos' over the past two decades: Jamia Nagar in New Delhi and Juhapura in Ahmedabad (Gujarat). Based on intermittent fieldwork between 2015 and 2020 (partly online), I argue that differences both in the quality of the violence as well as in the interaction between mediated and physical violence executed on the two spaces conditioned long-term options of collective communication (and their absence). The analysis helps us understand how massive political and legal protests could eventually erupt in Jamia Nagar (Shaheen Bagh) in late 2019, while the very reason for protest appears to have eluded residents of Juhapura.
Until 1991, the reporting of communal violence had, in permanent violation of India's democratic ... more Until 1991, the reporting of communal violence had, in permanent violation of India's democratic constitution, been censored "for the good of the people". This was the case both in the approach adopted by the then single state-owned TV broadcaster Doordarshan, and the result of pretty effective self-censorship in private newspapers. The official argument was that news of riots, and especially the naming of communities, would instigate further violence amongst a population never deemed quite "developed", i.e. secular, democratic and civilised enough. Indeed, that the Gujarat pogrom was the first communal violence in India that was televised, after the liberalisation of the media landscape had set in after 1991, is probably the only fact that goes uncontested. This identification is where even scholarly debate so far still ends. As such, this fact tells us little, though, because it is the very precondition for the prevailing antagonistic interpretations of the event itself.The coming decade, for Muslims to take steps out of their marginalisation, will require to move beyond complaints about stereotypisation and exclusion. It demands a greater understanding of the logic with which discourses evolve and are being organised, of the mechanisms of media and of the fact that "being in the media" may work as much against them as for them. Precisely their precarious position in India equips them for approaching this task.
Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Aug 2016
"Mit „Exzellenz“-Initiativen strebt die „Bildungsrepublik Deutschland“ an die Weltspitze. Doch hi... more "Mit „Exzellenz“-Initiativen strebt die „Bildungsrepublik Deutschland“ an die Weltspitze. Doch hinter den glänzenden Phrasen vollzieht sich die neoliberale Zurichtung der Universität. Britta Ohm, selbst langjährige Lehrende und Forschende, klagt an: Die „Exzellenz“ der deutschen Universitäten basiert auf der Ausbeutung einer ganzen Klasse prekär beschäftigter Akademiker, die am Ende schlicht überflüssig gemacht werden."
Veröffentlichungstitel: "Exzellente Entqualifizierung: Das neue akademische Prekariat"
This article follows a comparative perspective on media narratives and practices pertaining to In... more This article follows a comparative perspective on media narratives and practices pertaining to India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, previously Chief Minister of the Indian State of Gujarat since 2002, and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been in government, first as Prime Minister and now as President, since 2002. I argue that both have attained a current position of nearly opposition-free leadership by buttressing a “people's unity” as a majority of those who believe in the reliability of particular information. Modi has achieved this by successfully avoiding, since the mass-mediated anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat 2002, journalistic and legal investigation into his actions, thereby supporting people's interpretation and their confidence into their own capacity to identify “truth”. Modi's thus generated democratic intangibility becomes obvious when comparing it to Erdoğan who, by contrast, is more vulnerable to democratic opposition because he claims active legal and moral guidance to his supporters against a historically adversarial nationalist-secular media system and critical information about himself.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India's television landscape, this article works w... more Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India's television landscape, this article works with two terms – “interpretational authority” and “star-anchor” – so as to elucidate the ambivalence of empowerment in what Arvind Rajagopal has called India's postcolonial 'split public'. I understand interpretational authority, in the ambiguous context of the “democratic nation-state”, as professional journalism's filtering function of both direct democracy and popular majoritarianism. Along four genealogical variants of empowerment, I relate democratisation and anti-elitism in and through evolving Indian news television to Walter Benjamin's deliberations on the aesthetics of fascist communication and argue that in a swiftly 'entertainmentized' TV journalism, interpretational authority was rendered somewhat dysfunctional before it could actually establish itself both in vernacular and English-language channels. The “star-anchor”, in order to still reach a public, becomes the embodiment of interpretational authority compromised by a reified, socio-economic hierarchisation and the immediacy of fascist stardom.
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (WPCC), 9 (3), Dec 2013
This article introduces the term 'the ethnographic moment', which takes up and 'plays' with the l... more This article introduces the term 'the ethnographic moment', which takes up and 'plays' with the long-disputed 'ethnographic present' in anthropology, as an indicator of changing conditions and requirements for ethnography in the context of mass media and mediation. It argues that event and debate, rather than structure and practice, have become pivotal aspects in thinking and conducting fieldwork that has to deal with the ephemeral. At the same time, it tries to show that an unquestioning acceptance of technological advancement and speed of societal change immunizes us to the thinkable absence of media and obscures analysis of lasting states of injustice and inequality in whose (re-) production they have a stake.
Keywords: anthropology, media contents, social change, technology, time
"In this context, “Gezi”, as a synonym for all the places in Turkey where protests and citizen fo... more "In this context, “Gezi”, as a synonym for all the places in Turkey where protests and citizen forums have sprung up, is not as much about solidarity as it is about the albeit tentative discovery of common-ness through the very defence of the commons."
European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(6), Dec 2011
This article questions the assumption that the increase in visibility of religion in mass-mediate... more This article questions the assumption that the increase in visibility of religion in mass-mediated content is indicative of greater impact of religion in the public and state sphere and of a process of de-secularization. It argues that expressions of Hinduism and Islam have become inseparable from secularist histories in the respective countries. The analysis emphasizes a necessary distinction between piety, public popular culture and political activism in the name of a national religious majority, and shows that in its appropriation and redefinition of secularism and employment of religious symbolism, Hindu nationalist mobilization and governance in India are related more closely to sacralization of secularism in historical Turkish nationalism than to the Islamic movement. In both countries, we can observe a retreat rather than a greater media presence of the pious and sacred in the face of neonationalism and commercialization, which in each case produces a democratically precarious public popular culture.
This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. ... more This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. In late February 2002, when the fieldwork for this thesis commenced, an Express train carrying many Hindu-nationalist activists caught fire outside a small-town station in the West-Indian state of Gujarat. The incident set off the most brutal and most clearly state-sponsored violence against the Muslim minority (more than 2000 dead, 200 000 displaced) in India's post-Independence history. It was the first communal violence that was 24x7 reported nation-wide by commercial television, and it was the first pogrom on a global scale that was covered live and uncensored by competing networks from the same country (rather than international media "uncovering" such a form of organised violence and persecution).
Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion.
Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances.
In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.
Pasmanda' is arguably the most explosive term that the more recent anti-caste discourse in India ... more Pasmanda' is arguably the most explosive term that the more recent anti-caste discourse in India has produced. It is assembled from the Persian words pas ('back') and manda ('left behind'), thus describing somebody 'at the back' (of society), who 'has been left behind'. Like 'Dalit', 'Pasmanda' is essentially a political term, which means that it only comes into being and develops significance if people decide to acquire it and to identify themselves as different and as discriminated-in this case as lower-caste and 'Dalit Muslims'. 'Pasmanda' is hence intrinsically reliant on being communicated and mediated so as to enable its acceptance among the signified and to normalise the creation of a respective reality through a newly collectivising identity. This essay approaches 'Pasmanda' as 'a term to think with', in tracing the very possibility, among deprived and discriminated groups, to openly communicate, negotiate, and mediate this identity that challenges claims of religious (comm) unity and demands for national loyalty. This possibility varies greatly even across north India. As I examine 'Pasmanda' through three different local prisms, the term thus also becomes a dialectical index for the political conditions of its realisation: the conditions of its emergence and, however increasingly precarious, its thriving (in the state of Bihar) as much as the conditions for its suppression (in the capital Delhi) and even of its complete absence (in the state of Gujarat)-i.e. of the conditions that render Pasmandas non-existent. A different form of regional comparison thus emerges.
in: Academic Freedom and Precarity in the Global North: Free as a Bird (ed. Asli Vatansever, Aysuda Kölemen), Routledge, 2022
With contributions from six leading scientific countries of the Global North and from the general... more With contributions from six leading scientific countries of the Global North and from the general European Higher Education Area, this book questions the predominant view on academic freedom and pleads for a holistic approach.
While academic freedom has been a top agenda point for the global scientific community in recent years, the public and academic discourse has often been marked by a negative interpretation of the term understood merely as exemption from state intervention and censorship. The contributions in this edited volume demonstrate, however, that this is not where the story ends: the ability to exercise academic freedom not only involves the freedom of expression in its abstract sense but should involve the capability to determine research agendas and curricula independently from market pressures or threats of career sabotage, and to resist workplace misconduct without fear of losing future career chances.
Providing a differentiated picture of contemporary structural limits to academic freedom in advanced democracies, this volume will be of great interest for not only scholars of higher education, but for the entire academic community.
Thirty years after shooting their student documentary on cinema and media change in India, one of... more Thirty years after shooting their student documentary on cinema and media change in India, one of the three (female, Western) filmmakers contemplates the gendered and cultural conditions of creating the film and how they resonate with the trajectory that Indian politics has taken over these past few decades. The film is a self-reflective journey into different protagonists' relations to images and various media in an era of globalization that was sold as promising, liberating, and empowering as much as it was rife with apprehensions of westernization. The essay fleshes out that, in hindsight, the film bears many early signs of the socioeconomic frictions, the forms of entitlement, and the ultimately brutal transformation that neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism have since enforced.
Editorial introduction to the special issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture. The edito... more Editorial introduction to the special issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture. The editorial is a 7000 word essay that takes the question of "regional cinema and media" from merely problematising to situating the category in the intersecting nodes of technology, place and form. Through the thematically curated essays we argue that the region in film and media is a relational concept that are often mobilised through interlaced histories of movement of media technologies and social labour
Departing from the extensive internet shutdown (2019-2021) that the Indian government imposed on ... more Departing from the extensive internet shutdown (2019-2021) that the Indian government imposed on the annexed state of Jammu and Kashmir, this essay traces a historical trajectory of Kashmir's invisibilisation in India's popular imagination. Focusing film and television serial productions from the 1960s onwards, my argument proceeds from the forming of the cinematic master narrative on Kashmir towards the forcefully aborted TV serial Kashmeer (2003). I contend that in order to understand the large public acceptance both of Kashmir's annexation and its digital closure, we need to engage a more capacious conceptualisation of censorship that captures the variety of its political influences in everyday entertainment and its formative role for audiences. Moving beyond the official interference with imagery and story lines (through the Central Board of Film Certification, CBFB) I examine on the one hand, how the visual framing of Kashmir, and its absence, has been dependent on a structurally, ideologically and economically shifting televisual field that bore interlinked modes of vertical/state and horizontal/populist censorship as well as manipulative corporate intervention. On the other hand, in conjuncture with these conditions, I argue for a stronger consideration of the functional significance, at specific historical moments, of different formats and genres in fictitious storytelling, whose respective logics of production and consumption are themselves carriers of emancipative opening and closure.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine and Health, 2021
Implementing virtually overnight one of the strictest lockdowns on a global scale, Prime Minister... more Implementing virtually overnight one of the strictest lockdowns on a global scale, Prime Minister Narendra Modi completely ignored local preconditions and requirements of the large poorer sections of society, notably the homeless and migrant daily wage labourers. While we know biopolitics as a ‘technology of power’ that governs the physical and political lives of populations ( Foucault 1997 ), rather than outright agitating against them, Modi resorted to a neoliberal ‘biopolitics of disposability’ ( Giroux 2008 ) that rendered Muslims, lower castes, and the poor superfluous.
Understanding the relationship between media and communication as increasingly conflictive under ... more Understanding the relationship between media and communication as increasingly conflictive under conditions of de-democratization in India, this essay proposes a focus on violence-induced conditionalities of political communication among the affected. I introduce the term 'media/violence' as I look at two spaces in North Indian cities that have been turned into 'Muslim ghettos' over the past two decades: Jamia Nagar in New Delhi and Juhapura in Ahmedabad (Gujarat). Based on intermittent fieldwork between 2015 and 2020 (partly online), I argue that differences both in the quality of the violence as well as in the interaction between mediated and physical violence executed on the two spaces conditioned long-term options of collective communication (and their absence). The analysis helps us understand how massive political and legal protests could eventually erupt in Jamia Nagar (Shaheen Bagh) in late 2019, while the very reason for protest appears to have eluded residents of Juhapura.
Until 1991, the reporting of communal violence had, in permanent violation of India's democratic ... more Until 1991, the reporting of communal violence had, in permanent violation of India's democratic constitution, been censored "for the good of the people". This was the case both in the approach adopted by the then single state-owned TV broadcaster Doordarshan, and the result of pretty effective self-censorship in private newspapers. The official argument was that news of riots, and especially the naming of communities, would instigate further violence amongst a population never deemed quite "developed", i.e. secular, democratic and civilised enough. Indeed, that the Gujarat pogrom was the first communal violence in India that was televised, after the liberalisation of the media landscape had set in after 1991, is probably the only fact that goes uncontested. This identification is where even scholarly debate so far still ends. As such, this fact tells us little, though, because it is the very precondition for the prevailing antagonistic interpretations of the event itself.The coming decade, for Muslims to take steps out of their marginalisation, will require to move beyond complaints about stereotypisation and exclusion. It demands a greater understanding of the logic with which discourses evolve and are being organised, of the mechanisms of media and of the fact that "being in the media" may work as much against them as for them. Precisely their precarious position in India equips them for approaching this task.
Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Aug 2016
"Mit „Exzellenz“-Initiativen strebt die „Bildungsrepublik Deutschland“ an die Weltspitze. Doch hi... more "Mit „Exzellenz“-Initiativen strebt die „Bildungsrepublik Deutschland“ an die Weltspitze. Doch hinter den glänzenden Phrasen vollzieht sich die neoliberale Zurichtung der Universität. Britta Ohm, selbst langjährige Lehrende und Forschende, klagt an: Die „Exzellenz“ der deutschen Universitäten basiert auf der Ausbeutung einer ganzen Klasse prekär beschäftigter Akademiker, die am Ende schlicht überflüssig gemacht werden."
Veröffentlichungstitel: "Exzellente Entqualifizierung: Das neue akademische Prekariat"
This article follows a comparative perspective on media narratives and practices pertaining to In... more This article follows a comparative perspective on media narratives and practices pertaining to India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, previously Chief Minister of the Indian State of Gujarat since 2002, and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been in government, first as Prime Minister and now as President, since 2002. I argue that both have attained a current position of nearly opposition-free leadership by buttressing a “people's unity” as a majority of those who believe in the reliability of particular information. Modi has achieved this by successfully avoiding, since the mass-mediated anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat 2002, journalistic and legal investigation into his actions, thereby supporting people's interpretation and their confidence into their own capacity to identify “truth”. Modi's thus generated democratic intangibility becomes obvious when comparing it to Erdoğan who, by contrast, is more vulnerable to democratic opposition because he claims active legal and moral guidance to his supporters against a historically adversarial nationalist-secular media system and critical information about himself.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India's television landscape, this article works w... more Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India's television landscape, this article works with two terms – “interpretational authority” and “star-anchor” – so as to elucidate the ambivalence of empowerment in what Arvind Rajagopal has called India's postcolonial 'split public'. I understand interpretational authority, in the ambiguous context of the “democratic nation-state”, as professional journalism's filtering function of both direct democracy and popular majoritarianism. Along four genealogical variants of empowerment, I relate democratisation and anti-elitism in and through evolving Indian news television to Walter Benjamin's deliberations on the aesthetics of fascist communication and argue that in a swiftly 'entertainmentized' TV journalism, interpretational authority was rendered somewhat dysfunctional before it could actually establish itself both in vernacular and English-language channels. The “star-anchor”, in order to still reach a public, becomes the embodiment of interpretational authority compromised by a reified, socio-economic hierarchisation and the immediacy of fascist stardom.
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (WPCC), 9 (3), Dec 2013
This article introduces the term 'the ethnographic moment', which takes up and 'plays' with the l... more This article introduces the term 'the ethnographic moment', which takes up and 'plays' with the long-disputed 'ethnographic present' in anthropology, as an indicator of changing conditions and requirements for ethnography in the context of mass media and mediation. It argues that event and debate, rather than structure and practice, have become pivotal aspects in thinking and conducting fieldwork that has to deal with the ephemeral. At the same time, it tries to show that an unquestioning acceptance of technological advancement and speed of societal change immunizes us to the thinkable absence of media and obscures analysis of lasting states of injustice and inequality in whose (re-) production they have a stake.
Keywords: anthropology, media contents, social change, technology, time
"In this context, “Gezi”, as a synonym for all the places in Turkey where protests and citizen fo... more "In this context, “Gezi”, as a synonym for all the places in Turkey where protests and citizen forums have sprung up, is not as much about solidarity as it is about the albeit tentative discovery of common-ness through the very defence of the commons."
European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(6), Dec 2011
This article questions the assumption that the increase in visibility of religion in mass-mediate... more This article questions the assumption that the increase in visibility of religion in mass-mediated content is indicative of greater impact of religion in the public and state sphere and of a process of de-secularization. It argues that expressions of Hinduism and Islam have become inseparable from secularist histories in the respective countries. The analysis emphasizes a necessary distinction between piety, public popular culture and political activism in the name of a national religious majority, and shows that in its appropriation and redefinition of secularism and employment of religious symbolism, Hindu nationalist mobilization and governance in India are related more closely to sacralization of secularism in historical Turkish nationalism than to the Islamic movement. In both countries, we can observe a retreat rather than a greater media presence of the pious and sacred in the face of neonationalism and commercialization, which in each case produces a democratically precarious public popular culture.
The pogrom was not only publicly visible for the local population – as had always been the case w... more The pogrom was not only publicly visible for the local population – as had always been the case with earlier instances of anti-minority violence – but for everybody who could find a screen to watch it on throughout India.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 36(2), Jul 2013
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with p... more The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
On 2 nd February of this year, singer Rihanna twittered a simple question, however with the combi... more On 2 nd February of this year, singer Rihanna twittered a simple question, however with the combine of question-and exclamation mark lending it some urgency. Posting a CNN-photo of the farmers' protests in India, ongoing since months and mobilising hundreds of thousands increasingly desperate agricultural workers and suppliers against a new pro-corporate legislation, she asked: 'Why aren't we talking about this?!'
Understanding the relationship between media and communication as increasingly conflictive under ... more Understanding the relationship between media and communication as increasingly conflictive under conditions of de-democratization in India, this essay proposes a focus on violence-induced conditionalities of the political communication among the affected. I introduce the term 'media/violence' as I look at two spaces in North Indian cities that have been turned into 'Muslim ghettos' over the past two decades: Jamia Nagar in New Delhi and Juhapura in Ahmedabad (Gujarat). Based on intermittent fieldwork between 2015 and 2020 (partly online), I argue that differences both in the quality of the violence as well as in the interaction between mediated and physical violence executed on the two spaces conditioned long-term options of collective communication (and their absence). The analysis helps us understand how massive political and legal protests could eventually erupt in Jamia Nagar (Shaheen Bagh) in late 2019, while the very reason for protest appears to have eluded residents of Juhapura.
The article is in German and will be published in the 'Blätter für deutsche und internationale Po... more The article is in German and will be published in the 'Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik' (Papers for German and International Politics) in August 2016. I will provide an English translation if the English title attracts enough interest - so this is in fact kind of a test run :). The article critically and in global perspective elaborates on the intrinsic linkages between the fixation on the professorship as the single permanent post in the German university system, the tragic fallouts of the state-initiated program of scientific excellence, and the refusal to pay salaries to university teachers. It argues that the thwarting of solidarity and unionism amongst scholars, the discouragement of unpredictable (open, 'risky') research (especially in the arts, humanities and social sciences) and the eventual enforced de-qualification of mass produced underemployed academics have become the indispensable and unconstitutional underbelly of the German government's rhetoric of the 'international battle for the best brains'. It is because academia is under attack on a global scale - for different reasons in different contexts - that the advertising machinery of the the German government is able to sell a sorry state for a viable option.
12. International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)-Conference, 24-28 August 2021, University of Kyoto, Japan (online) https://icas.asia, 2021
This Roundtable was submitted and accepted by ICAS in October 2020; we however eventually withdre... more This Roundtable was submitted and accepted by ICAS in October 2020; we however eventually withdrew collectively facing exorbitant conference fees for an online-event and will look into other options of holding this discussion.
11. International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)-Conference,
16-19 July 2019, University of L... more 11. International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)-Conference, 16-19 July 2019, University of Leiden, Netherlands https://icas.asia
11. International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)-Conference,
16-19 July 2019, University of L... more 11. International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)-Conference, 16-19 July 2019, University of Leiden, Netherlands https://icas.asia
SASNET-Conference 2016 "Modern Matters: Negotiating the Future of Everyday Life in South Asia"
h... more SASNET-Conference 2016 "Modern Matters: Negotiating the Future of Everyday Life in South Asia"
“The Call for Participation in the first workshop of our working group "Precarious Internationale... more “The Call for Participation in the first workshop of our working group "Precarious Internationale" (Network for Decent Labour in Academia) is out. We will meet in Berlin in June and look forward to your suggestions and stories or, for the time being, to your simple message: I'm interested, I'm coming. Let us know until 15 February and please circulate widely! Thanks!
"Many of us have made and continue to make disenchanting experiences, to say the least, in the German academic system. While it markets itself as a world of excellence, liberal egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, freedom and generosity towards scholars at risk, the reality of its structural labour conditions and culture of ignorance betray this image to be a grotesque misrepresentation. German academia is characterised by an ingrained and almost cultivated lack of consciousness towards multiple forms of discrimination (based on race, class, gender, age, etc.) and by related modalities of exclusion as well as paternalistic and infantilizing norms and practices particularly vis-à-vis international and non-naturalized scholars and students. [...] As a part of this effort, this workshop wants to bring together scholars, unionists and activists with different histories of mobility and migration to discuss and refect on the intersection between precarious labour conditions and different forms of discrimination in the German academic system. We want to come together and learn from each other in order to come to a better analysis of the different problems and challenges faced by differently positioned scholars and activists, but also to exchange experiences and knowledges over struggles for academic freedoms and labour conditions in different contexts. The aim is both to position the question of labour in academia within broader societal struggles in Germany and to link it up to related struggles in other countries."
Die Beschäftigten an Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen leiden seit Jahren unter einer hohen... more Die Beschäftigten an Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen leiden seit Jahren unter einer hohen Befristungsquote, die zudem stark dysfunktional ist. Der dauerhafte Einstieg des Bundes in die Hochschulfinanzierung muss genutzt werden, um endlich mehr Dauerstellen zu schaffen. Das Argument von Ländern und Hochschulen, dass die nur zeitlich begrenzt zur Verfügung stehenden Programmmittel dies verhinderten, ist nun nicht mehr stichhaltig. Zudem ruft die Situation nach einem Neuanfang: Die rasant gewachsenen Studierendenzahlen sind nicht sinnvoll durch immer neue prekäre Projektstellen und Nachwuchs ohne Perspektive zu bewältigen. Die Studierenden brauchen erfahrenes, dauerhaft an den Hochschulen tätiges Personal – und junge Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler brauchen vertretbare Berufsperspektiven. Wir fordern daher:
Erleuchtung Garantiert: Wissenschaftliche Spotlights auf Religion & Spiritualität, 2022
Indien entwickelt unter dem Einfluss der hindu-nationalistischen Partei BJP immer stärker faschis... more Indien entwickelt unter dem Einfluss der hindu-nationalistischen Partei BJP immer stärker faschistische Strukturen. Ausgehend von der Idee des Hindu als biologisch-rassische Kategorie werden Minderheiten systematisch ausgegrenzt und die Rolle von Tätern und Opfern verdreht. Die Politikwissenschaftlerin und Anthropologin Britta Ohm zeigt auf, wo diese Entwicklung ihre Ursprünge hat, wie sie konkret funktioniert und wohin sie führt. Ausserdem erzählt sie von einem Imbissverkäufer, der verhaftet wurde, weil er sein Essen ins falsche Zeitungspapier gewickelt hat, und erklärt, weshalb in den Vorgärten indischer TV-Familien stets ein Tulsi-Baum steht.
Ein Podcast der Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Zürich. Produziert in Zusammenarbeit mit der Podcastschmiede.
Uploads
Books by Britta Ohm
Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion.
Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances.
In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.
Papers by Britta Ohm
While academic freedom has been a top agenda point for the global scientific community in recent years, the public and academic discourse has often been marked by a negative interpretation of the term understood merely as exemption from state intervention and censorship. The contributions in this edited volume demonstrate, however, that this is not where the story ends: the ability to exercise academic freedom not only involves the freedom of expression in its abstract sense but should involve the capability to determine research agendas and curricula independently from market pressures or threats of career sabotage, and to resist workplace misconduct without fear of losing future career chances.
Providing a differentiated picture of contemporary structural limits to academic freedom in advanced democracies, this volume will be of great interest for not only scholars of higher education, but for the entire academic community.
and political lives of populations ( Foucault 1997 ), rather than outright agitating against them, Modi resorted to a neoliberal ‘biopolitics of disposability’ ( Giroux 2008 ) that rendered Muslims, lower castes, and the poor superfluous.
Veröffentlichungstitel: "Exzellente Entqualifizierung: Das neue akademische Prekariat"
https://www.blaetter.de/archiv/jahrgaenge/2016/august/exzellente-entqualifizierung-das-neue-akademische-prekariat
Keywords: anthropology, media contents, social change, technology, time
https://www.westminsterpapers.org/25/volume/9/issue/3/
Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion.
Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances.
In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.
While academic freedom has been a top agenda point for the global scientific community in recent years, the public and academic discourse has often been marked by a negative interpretation of the term understood merely as exemption from state intervention and censorship. The contributions in this edited volume demonstrate, however, that this is not where the story ends: the ability to exercise academic freedom not only involves the freedom of expression in its abstract sense but should involve the capability to determine research agendas and curricula independently from market pressures or threats of career sabotage, and to resist workplace misconduct without fear of losing future career chances.
Providing a differentiated picture of contemporary structural limits to academic freedom in advanced democracies, this volume will be of great interest for not only scholars of higher education, but for the entire academic community.
and political lives of populations ( Foucault 1997 ), rather than outright agitating against them, Modi resorted to a neoliberal ‘biopolitics of disposability’ ( Giroux 2008 ) that rendered Muslims, lower castes, and the poor superfluous.
Veröffentlichungstitel: "Exzellente Entqualifizierung: Das neue akademische Prekariat"
https://www.blaetter.de/archiv/jahrgaenge/2016/august/exzellente-entqualifizierung-das-neue-akademische-prekariat
Keywords: anthropology, media contents, social change, technology, time
https://www.westminsterpapers.org/25/volume/9/issue/3/
The article critically and in global perspective elaborates on the intrinsic linkages between the fixation on the professorship as the single permanent post in the German university system, the tragic fallouts of the state-initiated program of scientific excellence, and the refusal to pay salaries to university teachers. It argues that the thwarting of solidarity and unionism amongst scholars, the discouragement of unpredictable (open, 'risky') research (especially in the arts, humanities and social sciences) and the eventual enforced de-qualification of mass produced underemployed academics have become the indispensable and unconstitutional underbelly of the German government's rhetoric of the 'international battle for the best brains'. It is because academia is under attack on a global scale - for different reasons in different contexts - that the advertising machinery of the the German government is able to sell a sorry state for a viable option.
16-19 July 2019, University of Leiden, Netherlands
https://icas.asia
16-19 July 2019, University of Leiden, Netherlands
https://icas.asia
https://www.sasnet.lu.se/conferences/modern-matters-negotiating-the-future-in-everyday-life-in-south-asia-2016/accepted-panels
"Many of us have made and continue to make disenchanting experiences, to say the least, in the German academic system. While it markets itself as a world of excellence, liberal egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, freedom and generosity towards scholars at risk, the reality of its structural labour conditions and culture of ignorance betray this image to be a grotesque misrepresentation. German academia is characterised by an ingrained and almost cultivated lack of consciousness towards multiple forms of discrimination (based on race, class, gender, age, etc.) and by related modalities of exclusion as well as paternalistic and infantilizing norms and practices particularly vis-à-vis international and non-naturalized scholars and students. [...]
As a part of this effort, this workshop wants to bring together scholars, unionists and activists with different histories of mobility and migration to discuss and refect on the intersection between precarious labour conditions and different forms of discrimination in the German academic system. We want to come together and learn from each other in order to come to a better analysis of the different problems and challenges faced by differently positioned scholars and activists, but also to exchange experiences and knowledges over struggles for academic freedoms and labour conditions in different contexts. The aim is both to position the question of labour in academia within broader societal struggles in Germany and to link it up to related struggles in other countries."
Vollständige Verwendung der Hochschulpaktmittel für Dauerstellen!
http://frististfrust.net/?fbclid=IwAR0eBird8C9siwdALxOBwL_8TKjIigIknBMDYqG30HZFDEI4WZO6FjSkk1w
Zeichnet die Petition hier (ab 01. März 2019):
https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/frist-ist-frust-entfristungspakt-2019
Ein Podcast der Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Zürich. Produziert in Zusammenarbeit mit der Podcastschmiede.