MEDIA AND MEDIATION (Communication Processes Series)

Description

This book, the first in a three-book series titled Communication Processes, is devoted to understanding the politics in, and of, communication. It explores both the ground on which processes of communication unfold and the political configurations implied in communication processes. This two-pronged approach questions the preoccupation in Indian scholarship with the ‘deployment’ of ‘communication’ as an interdisciplinary domain of enquiry.

Like in the ensuing series, the editors of this book juxtapose a pluralist universe of conceptual articulations, theoretical constructs and empirical validations. Here, the aim is to raise two fundamental questions:

-How fruitful is communication as a concept in yielding insights about the India of today, and that of yesterday and tomorrow?

-What constitutes a critical research agenda in communication amidst the fissured reality of the Information Age?

In addressing these questions, the contributors steer through, on the one hand, the modernization-inspired tradition of communication research in India- predominated by impact and reception studies – and, on the other, global trends that shaped the glut of fashionable writings – coincidental with and spurred by transnational television and the internet – during the 1990s. By rerouting the subject matter of communication, and re-installing the political therein, this series will be invaluable for students of communication, culture studies, sociology and journalism.

Bernard Bel, a computer scientist with an electronics background, pioneered real-time melodic movement analysis for Indian music, alongside rule-based drumming modeling. He earned a 1990 PhD in theoretical computer science and undertook projects in musicology and anthropology. Co-founding workshops and the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group, he focused on prosody and language representation. Now retired, he dedicates time to healthcare research, computational musicology, and a unique corpus of grindmill songs via People’s Archive of Rural India.

Jan Brouwer is an anthropologist, author of The Makers of the World (OUP) which will be enriched with a new chapter for its 2nd edition by Primus Books soon. His current work Business and Culture with co-author Dr Mark Avery and a monograph on Kodava (Coorg) Culture: Interface Between the Material and the Mental. He can be reached at indiaabc.in, abc43dh@gmail.com.

Biswajit Das is Professor and founding Director of Centre for Culture, Media & Governance. He has over four decades of teaching and research experiences in the field of theory, method and history of Communication in India. His latest publications include Gandhian Thought and Communication(ed.) (Sage, 2020), Caste, Communication and Power (ed.) (Sage, 2021). Seeing South Asia: Visuals beyond Borders (ed.) (Routledge, 2022), Korean Wave in South Asia: Transcultural flow, fandom and Identity (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and Pedagogy in Practice: Project-Based Learning in Media policy & Governance (ed.) (Bloomsbury,2022).

Vibodh Parthasarathi maintains a multidisciplinary interest in media policy/business/history. Associate Professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, he has been a visiting scholar at University of Queensland, KU Leuven, University of Helsinki, and IIT Bombay, and an affiliate at Lund University and Central European University. Widely published in leading scientific journals, including anchoring several special issues, his edited volumes include Pedagogy in Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022) and The Indian Media Economy (OUP, 2018). Currently, he is Associate Editor of the Journal of Digital Media and Policy.

Guy Poitevin (1934-2004) was a social activist and scholar. He was the Director of the Centre for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences (CCRSS) in Pune which he had founded in 1982.