Dialectical Anthropology - Call for Papers: The Limits of Visibility among South Asian Religious Minorities

The Limits of Visibility among South Asian Religious Minorities
Special Issue

Jürgen Schaflechner
Principle Investigator of the Volkswagen Freigeist Project “The Populism of the Precarious”
Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Max Kramer
Postdoctoral Research
Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

For this special issue of Dialectical Anthropology, we invite you to submit papers that explore how minority actors in South Asia—including social activists, filmmakers, citizen journalists and others—navigate new digital environments and how their practices of becoming visible—or, in fact, of remaining invisible—alleviate or exacerbate their often-precarious lifeworlds. We call our interlocuters’ engagements with online visibility tactics. This has to do with the fact that minorities’ often volatile circumstances do not allow for long-term strategies: Their practices are usually versatile, spontaneous, and highly context-sensitive as they need to advance and retreat in response to the frames of majoritarian politics and the capture of communicative capitalism. We are interested in discussions of minoritized agent’s different tactics with regard to how they handle dangerous digital terrains, how they avoid risks of exposure and surveillance, and how they increase the emancipatory possibilities that come with digital visibility. The papers in this special issue should be a result from work with and learning from minoritized media practitioners that run up against the emancipatory limits of the digital space.

Interested individuals should submit a working title and paper abstract of 200-250 words by November 15, 2022 to:

Jürgen Schaflechner (j.schaflechner@fu-berlin.de (this opens in a new tab))
Max Kramer (max.kramer@fu-berlin.de (this opens in a new tab))