Recently I wrote/published a bunch of articles on conceptualization of identity in Secondlife space – and am back doing further immersive ethnographies in various virtual worlds in relation to building monetary value for social identities and in relation trans-nations, inter-nations and the local and global. Some of what I write next will both contest and extend what I have written and published in the previous phase of immersive online and offline (and offline trans- rural as well as trans- urban “deep hanging out”) ethnographies.

As usual – some of this will be co-authored and other essays will be single-authored with a clear acknowledgement of its collaborative nature. Am working in bits and pieces with multiple groups of people both within and outside the Western academy as well as both within and outside virtual worlds.

Let the layered investigations resume (continue – actually they never stopped – but now that I have my first draft of the book manuscript on Technocultural Agency finally done – I am calling it phase two as I move this work into my next two book projects being developed)!

There is a chanting in my inner mind
I hear it

but what are those words

on the tip of my tongue

as I try to chant along

I know them

but I do
not

there is a chanting that I know very well
but
how could I
I never did learn them

I cannot say them
I cannot see them

through the blur
the haze

of my present knowledges

the merging of the now and then

the chanting comes from the ocean waves that rushed at the foot of the temple
to
the ocean waves that rushed to the edge of the trail
near the shores of a sea on the other end of the world

named after ancients here and there

I hear the chanting of the ghosts
I am chanting with them

but the words dont materialize

I found really good instructions on how to use the top spindle from youtube and finally got the hang of it. Of course I dont look very expert – but the job gets done.

Am currently using twisted.etsy.com ‘s rodney colorway roving that I got way back in spring of 2008 and am practicing handspun yarn. Its very “artsy”:)

will post pictures of the unevenly wound first attempts once I crochet it into something.

My mother will be ever so amused when I tell her I can finally use a spindle (she is quite the expert [at least in my eyes] – even now when she can barely see, her fingers are nimble – - spinner of khadi cotton yarn on her ancient charkha used when she and my father moved with Gandhi followers way back when…).

who’d a thunk it – my writing with neices leads me back to mapping roots and routes …

“my nostalgia for the rural is so unexplained by my actual life experiences…or on second thoughts maybe not unexplainable at all… while some may locate my yearning/nostalgia in roots in kakaraparru – it may be that the smells of burning wood and mud huts is actually taking me back to rural Africa…? or the rural Thai and Indonesian habitats that were still tucked in the backyards of urbanity of Bangkok, Jakarta, Bandung and even in the touristiness of Bali back in the late 60s and 70s”

So now I am at ICA – up at 4 am thinking of how to frame the loom.

I guess I used it to “rupture” the idea of “virtual” “global” and “technology”  in my precon presentation and my OU presentation – but now I have to put forth what S and Sh have articulated with me and once again make pleas to rearticulate the notion of global…

is there a point to trying? Is this the audience that will be receptive to these ideas – always the same questions, eh:)

oh well – it must be presented and then we shall see.

meanwhile – the book signing for the South Asian Technospaces is today.

In other news – unrelated to ICA and more about the technologists and professionals in my family who are simultaneously globetrotting this week to things like Brain conferences and what not in the Montreal neighborhood….

M gets here in the afternoon – maybe I will get to see him for lunch. S gets here at night – so no sleep for me. But I get a head start on my Hyderabad trip.

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interesting how even this most recent article took me back to theorizing pvt and public through postcolonial feminist lenses – and I really wasnt looking to directly go there…

and of course the ubiquitous tension/dialectic of accountability to and oppression within community v individualization and illusions of liberation….

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Note: This is not meant to be a perfect “seamless” experience of being in secondlife – but rather it is meant to show the breaks and ruptures…This is one version – I will have more with more ruptures inserted…layered…

When you ACTUALLY truly shift the lens of benefit to look at issues of sustainable livelihoods, accessible democratic practices and sharing of resources with future generations…… THEN what would we think of a progress? I keep thinking of the senior citizen who asked about why we were not improving our (US) railways – and why we always focus on better flying and fighting technologies (at least that’s the gist it seems of what he said). And of the rickshaw pullers that disappeared from the streets of Hyderabad from one visit to the next “back home” (India)…. 

DEADLINE EXTENDED:

PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS BY DECEMBER 1, 2007.

Title: Everyday 3D Lives: Digital Embodiment, Performativity and Globalization

Editor : Radhika Gajjala

[ http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik ]

In the recent past, there has been much talk of “web 2.0 “ and “web 3D” as new media. Educators and researchers all over the world are debating the pros and cons of such environments. MMORPGs (Massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft (WoW) and online 3D environments for social and economic activity. Immersive environments such as secondlife are being examined from multiple disciplinary lenses. This edited will include articles based in examinations of embodiment, performativity, gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and globalization critically, and will be open to multiple disciplinary intersections.

What sorts of convergences, conjunctures and connections emerge in relation to embodiment, identity and globalization specifically in 3D environment (such as secondlife) and MMORPGs? Researchers examining presence and absence or voice and voicelessness are increasingly mobilized to speak of identities emerging online, while binaries such as embodied/disembodied and global/local are deployed unproblematically in both utopian and dystopian viewpoints regarding the Internet. Performativity begins to shape exposure and privacy. Thus while claims are being made that the Internet is a “public sphere” in a Habermasian sense (Poster 1995) corporate privation and surveillance comes upon us in Internet mediated environments and we learn to negotiate our speaking within interstices of presences and absences, cooperation and isolation, community engagement and individual consumerism. Simultaneously hegemonic structures invested in particular ideologies of globalization and “free” markets learn to co-opt diverse identities and voices. Voice thus becomes a strategic construct in both cases. Notions of voice/voiceless and empowerment/participation in such instances are appropriated by status quo discourses and are themselves mobilized for the oppression of the subaltern (Gajjala, forthcoming 2008).

In the book on “Pedagogies of the Global”, the editor, Arif Dirlik writes that

“Rather than erase difference by converting all to Euro/American norms of modernity, however, capitalist modernity, as it has gone global, has empowered societies once theoretically condemned to premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of globalization “(Dirlik, 2006, 3).

Digital media plays a significant role in aiding these connections and shaping these re-presentations. I am interested in research that examines these connections, representations and productions through critical theoretical lenses based in postcolonial theories, feminist theories, critical race theories and so on.

500 word abstracts due by December 1, 2007 and full articles of no more than 8000 words length due by September 2008.

Email me with any queries – radhika@cyberdiva.org.