From my post to Radha ki Betiyaan pvt blog:

Okay – even though everyone [on RkB] almost is on facebook and some are on twitter – and several of you may have individual blogs. And we have once again started mass emailing each other.

This is still a different way of being, communication in this “space” we call Radha ki Betiyaan.

I am returning to posting and getting a sense of how I feel as I post in each of my many blogs – or some.

So I blogged some research notes on my livejournal – that only a. has an account on amongst all of you – and has access to when I set it to a certain type of private post setting.

I will go blog again on my cyberdiva.org blog and other spaces (all semester my students and I have been on tumblr.com because we are class blogging there).

Facebook allows different kinds of interactions – scattered and sudden and on impulse even. Twitter allows me to be very very scattered with no dialogue until I or someone else on my twitter list chooses to (similar to facebook status responses – but not with such a potentially large audience – so its not that kind of theater).

I’ve noticed that many many in P’s generation and S’s generation have a custom of keeping public blogs. The public theatricality of bloggling, facebook and twitter (and I am not even getting into youtube here because I speak only of written text) subconsciously shaping their way of being…

Add to this mix the act of posting and typing via Iphone interface.

thinking aloud and ending abruptly as always with my thoughts in-progress (and this is part of the website culture that I started out in since 1990s and that continues now in blogger culture)…

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”

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)…. 

PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS ASAP  (deadline is still tentative – so if you are working on something relevant email me anyway with a query).  Title: Everyday 3D Lives: Digital Embodiment, Performativity and GlobalizationEditor : Radhika Gajjala[ http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik ](Lexington Press is interested and I am discussing this collection with them)  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 January 1, 2008 and full articles of no more than 8000 words length due by September 2008.Email me with any queries (Deadlines are still flexible at this time – so keep checking) – radhika@cyberdiva.org.

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.