“Digital diasporas” occur at the intersection of local/ global, national/

international, private/public, offline/online and embodied/disembodied. In

digital diasporas, a multiplicity of representations, mass media broadcasts,

textual and visual performances and interpersonal interactions occur. The

term *”digital diaspora”* is most often used to talk about how diasporic

populations the world over use the Internet to connect to each other.

Scholars such as Anna Everett (2009) and Jeniffer Brinkerhoff (2009) have

each used the phrase in relation to very specific situated histories of

forced migrations (African American histories of slavery) and transnational

travel respectively. The link to labor flows and hierarchies of colonialisms

and digital globalization is clear in both. In most general usage of the

phrase “digital diaspora,” however, it is used to describe migrant

populations without attention to the specific conditions of subjectivity

that produces diasporas. Further, it is interesting that international NGOs

(specifically the United Nations) and Transnational corporations as well as

National businesses have mobilized the notion of digital diaspora in

“reverse brain-drain” efforts where very materially successful

transnationals and migrants with moneys to invest actually get to return

home.

In the past I have edited a couple publications that center around South

Asian Digital Diasporas (a Special Section of New Media and Society in 2006)

and South Asian Technospace (a co-edited collection of essays). My intent

with this next volume on digital diasporas is to include material that helps

elaborate on the more current platforms where links between transnational

capital and labor flows can be mapped in the context of the increasing

NGOization and ITization of the globe. Thus questions include (but are not

limited to) – why “digital diaspora” and why now? What forms a “digital

diaspora” within gaming environments and social networks? How are

non-profits and transnational corporations (similarly or differently)

mobilizing this idea of digital diaspora in relation to labor and capital

flows? How does a “digital diaspora” form – how does it “look” – how does it

function and so on.

>From prospective contributors, I will need an extended abstract of 800 to

1000 words that fleshes out the theoretical and methodological approaches in

relation to a specific site that will be examined.

Due Dates:

1] Extended abstract due on July 26th, 2011

2] You will hear back about your abstracts by August 15th 2011 – with

suggestions on how

you can proceed if the abstract is considered acceptable for the collection

3] Full essays are due by October 1, 2011.

If you have questions regarding the publisher and what exactly I’m looking

for and so on – feel free to email me -

radhika@cyberdiva.org with the subject header

“digital diasporas.”

Program and Flier Attached

see also blog – http://blogs.bgsu.edu/raceandaffect/

twitter stream http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23drabgsu2011

[for citation details - email me]

CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION
or
Changes, Transitions, Upgrading, Rewriting… what stayed constant if anything?

I started work on this book during a post dot.com socio-economic era soon after I had completed my last book. The last book (Gajjala, 2004) to be based fully on my own research endeavours and collaborations drew on the work I’d done both for my dissertation and towards tenure, during the mid to late 90s. In the midst of that book project and this current one (and I anticipate the same for the next one I am embarking on as I shut the covers on this one) – shifts have occurred. These shifts have reaffirmed for me that what I was observing at these cross-sections are indeed impacting our presents and futures in ways that compel us to re-seat ourselves from disciplinary comfort zones. What is discussed in this book that you are reading the “conclusion” of, for instance, does not just impact our social and cultural lives as if those were separate from political and the economic. These online/offline intersections are changing the way we need to respond to situations around us – whether in our domestic everyday or in the world-wide political milieu. What is most compelling is not that there are shifts or there is change – these are givens in any era. Our urgent attention and reflexive engagement is needed to observe carefully how this so-called speed of change allows a loss of memory that permits status quo hierarchies to be unchanged generation after generation. While bodies and cultural objects are coded as interchangeable and made visible as agents of difference, democracy and multiculturalism – code is standardized and these individual agents of so-called change are placed on naturalized technical platforms. Code is made invisible. Does this mean that the cod-ers – the labor that codes – have the power? Does this mean that the complex literacies involved in producing the platforms and networks are created by the labor-force that codes them? What configurations of practices, literacies and assumptions underpin how this labor force is trained and simultaneously rendered powerless while they labor to produce “us” in the interface?

Should the Humanities and Social Sciences be left out of these kinds of inter-disciplinary practices of standardizing socio-cultural financial code named as “technical” and “Technology,” as we continue incestuously “blind” peer-reviewing each other’s work, gatekeeping to ensure there is not more than a bit of fashionable dissonance and multiplicity in voicing – as we maintain outdated hierarchies of knowledge-production?
In continuing work my call to fellow researchers is to scrutinize closely every practice, every code, every interface, woven designs, crochet patterns, spoken word – for what seams seamless. We have been looking at and reveling in the discovery of “ruptures” and celebrating them or pointing to them as evidence of hopeful change. But we are missing what hides in the background of the ruptures we see “popping up.” What are the non-changing factors that are hidden by the fast appearing manner in which the “newness” of the place/space/time/body intersections seem to have the potential for reproducing “old” oppressive regimes in brand new bytes great speed and less time for reflection and contemplation.
How do we “upgrade” the lens that sees – what do we look for and why. How is an “unscripted entry” (here I refer to a recent podcast interview of Larry Gross where he talks about the unscripted entry of Justin Beiber and the likes into the mainstream) into the mainstream actually a product of status quo production mechanisms that have shifted and been hidden through the continual and simultaneous upgrading and standardization of layers of access and literacy. What do we write and publish for and why – if we reproduce consistencies in the name of discovery of newness?

Affect Conference_names(2)

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