Kiran Vinod Bhatia delivered a lecture on ‘Faith on the Feed: Children’s Religious Enactments Online’. It was chaired by Prathama Banerjee.
ZOOM ID: 88348003089 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
More than eight million children live in low-income neighborhoods in India have acquired access to affordable digital technologies, including smartphones, laptops, personal computers, and data packages. This lecture will present insights from 5-year long ethnographic research conducted in low-income neighborhoods of Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore to explore how children enacted their religious identities online and offline. Children use digital technologies as proxy sites for enacting their religious identities. I will offer ethnographic narratives demonstrating that the globalizing potential of digital technologies induced anxiety among young people as they felt that their local identities and cultural beliefs were collapsing under the weight of Western ideas and lifestyles. They actively used online platforms and communication channels to reinforce their religious identities and allegiances, thus deepening the existing communal differences.
Kiran Vinod Bhatia is Research Director at FemLab; Research Affiliate at Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She is a digital anthropologist working at the intersection of marginalization and digital media. She also studies the interlinkages between digital technologies, policies, protest cultures, and social movements.
Prathama Banerjee is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 27 September 2024, 8 pm, Zoom https://bit.ly/3TtcLVz
