Digital Intimacies: Young Women and Social Transformation in Globalizing Asia
Date
1 June 2023 (Thu)
Time
16:30 – 18:30
Venue
SEK107
Language
English
Speaker: Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana
(Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research, and Dean of Online Programmes, Ahmedabad University, India; Fellow and Adjunct Professor, CCRD, Lingnan University)
Moderator: Prof. Pun Ngai; Discussant: Prof. Roberto Castillo
ILP (For Lingnan Students only): 1.5 Units (Social and Emotional Well-being)
Abstract
This multi-sited project, located in four Asian cities – Hong Kong, Bangalore, Guangzhou and Singapore – seeks to investigate how university-going young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media and the widespread use of digital apps. Specifically, it looks at negotiations around the institutions of family, marriage, and tertiary education, all three of which appear to be undergoing profound transformation due to digital mediation. The four cities were chosen for their high percentage of social media usage in Asia among women in the 18-30 age group. The project focusses on three aspects of social media, namely microblogging, file-sharing and services (e.g. provided by dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Tantan), as well as on communicative media (e.g. WeChat, WhatsApp, Instagram). Using a qualitative ethnographic approach, the project seeks to throw new light on emerging practices of digital intimacy, with specific reference to how young, college-going women cultivate digital personae of their selves at the intersection of class, caste and gender, and how such personae forge new ways of negotiating and navigating the realms of courtship/marriage, kinship/family and university.
Biography
Tejaswini Niranjana is Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research, and Dean, Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University, India. Before taking up this position, she was Professor and Head, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Director, Centre for Cultural Research and Development. Professor Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Duke UP, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (Duke UP, 2020). Her most recent edited volumes include Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Orient Blackswan, 2015) with Wang Xiaoming; and Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford University Press, 2020).
She is curator of the Saath-Saath Project, a musical collaboration between Indian and Chinese performers: http://saathsaathmusic.com, and producer of three documentary films based on her music research (directed by Surabhi Sharma).
Enquiry: [email protected] or 2616 7491
All are welcome!