ID: (Left) A workshop poster on Making as Critique with a collage of images covering hypertext media, digital archives, and videogames set against a grey background; (Right) A studio poster on Care Matters and Justice Dreams with a background image of hands weaving yarn and text and a set of foreground text boxes describing the studio and making the public seminar announcement. Image courtesy of Kush Patel (September 2023).

At the end of August, I gave a talk about my experiences with research to the newest cohort of PhD candidates in art, design, and transdisciplinary studies at SMI. It is a conversation, which I’ve been having with myself ongoingly and in relation to the different academic roles that I have inhabited in the past and those that I currently practice—and where I ask: How might I describe my relationship to research, and research scholarship itself, when it inhabits and continues to grow out of a set of epistemic locations that can feel less hostile to the process and experience of queer becoming: the text and image, the community archive, the classroom? What do these locations index—and how might their overlaps and juxtapositions cumulatively, through time, expand the purpose of research to ensure survival amidst heightened precarity and ongoing institutional violence? Indeed, if the Just Futures Co-lab is one such indexicality, the relations, including citational relations, that it has fostered through postgraduate research and pedagogy remain a core way to model community-centered accountabilities and values that may otherwise remain unnamed and unacknowledged in higher ed. 

Last month, as part of a weeklong orientation program for the postgraduate cohort at SMI, I also led a half-day workshop titled, “Making as Critique.” For this session, the Just Futures Co-lab not only served as a physical locus, but also as an invitation for students to think about future alignments between their academic pursuits and my ongoing research in critical digital humanities at the lab. 

What does it mean to entwine experience and feeling with analyzing or reconfiguring a technological object in its community or use context (for example: a hypertext, digital archive, or videogame)? What might we consider as making through such an embodied-situated entwining? And how might this entwining help us challenge the conventional opposition between theorizing and doing in art and design? The goal of my workshop was to open up a conversation with students around making—and specifically, the roles that queer-feminist principles play in adding criticality to technological engagements involving storytelling, archiving, and video gaming. The session ended with each of the 11 students—Lex, Veda Shetye, Keshav Doyal, Namitha Susan Moses, Divya (Bavisha) Varigonda, Deepthi Narasimha Murthy, Shinjini Asthana, Avani Bhardwaj, Shae, C. Reethika, Sarah Mariyam Michael—drafting their own definitions of critical making based on workshop materials and activities, and in connection with their elected majors and fields of study, namely, animation, curatorial practice, design computation, human-centered design, experience design, and contemporary arts practice.

In addition to each of these engagements, it was extremely joyful to have recent graduates return to the Just Futures Co-lab as participants of a public seminar and engage the work of current students with their insightful questions and comments. This past week saw one such graduate, Aditi Bhat, attend the culmination of my MA studio on “Care Matters and Justice Dreams,” comprising eight students—Effie Fernandes, Heli Motanpotra, Navya S, Praneetha Sali, Priti Dhongani, R Kalaivani, Sowmya Chandrasekaran, and Tanima Jajoo—representing experience design and human-centered design majors. In this studio iteration [1], students and I analyzed with and through weaving the overlaps between personal data, digital technologies, and the becoming of a human subject connected to workplace and community surveillance. Specifically, by centering gendered stories of technology involving wearable GPS trackers, CCTV cameras, biometric scanners, digitized linked-data services, gig worker rating systems, plagiarism detection tools, vaccination verification QR codes, and remote electronic monitoring softwares, the studio asked: What leads to the adoption and perpetuation of workplace surveillance systems? How might we name, contend with, and weave into form socio-technical hegemonies and the power and politics embedded in their operations? Who can be authorial about labouring bodies? How is design implicated in such technological systems—and how might care-based responsibilities show us different ways of workplace and community being? While the studio has now concluded with the production of eight tapestries responding variously to the above questions, students and I will be holding these critiques a bit closer and longer for continued reflections in public.

Thank you Aditi for your brilliant presence; thank you to each of the other invited colleagues Swati Maskeri, Shradha Jain, and Animesh Bahadur for such enriching seminar conversations; and thank you to Hanumanthappa, Mamta Sagar, Meghana Singh, Rustam Vania, and Ipsa Jain for being in community throughout that day. Likewise, I want to give a shout-out to another graduate, Gayatri Shanbhag, for her encouraging feedback on studio outline prior to the actual start of the 2023 academic cycle. Both Aditi and Gayatri were participants of last year’s studio (alongwith M. Nithya Kirti) and to have them be supportive bookends to this year’s project felt doubly affirming. 

Notes

[1] The inaugural 2021 studio invited students to produce care work biographies of their interactions with technology during, but not exclusive to, the then raging COVID-19 pandemic. This four-week studio assumed a hybrid form and resulted in 10 individual interactive stories, involving, but not limited to, Twine. The 2022 studio furthered this focus on care work by grounding itself more deeply into humanistic questions of biographical writing and storytelling, resulting in the production of individually written essays, interactive Twine narratives, and a collective studio book. Together, both these iterations asked: How might you—and we—ensure that our current and future interactions with technologies and each other are rooted in and emerge from places and acts of care? What are the embodied, situated, and material forms of such care-based interactions? And how might your care work biographies inform technology-enabled descriptions, expectations, and measurements of self away from their positivist, disembodied, and surveilled notions? Check out the published abstract (Virtual Session 4: Care, Empathy, and Justice, CDHI International Conference 2022 / Kush Patel, Sai Vidyasri Giridharan, Shamanth Joshi) and proceedings (Global DH 2023 / Anne Cong-Huyen, Kush Patel, Aditi Bhat, Gayatri Shanbhag, M. Nithya Kirti) connected to each of these studios. 

Opportunities

• Call for Applications: Digital and Society: Social Sciences Winter School at IFP, Pondicherry (November 13-17, 2023) (Deadline: September 10, 2023)
• Job / Call for Applications: Technology Researcher (Security and Privacy) at Center for Internet and Society (Deadline: September 19, 2023)
• Call for Applications: Winter School on Digital Technology and Society at IIIT-Hyderabad (November 5-10, 2023) (Deadline: September 20, 2023)
• Call for Papers: Digital Citizenship in Contemporary India, January 12-14, 2024 (Deadline: October 3, 2023)
• Call for Proposals: Global Digital Humanities Symposium 2024 at Michigan State University, East Lansing and Virtually (Deadline: October 9, 2023)
• Call for Participation: Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2024 at the University of Victoria, Victoria (Early Registration Deadline: April 1, 2024 / Regular Registration Deadline: June 1, 2024)