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CFP: DHARTI 2022 Conference

The Digital Divides: Discontents, Debates and
Discussions

Is the digital in the amorphous series of binary numbers on shapeless online clouds or in the submarine transatlantic cables that provide the offline infrastructures enabling our social, political, economic and networked materialities? The ubiquity of the word digital, however, has not allowed us to reach a resolution on this critical query. During the ongoing Covid pandemic the digital has found itself in a range of paradoxes: from simultaneously empowering and unequal online pedagogies to mobile applications for invasive surveillance as well as life-saving vaccinations to fake news infodemics as well as decisive community building measures on social media platforms. The digital in the past few months has therefore self-reflexively challenged its apparent neutrality. Unsurprisingly, the first pandemic of the digital age has been unequivocal in exposing that the digital is indeed in the human.

Following the success of our inaugural 2018 Conference [in our previous avatar as the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI)], India’s first DH Twitter conference in 2020, as well as the DHARTISpeaks! Webinar Series—the 2022 DHARTI Conference would like to provoke challenges to the conventional location of the digital in “discrete electronic computing techniques” (Peters). Instead, we focus on how since the evolution of the extensor digitorum muscles, human civilization has inherently been in the “digital condition” (Heilmann): in the symbolic, indexical, and computational registers.

For our second conference, DHARTI invites scholars, artists, practitioners, and diverse stakeholders, especially from marginalized and non-normative communities in the Global South, to join us. Through acknowledging the vertiginous divides, celebrating the productive debates, and encouraging new models of thinking about humanistic inquiry this conference will develop conceptual links between various paradigms of the digital. Reflecting on endeavours like Dr. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall”/Minimally Invasive Experiment we will try to reimagine the disciplinary contours of “the digital humanities” in Indian and Global South spaces: beyond the limited lexicon of DH in normative spaces. We hope that the interventions at this conference will show how becoming DH in the Indian landscape—for research, pedagogy, and advocacy—is through an attendant dialectical tension between the making and doing as well as being inherently multilingual: thereby igniting new path(s) forward for an always already rhizomatic teleology of Indian DH.

Paper/Panel/ Poster/ Workshops/ Hackathon submissions might include (but are not limited to) those that address:

  • Digital divide and online pedagogy during the Covid pandemic;
  • Digital divide and marginalized communities;
  • Digital divide in urban, semi-urban and rural areas;
  • Digital divide and social media;
  • Social media and Covid pandemic;
  • Digital labor, infrastructure and data justice;
  • Digital Cultures and Infrastructures in Indian languages;
  • Computational approaches and applications in history, literature, archaeology,
  • cultural studies etc.
  • Digitally enabled surveillance and the ‘Division of Learning’
  • Algorithmic governance
  • Video Games, Gamification
  • Digital Archives, Web Archives and Born Digital Archiving
  • Digital Storytelling in/and Oral Histories

Proposals may be of four types:

  1. Paper presentation
  2. Panel
  3. Poster presentation
  4. Workshop/ Hackathon

Conference participants may not present more than two interventions at the conference, either as individual papers or as part of a panel. Therefore, no participant should submit more than two abstracts to invigilate fairness and equity to all others who are submitting an abstract. The restriction of two presentations does not count towards poster presentations.

The conference will be held in the hybrid mode to allow for accessibility and convenience to those in time zones beyond IST.

Submissions

DHARTI encourages individual paper, panel and poster proposals in English along with one other language (typed in Unicode).

  • Paper abstracts should not be more than 300 words and paper presenters will be allotted 15 mins.
  • Panel proposal abstracts should consist of a 500-word overview and individual paper proposals of not more than 300 words. Each panel should consist of 4-6 presentations with each presentation not being more than 15 minutes. Panel chairs should try to maintain diversity in the panel composition and coherence in paper themes.
  • Poster Proposals should not be more than 250 words. Discussions on all posters will be held in a single session.

Before the conference, accepted presenters in the above categories will be required to submit slides (PDF), video recordings or links of their presentations. Synchronous discussions of the submissions will be scheduled during the conference week.

  • Workshops/ Hackathons can be proposed by individuals or collectives will have to be managed by their respective hosts. DHARTI will not provide hardware or software logistics for the workshop. DHARTI will provide publicity for the workshop through the official conference channels.

Workshops/ Hackathons will be held in the pre or post conference weeks and can have multiple schedules:

Eg. One hour a day for 5 days; a single hour; one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. Workshop/ Hackathon chairs can propose a schedule.

                Conference Timeline:   Dates
Call for Papers   23 August 2021
Deadline for Abstract submissions   30 November 2021
Communication of decisions after peer review   31 December 2021  
Submission of presentations     5 Feb 2022  
Conference Week   21 Feb – 25 Feb 2022  

Submissions should be made at the following form by 30 November 2021shorturl.at/lpMQZ  

November 30, 2021 11:45 pm

submit abstract through link in description

Event type: Conference

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Event type: Call for Papers