From dak at sarai.net Mon Sep 2 18:34:23 2002 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2002 18:34:23 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter]Call for Proposals Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20020902183239.00a7b1d0@mail.sarai.net> Applications Invited for Short Term Independent Research Fellowship The Sarai Programme: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi What is Sarai? Sarai is a public initiative of media practitioners and scholars looking at media cultures and urban life. Sarai's interests are in the field of old and new media, information and communication Technologies, free software, cinema, and urban space - its politics, built form, ecology, culture and history, with a strong commitment to making knowledge available in the public domain. It is a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. For more information visit www.sarai.net Who Can Apply Sarai invites independent researchers, media practitioners, software designers and programmers, urbanists, architects, artists and writers, as well as students (post graduate level and above) and university and college faculty to apply for support to research driven projects. Why Research ? What do we mean by Research? What is a Seed Grant? Sarai is committed to generating public knowledge and creativity through research. Hence the support for research driven projects and processes. The fellowships are in the nature of seed grants in order to emphasize the initiation and founding of projects that would otherwise go unsupported Here by research we mean both archival and field research, and forays into theoretical work as well as any process or activity of an experimental or creative nature - for instance in the audiovisual media, as well as in journalism or the humanities and social sciences, or in computing and architecture. The Experience of Last Year This is the second year in which Sarai has called for proposals for such fellowships. We would like to spell out the way in which the process worked during the first year, as an indication of what applicants should expect. The first year saw the selection of twenty proposals, which included work towards projects based on investigative reportage of urban issues, essays on everyday life, a history of urban Dalit performance traditions, a soundscape of an industrial suburb, a graphic novel about Delhi, a documentation of the free software movement in India, research on displacement and rehabilitation in cities, and an interpretative catalogue of wall writings and street signs. Successful applicants included free lance researchers, academics, media practitioners, writers, journalists and activists. The projects were submitted in English, Hindi or a combination of the two languages. We have seen that projects that set important but practical and modest goals were usually successful, whereas those that may have been conceptually sound but lacked sufficient motivation to actually persue a research objective on the field, usually did not take off beyond the interim stage. Sarai interacted closely with the researcher over the period of the fellowship and the grantees made interim and final presentations at Sarai which us to trace the development of work during the grant period and the grantees to obtain structured but informal feedback from us at Sarai in stages during the course of their work. Submissions by grantees included written reports and essays, photographs, tape recordings, pamphlets, maps, drawings and html presentations. What we are Looking For Like last year, this year too we are looking for proposals that are imaginatively articulated, experimental and methodogically innovative, but which are pragmatic and backed up by a well argued work plan which sets out a time table for the project, as well as suggests how the support will help with specific resources (human and material) that the project needs. Suggested Themes Sarai's interests lie in the city, and in media. Broadly speaking any proposal that looks at the urban condition, or at media is eligible. More specifically, themes may be as diverse as habitation, sexuality, labour, social/digital interfaces, urban violence, street life, technologies of urban control, health and the city, the political economy of media forms, histories of particular media practices, migration, transportation, or anything that the applicants feel will resonate with the philosophy and interests that motivate Sarai's work. Sarai supports innovative and inventive modes of rendering work into the Public Domain. Proposals, which pay attention to this, will be particularly valued. Preferred Approaches Innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies, that combine research, practice, and delivery or rendition methods will be especially welcome. Conditions Applicants should be resident in India, and should have an account in any bank operating in India. The research fellowship would be available for up to six months and for a maximum amount of Rs. 60,000. The fellowships do not require an every day presence at Sarai. These are support fellowships and fellowship holders will be free to pursue their primary occupations, if any. What you need to send There are no application forms. Simply post your - Proposal (not more than1000 words) - A brief workplan (not more than one page) - An updated CVs (not more than two pages) - Work samples (maximum two) - Envelopes should be marked - "Attention : Short Term Independent Research Fellowship" [Email proposals will not be entertained]. Proposals may be sent in English or Hindi. - Mail these to: Ranita Chatterjee, Coordinator, Programmes, Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India. Enquires: dak at sarai.net Last date for submission: October 5, 2002. Note: Proposals from teams, partnerships, collectives, faculty are welcome, so long as the grant amount is administered by a single individual, and the funds are deposited in a single bank account in the name of an individual, partnership, registered body or institutional entity. Applicants who apply to other institutions for support for the same proposal will not be disqualified, provided they inform Sarai that support is being sought (or has been obtained) from another institution. The applicants should inform Sarai about the identity of the other institution. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cityone at sarai.net Fri Sep 6 14:40:16 2002 From: cityone at sarai.net (City One Conference) Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2002 14:40:16 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter]Call for Proposals Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20020906143913.00a62038@mail.sarai.net> City One, The First South Asian Conference on the urban experience is being held in Delhi from January 9-11th, 2003. We hope to bring together most people working on the South Asian city, both in India and around the world. The design is to push the idea of the urban seriously in the South Asian context, within the framework of a cross-disciplinary conference, bringing people from different areas (history, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, urban design, architecture, film and media studies) and also including practitioners like architects and urban designers, as well as representatives of urban social movements. The conference is organised by Sarai (www.sarai.net), a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Sarai's research emphasis is on urban culture and media. The broad themes for the conference are as follows: Modernity and the South Asian city Urban History Social Theories of the South Asian City Colonial Urbanism in South Asia Architecture and Spatial transformations Critiques of Urbanism and Modernist Planning Urban Memory and Narratives of Violence Urban Ecologies Traditions of Urban Demography Urban Social Movements New forms of differentiation Literature and Urbanism Cinema and the City The future of Public Space Media-Cities and Globalisation Alternative Urban Visions Labouring in the City Visual Culture Urban Crisis and Governance City Panels: Bombay/Mumbai, Calcutta/ Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Lahore, Delhi, Karachi, Kathmandu, Colombo, Dhaka. These themes are by no means exhaustive and new may emerge after the abstracts have come in. Also the 'city' panels overlap with the main conference themes in line with the cross-disciplinary format. In the case of some cities there may be more than one panel. There are still a few slots available for presentations, and we are calling for proposals. The abstracts must not be more than 150 words and must reach us latest by October 1th. 2002. Be sure to also include your full mailing address and contact information. October 1: last date for abstracts. Please send abstracts to cityone at sarai.net. We will cover all travel and local hotel costs for abstracts that are accepted from South Asia. We would like to urge international scholars with institutional affiliation to secure travel costs from their institution. This will help us fund travel for participants in India, who lack such support. Sarai and CSDS will cover all local costs for international scholars whose abstracts are accepted: including room and board. Pre-Registration If you are not presenting a paper but wish to attend the conference, you can pre-register by sending an email to cityone at sarai.net. Registration costs are Rs 300 per person, and Rs 100 for students. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dak at sarai.net Thu Sep 12 13:41:09 2002 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 13:41:09 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter]Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 03 Message-ID: <02091213410900.00970@saumya.sarai.kit> Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 03 :  "Shaping Technologies" Sarai, (www.sarai.net) an interdisciplinary research and practice programme on the city and the media, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Waag Society (www.waag.org), a center for culture and technology based in Amsterdam, invites contributions to Sarai Reader 03 : Shaping Technologies. We also invite proposals to initiate and moderate discussions on the themes of the Sarai Reader 03 on the Reader List (http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list) with a view to the moderator(s) editing the transcripts of these discussions for publication in the Sarai Reader 03. The Sarai Reader is an annual publication produced jointly by Sarai/CSDS (Delhi) and the Waag Society (Amsterdam). Previous Readers have included : 'The Public Domain' : Sarai Reader 01, 2001(http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader1.html) and 'The Cities of Everyday Life' :  Sarai Reader 02, 2002, (http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader2.html ). The Sarai Reader series aims at bringing together original, thoughtful, critical, reflective, well researched and provocative texts and essays by theorists, practitioners and activists, grouped under a core theme that expresses the interests of Sarai in issues that relate media, information and society in the contemporary world. The Sarai Readers have a wide international readership. Editorial Collective for Sarai Reader 03 : Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Sarai) and Geert Lovink & Marleen Strikker (The Waag Society) ___________________________________________________________ The Concept - Shaping Technologies Today, technology is second nature to us. If the landscape of earlier times could be ideally represented by images of naturally occurring objects, the landscape of the contemporary is one that can only be imagined as being peopled by machines. The 'nature' of our times is technological - we are embodied, articulated, located and governed by the machines we make to extend our lives, bodies and faculties. We shape the technologies that surround us and the technologies that surround us shape the contour of our lives. This is what we mean by the term 'Shaping Technologies', which as a term with two senses suggests both a subjective, social appropriation of technological creativity, as well as the impact of technologies  on society and life in general. One may even say that the technological ubiquity has gone so far as to make it nearly impossible for us to reflect upon technology as a phenomena separate from the general conditions of global urban life. We are what we work, play and think with, and today we work, play and think with our machines. We are users, inventors, practitioners, artists, hackers and artisans who work with technologies; we are technology's consumers and users, we are hobbyists, enthusiasts and addicts just as we are critics, prophets, and analysts. We are masters, slaves, victims and rebels of technology. No one remains untouched by the 'machine'. Yet, we do not have an adequate language with which to understand and articulate the presence of technology in culture, society and in politics. We are accustomed to construct utopian and dystopic technological imaginaries, even as we neglect the task of a sober and considered reflection of the ethical and cognitive dilemmas that the presence of technologies in everyday life confront us with. And even as technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, even as it touches wider populations, even as an immersion in technoculture becomes the condition of the contemporary moment, it becomes simultaneously the discursive monopoly of experts and specialists, or of geeks and hobbyists, far removed from the concerns that animate scholars, public intellectuals, and the average curious person. Technology is the underpinning and the shadow of the public domain. Technology is ubiquitous, yet discursively invisible. Sarai Reader 03 seeks to contribute to the termination of this discursive vacuum by asking what other imaginary space there may be, besides the imperative to consume, the irrepressible desire to shop for the next gadget that comes our way, and the whine of the perennial victim of the machine, with which we can envision technology's presence in our lives ? In this third volume in the Sarai Reader series we will also look into alternative approaches towards technology, strategies to revitalize forgotten concepts (and their authors), re-readings of past debates and anticipations of future ones. We will weigh the utopian visions against the dystopic nightmares, perhaps to arrive at assessments that suggest sobriety and a 'cool' consideration of the cold touch of the machine, as well as of the heat of the fuel that animates it. If you feel these issues and questions are of interest to you. If your practice, thought, curiosities, research or creative activity has impelled you to think about some of these issues, we invite you to contribute texts to Sarai Reader 03 : Shaping Technologies. The Reader will have the following broad areas of interest: I. Technologies of Urbanism : Making the City II. The Everyday Experience of Technology III. Philosophies of Technology - Being the Machine IV. Technologies in History IV. Imagining Technologies - The Machine in Art, Literature and Cinema V. Technologies of the Body VI. Gender and Technology VII. Tactical Tech : Technologies of Power and Resistance VIII. D.I.Y (Do it Yourself) IX. Social Software X. Technology and the Environment XI. Networks and Transmissions There will also be three additional special sections: i. Selections from the Reader List on the violence in Gujarat in February/March 2002, ii. Design, Technology and the Urban Info Sphere : Case Studies from Amsterdam iii. The book (like Readers 1 and 2) will end with the Alt/Option section, which offers manifestos and alternative perspectives _______________________________________ GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSIONS Word Limit : 1500 - 4000 words 1.Submissions may be scholarly, journalistic, or literary - or a mix of these,  in the form of essays, papers, interviews, online discussions or diary entries. All submission, unless specifically solicited, must be in English only. 2.Submissions must be sent by email in rich text format (rtf) or star-office documents. Articles may be accompanied by black and white photographs or drawings submitted in the tif format. 3.We urge all writers, to follow the Chicago Manual of Style, (CMS) in terms of footnotes, annotations and references. For more details about the CMS, please see the Florida State University web page on CMS  style documentation   at :   http://www.fsu.edu/~library/guides/chicago.html 4.All contributions should be accompanied by a three/four line text introducing the author. 5.All submissions will be read by the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader 02 before the final selection is made. The editorial collective reserves the right not to publish any material sent to it for publication in the Sarai Reader on stylistic or editorial grounds. All contributors will be informed of the decisions of the editorial collective vis a vis their contribution after December 1, 2002. 6.Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the authors, but Sarai and the Waag Society reserve indefinitely the right to place any of the material accepted for publication on the public domain in print or electronic forms, and on the internet. 7.Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but authors are guaranteed a wide international readership. The Reader will be published in print, distributed in India and internationally, and will also be uploaded in a pdf form on to the Sarai website. All contributors whose work has been accepted for publication will receive two copies of the Reader. Last date for submission - December 1st 2002. (but please write as soon as possible to the editorial collective with a brief outline/abstract, not more than one page, of what you want to write about - this helps in designing the content of the reader) We expect to have the reader published by mid February 2003. ________________________________________ Please send in your outlines and abstracts 1. (for articles) to Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Co Ordinator, Sarai Reader 03 Editorial Collective (shuddha at sarai.net) 2. (for proposals to moderate online discussions on the Reader List) to Monica Narula, List Administrator,  the Reader List (monica at sarai.net) From dak at sarai.net Thu Sep 12 15:25:06 2002 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 15:25:06 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter]Student Stipends for Research on the City Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.0.20020912152339.00a69b00@mail.sarai.net> Student Stipends for Research on the City Sarai, (www.sarai.net) an interdisciplinary research and practice programme on the city and the media, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, invites applications for short term studentships to facilitate preparation of research projects on contemporary urban life in South Asia. Applicants are asked to submit a bio data and short statement of research interests in this field. Selected candidates will attend the City One Conference in 9-11th January, 2003, South Asia's first conference on the urban experience. They will also participate in an orientation workshop, `Researching the contemporary city'. The studentship provides candidates Rs.10,000/- for the preparation of a preliminary research proposal to be presented at a workshop in June 2003. Travel expenses, board and lodge, as well as a modest per diem, will be provided to the candidates for attending the workshops and the Conference. The candidates may be from any social science or humanities discipline, and could be enrolled in an MA, M.Phil or Ph.D programme. Sarai would like to encourage research in the following areas: Colonial Urbanism in South Asia Architecture and Spatial transformations Modernist Planning Alternative urban visions Migration and demographic transformations Urban Memory and Narratives of Violence Urban Ecologies Urban Social Movements New forms of social differentiation Literature and Urbanism Cinema and the City Visual culture The future of Public Space Media-Cities and Globalisation Labouring in the City Sarai would like to support a diverse range of projects, but would particularly like to encourage proposals which, while conversant with theoretical debates, have developed a strong sense of the research material, whether of archival/ethnographic/anthropological nature. We hope that, through this modest programme of support, we would encourage research in as yet underdeveloped fields. Last date for applications: 1 November 2002 Please submit a bio data and short statement in a cover marked `Sarai studentships' to Ranita Chatterjee Coordinator Programmes Sarai CSDS -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: