From dak at sarai.net Tue Aug 3 19:00:22 2004 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 19:00:22 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Call for Papers :: Contested Commons/Trespassing Publics Message-ID: <200408031900.22992.dak@sarai.net> *Call for Papers * *Contested Commons/Trespassing Publics :: * A Conference on Inequalities, Conflicts and Intellectual Property 6th - 8th January 2005 in New Delhi, India. The past few years have seen conflicts over the regulation of information; knowledge and cultural materials increase in intensity and scope. This conflict has widened to include new geographical spaces, particularly China, India, South Africa and Brazil. Moreover, a range of new problems, including the expansion of intellectual property protection to almost all spheres of our social life, has intensified the nature of the conflict. It is important to recognize that the nature of the conflict gets configured differently as we move from the United States and Europe to social landscapes marked by sharp inequalities in Asia, Latin America and Africa. In the light of these transformations, we would like to revisit earlier discussions on creativity, innovation, authorship, and the making of property. Is it possible to draw comparative registers between earlier histories of violence and dispossession that accompanied the making of property, and the current turbulence around intellectual property on world scale? In this conference, we would like to push comparative discussions between earlier and contemporary moments of dispossession and criminalisation, between the open source movement and discussions on traditional knowledge and biodiversity. We would also like to build a dialogue between different moments in media history: print, film, music and the new media, so as to prise open questions around culture, circulation and property. This conference aspires to interrogate the philosophical persuasions, cultural dynamics, political economy and legal grids that constitute the contemporary consensus. This cross-disciplinary conference will bring together people from different areas of study: law, history, sociology, literature, anthropology, development and cultural studies, film and media studies. The conference is organised by Sarai (www.sarai.net), a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and the Alternative Law Forum (ALF), Bangalore. Sarai's research programme focuses on urban culture and the media, while ALF is a collective of critical legal researchers and practitioners based in Bangalore. Sarai and ALF have been collaborating on research and practice in the domain of 'Knowledge and Culture Commons' over the last two years. Abstracts of three hundred words (300) are invited. The abstracts may address anyone of the above themes. We will support travel and board of all selected participants resident in the South. Last date for submission of abstracts is the 15th of September 2004 Please mail your abstracts to -------------- Conference Editors: >From Sarai/CSDS: Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Sundaram >From ALF: Lawrence Liang, Sudhir Krishnaswamy -------------------------- Sarai Center for Study of Developing Studies (CSDS) 29, Rajpur Road Delhi 110054, India Ph: 91 11 23960040 Fax: 91 11 23943450 Email: Alternative Law Forum (ALF) 122/4 Infantry Road, Bangalore 560 001, Karnataka Phone: 91 80 22865757 Email: --------------------------- From dak at sarai.net Wed Aug 4 19:05:35 2004 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 19:05:35 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] AUGUST 2004 Message-ID: <200408041905.35245.dak@sarai.net> CONTENTS: August 2004 Workshop @ Sarai 19th-20th Student Stipends Workshop for Research on the City Film @ Sarai: Machine/Becoming 6th The Animatrix, 9 Short Films set in the world of 'The Matrix' 13th 2001: A Space Odyssey, Directed by Stanley Kubrick Call for Papers: Urban Environments Workshop ______________________________________________________________________ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WORKSHOP @ SARAI August 19-20, 2004 Student Stipends Workshop for Research on the City Every year the Sarai programme supports young research students for short term studentships to facilitate research on urban life in South Asia. Covering a wide frame of geo-cultural regions from Kochin and Goa to Allahabad and Kolkata, these stipendiaries focus on a broad range of disciplines including literature, history, geography, urban planning and media studies. In the course of the stipendship, researchers were invited to Sarai to discuss their ideas and problems and interacted with scholars of urban studies. The workshop is intended for researchers to present work addressing a wide range of themes. This year's subjects include: urban governance, urban heritage and construction of the identity in Goa, smell and the city in colonial and post-colonial Kerala, homosexuality and literature, cinematic representation and the city, urban ecology, new regimes of urban work cultures and work spaces, the public sphere of the coffee house and urban memory. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FILM @ SARAI: Machine/Becoming Many people found the last two instalments of 'The Matrix' trilogy disappointing. The exciting 'hacker' ethic of the first film was lost here in a bizarre and confused/confusing welter of pop philosophy, rehashed archetypes, and relentless marketing. But 'The Animatrix' series of short films, directed by such masters of animation as Shinchiro Watanabe and Peter Chung, take the vision of the original film in completely new directions: in terms of visual style (from realistic 3-D graphics renders, to black and white sketches invoking film noir beautifully in animation) as well as originality of plot and story (which apart from two of the films, are independent of the story arcs of the trilogy). However, the underlying themes of the films are those of the trilogy - the very Nietzschean view of humanity transcending its limitations and being/becoming something else, along with an 'anxiety of incipience', an anxiety of machines becoming 'human' and superseding humanity. These anxieties are also seen in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. To quote Mark Leier, two parallel stories are “unfolding simultaneously throughout the bulk of '2001...'; one being man's evolution from primitive to enlightened and the other HAL's (Kubrick's futuristic computer's) ongoing metamorphosis, from cybersystem to organism." '2001...' is of course, a classic of cinema, with many famous sequences, including the “Dawn of Man” and the “Stargate Sequence” (and with its not-so-subtle reference to Nietzsche in the famous use of Richard Strauss' 'Also Sprach Zarathustra'), and deserves to be seen for its own sake. It would be interesting to see the dialogue between a film made in 1968, and films released in 2003. What are the shifts in modes of representation in the intervening thirty-five years, and how have the anxieties about technology shifted? In 'The Animatrix', ('Matriculated'), as in the last film of the trilogy, theres is a hint of the possibility of an almost mystical union of man and machine, a possibility that seems very far away in '2001...' : when HAL murders the astronauts. Friday, August 6, 2004, 4:30 pm The Animatrix (2003), 90 minutes 9 Short Films set in the world of 'The Matrix' Directed by Yoshiyaki Kawajiri, Shinichiro Watanabe, Mahiro Maeda, Takeshi Koike, Andy Jones, Peter Chung, Koji Morimoto A collection of nine short films created by the Wachowski brothers in collaboration with various anime and CG filmmakers. They range across the world of 'The Matrix', filling in background, providing incidental parallel stories. Included is a prequel to 'The Matrix Reloaded', a historical document of humanity's fall and sundry stories set in the world of 'The Matrix'. Friday, August 13, 2004, 4:30 pm 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 155 minutes Directed by Stanley Kubrick A four-million-year-old black monolith is discovered on the moon, and the government (while hiding the situation from the public) sends a team of scientists on a fact-finding mission. Eighteen months later, another team is sent to Jupiter in a ship controlled by the perfect HAL 9000 computer to further investigate the giant object, but on this trip something goes terribly wrong. Director and (with Arthur C. Clarke) co-screenwriter Stanley Kubrick has created a visual and aural spectacle that stands as one of the greatest achievements ever put on celluloid. The film begins with the “Dawn of Man" segment, about the evolution of apes, and then ventures into the future, taking a look at what the world might be like in the first year of the 21st century. Kubrick's film is a triumph of technological storytelling, with stunning sets and a brilliant, overwhelming soundtrack. Long dialogue-free scenes sparkle with indelible images backed by powerful orchestral music, culminating in an unforgettable, inscrutable tale of birth and rebirth, human evolution and artificial intelligence, the past and the future. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS: Urban Environments Workshop November 3 - 4, 2004 Sarai-CSDS, Delhi The Sarai programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi is organizing a workshop on Urban Environments on 3rd and 4th November, 2004. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together ideas and engagements regarding the issue of environment in the cities of South Asia. We hope to generate discussions regarding the conceptual tools through which to address urban environments and also concerns around specific issues such as water, waste, pollution etc. In the recent past, environment has emerged as a major issue in urban politics in the cities of South Asia that has elicited a fair bit of response in the media, and a more limited one within the academia. In this workshop we expect to sharpen these debates through a more historically situated engagement with the notion of 'urban environment'. In our reckoning, there are a wide variety of issues that are covered under this rubric - from slums, waste and nuisance to sanitation, parks, pollution etc. The analytical frames through which the various issues have been understood and acted upon - politically, socially, aesthetically etc. - have changed over time. Similarly, the institutional arrangements for addressing environmental issues in the urban context been radically transformed over the last century. In this workshop we hope to examine both the early environmental legacies - from the ideas of Patrick Geddes to the world-view of public health officials and planners - and the more contemporary environmental concerns that are addressed through law and science, to examine both the continuities and departures in the way cities have dealt with environmental issues in modern South Asia. Those interested in presenting a paper at the workshop are requested to send in an abstract by 30th August. We expect the final papers to be submitted by 15th October. Sarai will be able to meet all costs of scholars from India/ South Asia. For further inquiries you may contact Awadhendra Sharan (sharan at sarai.net) or Ritika Shrimali (ritika at sarai.net). -- The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040 (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net From dak at sarai.net Thu Aug 5 15:24:08 2004 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 15:24:08 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] AUGUST 2004 Message-ID: <200408051524.08868.dak@sarai.net> CONTENTS: August 2004 Workshop @ Sarai 19th-20th Student Stipends Workshop for Research on the City Film @ Sarai: Machine/Becoming 6th The Animatrix, 9 Short Films set in the world of 'The Matrix' 13th 2001: A Space Odyssey, Directed by Stanley Kubrick Call for Papers: Urban Environments Workshop ______________________________________________________________________ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WORKSHOP @ SARAI August 19-20, 2004 Student Stipends Workshop for Research on the City Every year the Sarai programme supports young research students for short term studentships to facilitate research on urban life in South Asia. Covering a wide frame of geo-cultural regions from Kochin and Goa to Allahabad and Kolkata, these stipendiaries focus on a broad range of disciplines including literature, history, geography, urban planning and media studies. In the course of the stipendship, researchers were invited to Sarai to discuss their ideas and problems and interacted with scholars of urban studies. The workshop is intended for researchers to present work addressing a wide range of themes. This year's subjects include: urban governance, urban heritage and construction of the identity in Goa, smell and the city in colonial and post-colonial Kerala, homosexuality and literature, cinematic representation and the city, urban ecology, new regimes of urban work cultures and work spaces, the public sphere of the coffee house and urban memory. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FILM @ SARAI: Machine/Becoming Curated by Anand Vivek Taneja Many people found the last two instalments of 'The Matrix' trilogy disappointing. The exciting 'hacker' ethic of the first film was lost here in a bizarre and confused/confusing welter of pop philosophy, rehashed archetypes, and relentless marketing. But 'The Animatrix' series of short films, directed by such masters of animation as Shinchiro Watanabe and Peter Chung, take the vision of the original film in completely new directions: in terms of visual style (from realistic 3-D graphics renders, to black and white sketches invoking film noir beautifully in animation) as well as originality of plot and story (which apart from two of the films, are independent of the story arcs of the trilogy). However, the underlying themes of the films are those of the trilogy - the very Nietzschean view of humanity transcending its limitations and being/becoming something else, along with an 'anxiety of incipience', an anxiety of machines becoming 'human' and superseding humanity. These anxieties are also seen in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. To quote Mark Leier, two parallel stories are "unfolding simultaneously throughout the bulk of '2001...'; one being man's evolution from primitive to enlightened and the other HAL's (Kubrick's futuristic computer's) ongoing metamorphosis, from cybersystem to organism." '2001...' is of course, a classic of cinema, with many famous sequences, including the "Dawn of Man" and the "Stargate Sequence" (and with its not-so-subtle reference to Nietzsche in the famous use of Richard Strauss' 'Also Sprach Zarathustra'), and deserves to be seen for its own sake. It would be interesting to see the dialogue between a film made in 1968, and films released in 2003. What are the shifts in modes of representation in the intervening thirty-five years, and how have the anxieties about technology shifted? In 'The Animatrix', ('Matriculated'), as in the last film of the trilogy, theres is a hint of the possibility of an almost mystical union of man and machine, a possibility that seems very far away in '2001...' : when HAL murders the astronauts. Friday, August 6, 2004, 4:30 pm The Animatrix (2003), 90 minutes 9 Short Films set in the world of 'The Matrix' Directed by Yoshiyaki Kawajiri, Shinichiro Watanabe, Mahiro Maeda, Takeshi Koike, Andy Jones, Peter Chung, Koji Morimoto A collection of nine short films created by the Wachowski brothers in collaboration with various anime and CG filmmakers. They range across the world of 'The Matrix', filling in background, providing incidental parallel stories. Included is a prequel to 'The Matrix Reloaded', a historical document of humanity's fall and sundry stories set in the world of 'The Matrix'. Friday, August 13, 2004, 4:30 pm 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 155 minutes Directed by Stanley Kubrick A four-million-year-old black monolith is discovered on the moon, and the government (while hiding the situation from the public) sends a team of scientists on a fact-finding mission. Eighteen months later, another team is sent to Jupiter in a ship controlled by the perfect HAL 9000 computer to further investigate the giant object, but on this trip something goes terribly wrong. Director and (with Arthur C. Clarke) co-screenwriter Stanley Kubrick has created a visual and aural spectacle that stands as one of the greatest achievements ever put on celluloid. The film begins with the "Dawn of Man" segment, about the evolution of apes, and then ventures into the future, taking a look at what the world might be like in the first year of the 21st century. Kubrick's film is a triumph of technological storytelling, with stunning sets and a brilliant, overwhelming soundtrack. Long dialogue-free scenes sparkle with indelible images backed by powerful orchestral music, culminating in an unforgettable, inscrutable tale of birth and rebirth, human evolution and artificial intelligence, the past and the future. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS: Urban Environments Workshop November 3 - 4, 2004 Sarai-CSDS, Delhi The Sarai programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi is organizing a workshop on Urban Environments on 3rd and 4th November, 2004. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together ideas and engagements regarding the issue of environment in the cities of South Asia. We hope to generate discussions regarding the conceptual tools through which to address urban environments and also concerns around specific issues such as water, waste, pollution etc. In the recent past, environment has emerged as a major issue in urban politics in the cities of South Asia that has elicited a fair bit of response in the media, and a more limited one within the academia. In this workshop we expect to sharpen these debates through a more historically situated engagement with the notion of 'urban environment'. In our reckoning, there are a wide variety of issues that are covered under this rubric - from slums, waste and nuisance to sanitation, parks, pollution etc. The analytical frames through which the various issues have been understood and acted upon - politically, socially, aesthetically etc. - have changed over time. Similarly, the institutional arrangements for addressing environmental issues in the urban context been radically transformed over the last century. In this workshop we hope to examine both the early environmental legacies - from the ideas of Patrick Geddes to the world-view of public health officials and planners - and the more contemporary environmental concerns that are addressed through law and science, to examine both the continuities and departures in the way cities have dealt with environmental issues in modern South Asia. Those interested in presenting a paper at the workshop are requested to send in an abstract by 30th August. We expect the final papers to be submitted by 15th October. Sarai will be able to meet all costs of scholars from India/ South Asia. For further inquiries you may contact Awadhendra Sharan (sharan at sarai.net) or Ritika Shrimali (ritika at sarai.net). -- The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040 (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net From dak at sarai.net Fri Aug 13 12:23:14 2004 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 12:23:14 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] Call for contributions to Sarai Reader 05 Message-ID: <200408131223.14793.dak@sarai.net> CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO SARAI READER O5 BARE ACTS: TRESPASSERS AND ENFORCERS IN PRECARIOUS TIMES The 'Bare Act' is an expression used to specify the content of law, bereft of any interpretative gloss. In a legal library in India and many parts of the English-speaking world, a Bare Act is a document that simply codifies a law without annotation or commentary. The 'Bare Act' is legality pared down to its textual essence. It expresses only what the law does, and what it can do. The enactment of law, however, is less a matter of reading the letter of the law, and more a matter of augmenting or eroding the textual foundation through the acts of interpretation, negotiation, disputation and witnessing. The law and practices within and outside stand in relation to a meta legal domain that can be said to embrace acts and actions in all their depth, intensity and substantive generality. This too is a stage set for the performance of 'bare acts', of what we might call 'naked deeds' - actions shorn of everything other than what is contained in a verb. The 'Bare Act' that encrypts the letter of the law, the wire frame structure that demands the fleshing out of interpretation, and the 'bare act' that expresses and contains the stripped down kernel of an act, of something that is done, are both expressions that face each other in a relationship of tense reflection and intimate alterity. Bare Acts generate bare acts, and vice versa. "Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts: Trespassers and Enforcers in Precarious Times" proposes to be a considered examination of this troubled mirror image. We are interested in looking not only at what happens in law courts but also at customs, conventions, formal and quasi formal 'ways of doing things' that are pertinent to communities howsoever they may be formed. Thus the conventions and codes evolved by the practitioners of a juridically 'illicit' trade or calling or way of life, such as that of software pirates, or 'illegal' migrants, or squatters on government land, fall within the ambit of our concerns. We want to speak of the relationships of conflict, co existence and accommodations between different kinds of codes that make claims to our ideas of what is right, or just, or functional, or even merely appropriate. To see 'actions' arrayed across a spectrum in this manner is also to see a range of ways in which laws, codes and a variety of formal and informal arbitration mechanisms act on us. Sometimes this may take the form of executive force and fiat, but crucially it may also rely on the powers of persuasion that characterize a host of quasi formal interactions between state and non-state actors, and between non-state actors and individuals. Typically, this for instance is the way in which non-legal entities like informally constituted councils, political formations outside the state, customary bodies and traditional councils act to enforce their will or influence those within (and occasionally outside) their ambit. The landscape of actions and deeds covers a far more subtle, slippery, nuanced and ambiguous ground (than the codes that seek to index, define or govern them). Actions have gradients, they ascend and descend on to each other much as peaks emerge from and plunge into troughs in a three dimensional graph. The political, ethical and semantic facets of acts shade off, and slope into each other, now revealing, now concealing hitherto unknown aspects of themselves and their consequences, often in unexpected ways. Laws are attempts to understand, interpret and govern action, but their enunciative capacity is bundled up with executive authority; they are words that decree what must be done. But just as the way in which a map is drawn can have consequences on the ecology of a terrain, the phrases spoken as law too can transform and erode as well as irrigate the ground of action. Laws are a creature of habit, of pattern, rhythm and repetition. The exceptional singularity of an action, which is precisely what law seeks to tame to the rhythm of the predictable, leaves us with a strange situation where the "bareness of an act" is precisely what is sought to be clothed by a 'bare act'. This gives rise to many tensions and aporias, which we invite contributors to reflect upon and report, from their locations in the real world, whatever be their locus standi. You may be a human rights lawyer, or an intellectual property attorney, a philosopher, an artist, an activist, a combatant or peace maker in a conflict situation, a person who lives and works with ideas and words, a person who saves lives or takes them, a person who has custody of others, or who may be in the custody of an institution; in addition, you may be someone who either is, or identifies with, or sympathizes with, a hacker, a pirate, a re-distributor of intellectual assets, an illegal emigrant, a non-heterosexual person, a compulsive traveller, a squatter, a sex worker, a terrorist of the imagination, you may be free or in confinement, you may be healthy or unwell - whosoever you may be and whatever you are, you have to act, and deal with the actions of others, and all that you do, or do not do, is framed by a structure of bare acts of the law. Yet, you shape the world with the things you do to be yourself, to act in concert with others, to defend yourself and to pursue what you see as liberty and happiness, or simply, to survive. We would also like to invite investigations into the production of 'legal subjects' through judgements (communiqués to the citizen/denizen) and petitions (appeals from the citizen/denizen) as well as through mechanisms like recording and registration mechanisms such as census records, land records, municipal records, forestry regulations, registers of citizens and aliens and other instruments that define and enumerate the person addressed by the legal-formal apparatuses that govern day to day life. What is the language, the rhetoric, the tone of these acts of address? How are they scripted, rehearsed and staged? All these are things for us to explore when we look at the law, whether in the courtroom, in a village council meeting, or in the performance of a 'courtroom drama' in a film. Crucially, here we want to explore the figures of authorised and unauthorised interlocutors, expert and wayward witnesses and the myriad characters that constitute the theatre of the courtroom. This Reader invites you to reflect on actions, yours as well as those of others, to act with your words, thoughts and images to contribute to our understanding of the world, as we know it today. We are committed to an elaboration of positions that often find themselves identified with the interloper, trespasser and the proscribed, not because we have any special affinity for the illicit, but because we feel that the growing constriction of the domain of the do-able by the letter of the law (which we all face in societies where the state and para state institutions lay increasing claims to our fealty) leads to a situation where those committed to a modicum of social liberty, to expanding the territory of what may be creatively imagined and acted upon, have to invest in knowing and understanding an ethic of trespasses. Interdictions need interrogation, and this Reader is a call for such interrogations. A 'bare act', as we said at the outset, can also be taken to mean action divested of everything other than its essence as a deed. Encountering the naked deed, action in and of itself, on its own terms, means facing up to difficult and occasionally challenging ethical questions. What constitutes violence? What is generosity, or hospitality? Why does altruism have to be hedged in by qualifications and constraints? It also means asking - what it is to become someone through action? What is it to act, or play a part, in the theatre of social life? What is the border that separates action from expression? What connects the act to gesture and to performance, as much as it does to deed? Moreover, what accounts can we give to the 'act' of witnessing, or bearing witness to a course of action, or to an event? Law or codes of action of any kind seem untenable without the notion of the witness. The presence of the witness is crucial to any notion of credence, the foundations on which arguments, petitions and judgements have to base their thrust and parry. We would like this collection to provoke reflections on the nature of the evidentiary and narrative protocols that frame acts of 'speaking' or 'speaking out' in the face of, or in the aftermath of, or in the memorialization of, acts and events that leave a mark on our times so as to instigate a more complex unravelling of the relationship between persons, actions, narratives and codes of behaviour, To carry this argument further, we want to point out that in languages such as Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Urdu, the roots for words as disparate sounding as 'martyr' and 'witness' (shaheed/martyr and shahid/witness) devolve to a common source. This suggests to us a febrile tension between the reality of a precipitate, even violent action, its consequence (the shaheed) and a recording presence (the shahid). In other words, given the fact that acts do speak for themselves (and sometimes make the claim to speak for others), we consider it necessary to take stock and reflect on what might be considered the heritage of the 'propaganda of the deed' - a doctrine that underpins violent terrorism, as well as non-violent civil disobedience and militant passive resistance, to see how such modes of acting stretch and challenge consensual notions of the relationships between means and ends. As we have said in calls for contributions to previous readers, on themes and subjects quite different from the ones that we have sketched here, these are open questions with no satisfactory and coherent answers. But Sarai Reader 05, like its predecessors, would like to take them on, so as to map new territories of thought about the things we all do and the things that are done to us. Today, there are different images of naked legality that we have grown accustomed to. We know that the law is often the last resort that the poor and the marginalized can turn to in some societies to appeal for redress and comfort from having to face obvious and naked oppression. Thus the slum dweller facing demolition sees in a high court stay order, a breathing space in which to try and muster some means of continued survival in the city as a householder. A person on death row can have little hope but to argue for an acquittal or a pardon. There are also occasions when international criminal courts may be seen to be effective instruments of redress for victims of genocide and war crimes. These are but the bare facts of a case for the law, and for a conscientious practice of the legal calling as a continuing good in human societies. However, we have also seen pictures of naked human beings in judicial custody in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This too is naked legality. We have seen migrants waiting to be deported. We have seen the banal playing out of the script of domination and violence, on streets, in educational institutions, in homes. We have seen attempts at the foreclosure of cultural and intellectual commons. We have seen attempts at surveillance and control, and we have witnessed, resistances to each of these - quiet subversions, cunning negotiations and outright rejections as well as attempts to scale the walls erected by the threat of interdictions, sanctions and prohibitions. Sarai Reader 05 seeks to register these matters in their puzzling ambivalence, with intelligence, acuity and close attention to the pulse of our times. A Preliminary List of Themes (these are not chapter or section headings, but point to areas of interest) could include: … The Pure Act, the Impure Gesture and Bare Presences: A Sceptical Guide to Acting in Today's World … Barely Human/Naked Power: Critiques of Contemporary Injustices … Punishments in Search of Crimes: Histories and Practices of Illegality … Authorised and Unauthorised Interlocutors … The Human Right to Copy and Paste: Culture, Law, Conflict and Intellectual Property … The Letter of the Law: Glossing Gender, Class, Race and Caste in the Courtroom … In Camera: Courts, Prison and the Justice System in Cinema … Rough Justice and Gentle Persuasion: Non-legal Forms of Arbitration … To Be Done and To Be Seen to be Done: Legal Action and its Media Representations … Despatches and Communiqués: Reflecting on Media Representations of Direct Action … Private Matters in the Public Domain: The Law and Sexuality … The Encounter: Terror In and Out of Uniform … Caught in an Emergency: The Ethical Dilemmas of Humanitarian Intervention in War Zones and Conflict Situations … The War Against Error: The Normalization of Surveillance and Identification … Bearing Witness … Citizens, Denizens, Aliens, Others: Taxonomies for Our Times … Altitude Sickness: The Activist on Higher Moral Ground … What is (not) to be Done: Understanding the Limitations of Action and Activism … The Right to be Wrong: In Praise of Political, Ethical and Legal Uncertainties … What it Takes to Be... Accounts of Becoming and Choosing to Remain Marginal … At A Loss for Words: Talking about Things Perhaps Best Left Unsaid … Utterance as Action: How Speech Acts Change the World Sometimes … The Word as Violence: Interpretative Acts in the Field of Life and Death … Politics beyond the Law "Sarai Reader 05: The Bare Act" seeks to engage with this situation by inviting a series of reflections. We are looking for incisive analysis, as well as passionate writing, for scholarly and theoretical rigour as well as for critical and imaginative depth. We invite essays, reportage, diaries and memoirs, entries from weblogs, edited compilations of online discussions, photo essays, image-text collages and interpretations of found visual material. Finally, we would like to see texts that draw attention to the curious and unfolding relationships between acts, actions (especially what is called 'direct action'), activism and the domain of media practice: namely between acts and representations, and on representations as acts. What are the trade offs involved in transmission of an 'action', how does the possibility of transmission help script an action before it is staged - these are urgent questions, especially at a time when the relationship between deed and representation tends to blur in the form of what we can call a 'media event'. This is not to evaluate such instances negatively or positively, only to register the fact that they occur, and to call for an attempt at an informed understanding of their contents and ramifications. We invite activists, media activists and media practitioners to revisit and reflect on the instances of the encounters between deeds and mediatization in their own practices, and on the relationship between media and action in a general sense. In doing so, we are revisiting and continuing a discussion on some of the questions that have already been raised in "Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media". The Sarai Reader 05, like the previous Sarai Readers, will be international in scope and content, while retaining a special emphasis on reflection about and from areas that normally lie outside the domain of mainstream discourses. We are particularly interested in contributions from South Asia, South and Central America, East Europe, the Arabic Speaking Countries, Central and West Africa, South Africa, South East Asia, China, Tibet and Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Australia. The Editorial Collective *Guidelines for Submissions* Word Limit: 1000 - 6000 words 1. All submission, unless specifically solicited, must be in English only. 2. Submissions must be sent by email in as text, or as rtf, or as word document or star office/open office attachments. Articles may be accompanied by black and white photographs/other visual material 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 and an updated list of Frequently Asked Questions, see -http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html For a Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style, especially relevant for citation style, see - http://www.library.wwu.edu/ref/Refhome/chicago.html 4. All contributions should be accompanied by a three/four line text introducing the author, with email address and a relevant url. 5. All submissions will be read by the editorial collective before the final selection is made. The editorial collective reserves the right not to publish any material sent to it for publication on stylistic or editorial grounds. 6. Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the authors, but Sarai reserves 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. If you are interested in contributing, write to monica at sarai.net or shuddha at sarai.net with a brief note saying what you want to write about, or an outline. You can take time to write up a more substantial outline, but please make sure that they are in by September 30, 2004. Outlines can be up to 500 words. The Editorial collective will write back to all those who have submitted the outlines in early October 2004, informing them whether their proposal for a contribution has been accepted. Deadlines for the Submission of Articles is - November 15 The Editorial Collective of Sarai Reader 05 consists of the following - Awadhendra Sharan, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasudevan and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Sarai-CSDS, Delhi), Lawrence Liang (Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore) and Geert Lovink (Indpendent Media Theorist and Critic, Amsterdam) -- Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective] Sarai-CSDS 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.raqsmediacollective.net www.sarai.net _______________