Heptanesian Archives

Due to my continuing back problems, I was unable to attend WordCampEd 2008 (though I am the brown guy with his head hunched down the extreme right of the header image on their website). I sure wish I could have been there, as THATCamp was a blast and I spent most of last year working for as an evangelist with the Center for History and New Media for Zotero. These guys are awesome, check out their podcast Digital Campus for a taste of their conversations.

If I had made it down for the camp, focussed on using WordPress for educational and academic communities,  I had hoped to talk about the experience of building and designing the SUNY Stony Brook History Department website. This was my first attempt at a multi-user blog system for an academic department, and the template was based on work by Jeremy Boggs for the GMU Art History Department. The site went live in September, and has been developing iteratively for the past one year through the inputs of historians Chris Sellers, Eric Lewis Beverley, Larry Frohman, and Nancy Tomes.

With help from Jeremy to cut my teeth on css, I built on his core design to incorporate sidebar widgets and extensively furnished author profile pages and dashboard where faculty can upload their own photos, bibliographies, and run their own mini-blogs inside one Wordpress site, posting to their own home pages, front page department news, and thematic blogs for different research areas within the department. As faculty participation in the site grows, these categories and areas will be easily extended to represent the strengths of the departments’ historians in such areas as Latin America and fields such as gender and the environment.

For this site, the open source ecology came to my aid in designing a new feature for faculty profile pages, where I extensively relied on Marco Cimmino’s excellent plugin Cimy Extended User Fields to manage custom fields and tags on the member pages for the historians at Stony Brook. These pages are easily the most important for any faculty, and I wanted them each to have a blog and feed which could be used for communicating their work, sharing ideas, and as a classroom tool. I paid for the developer to create a new feature for rich text fields for their bibliographies — this feature will hopefully appear in the next version of the plugin.

WIth faculty, staff, and graduate students, well over four hundred registered members in the Stony Brook History Department, using Wordpress presented significant challenges due to its individual blogger orientation. Some significant limitations remain in Wordpress’s user management and security functions, which plugins such as Role Manager help to address, such as custom user groups and controlling permissions — but not resetting passwords — for each group. Some other plugins at work on the site are Sidebar Login and COinS Metadata Exposer which embeds citations for each post as microformats.

Zotero can grab these embedded citations, and with the rich textarea fields on their profiles, faculty can simply drag and drop reading lists, a class syllabus, or their own publications into their home page or blog posts and have them slurped back into Zotero for later reference. This is something which I have done with another site called Bombayology in Wordpress, where every post is for a meeting of our workshop on urban history and culture in India. The citations to assigned texts are embedded with OpenURL COiNS — which Zotero does in a simple drag and drop in your browser — and also linked to password-protected PDFs of the fully digitized text of the readings for that meeting.

If only I could have been at this special WordCamp, I would have also liked to talk about the other Wordpress sites which I have developed and maintained over the past several years, including the personal archive and teaching blog of social anthropologist Keith Hart, the Memory Bank; the site of urban research and design group CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust); the Writing Cities network between MIT, Harvard and LSE; the Urban South Asia workshop.

I have no doubt that the expert minds and hands of Dave Lester and Jeremy Boggs have created another excellent peer-learning experience at WordCampEd. I hope I’ll be there next year.

The people at SARAI to have been an inspiration and example in India for many years, and the discourse which they have sponsored in the varied fields of free software, media culture, film studies and urban research have been deeply influential on my thinking for nearly six years now. Indeed my visits to Delhi and for their gatherings on the Public Domain, the Tactical Media Lab, CITY One, and Emerging Urbanism over the years — and their work with the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore — have exposed me to new research networks and communities of practice. It was with great anticipation that we at CRIT co-organised our first public workshop with SARAI on 27-29 December in Mumbai, called Metrolog(ue): A Discussion on Emerging Urbanism.

The workshop was beautifully and almost single-handedly organised by Prasad Shetty and signified for CRIT our first public engagement on our own platform. You can read the problem statement of the workshop here, which was co-written by several of us (and in which it later emerged that I slyly inserted several normative, rather than purely descriptive, terms). The web-site contains further write-ups about each of the panels and thematic foci of the workshop: Emerging Morphologies, the Politics of Occupancy, New Civil Society Organisations, Urban Peripheries, New Entrepreneurship, and Publishing Archiving and Mapping. The workshop grows out of work done by members of CRIT under the SARAI Independent Fellowships, especially Rupali Gupte’s Tactical City and Prasad’s Stories of Entrepreneurship.

As the Anarchytect has elegantly stated in one of his daily reports on the conference, there was little dialogue between the innocently empirical and technical presentations on new urban environments, and the all-knowing discourse analysis which is preoccupied with the city as a field of representations. There was a perverse juxtaposition of an enthusiastic sense of improvement and development, with a pessimistic post-modernism which is sceptical of all such impulses. The arrogance of this posture is almost impossible to convey, but it was felt by many of the independent researchers and activists from Mumbai. As a social scientist, I was disappointed in my fellow academics in the room, who gave away little, and kept themselves safe and dry on the high-ground of cultual theory. Have a look at Anarchytect’s reports on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and his other scrawlings.

In the academic world in which I work, proximity to the rich and powerful is at best a matter of expediency, and at worst elicits the charge of complicity. What I appreciate about architects and designers is the irreftutably practical nature of their world, in which structures of power and the market shape the context of practice. If we social scientists are in the world but pretend to be above it, designers are both of the world and in it.

This past week I was in Berlin for the Urban Age conference, the last in a series of high-powered summits of city mayors, urban planners, architects and designers, and sociologists and geographers concerned with the fate of cities — London, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Berlin. This was part of my class at MIT on Social Theory and the City, taught by Richard Sennett, who brought our entire class to Berlin for the conference. Amongst the many people I met this weekend, I had the good fortune to interact with the urban geographer Edward Soja, whose work I have followed for years — and who said to me over a drink later that he was there as much for the intellectual exchange as for the political networking! Here is Ed Soja on the screen asking a question of the mayor of Bogota in the panel on mobility and transport. It was great to meet and listen to people whose work I have read and taught for several years. Presentations by my teacher Richard Sennett on open and brittle cities, Deyan Sudjic on listening to the city, Saskia Sassen on cities at the intersection are online.

The conference was as much about networks as ideas, and it was an interesting chance to observe academics who felt they were close to power, as well as politicians who felt they were close to ideas. The architects and planners, including us students, were all somewhere in-between. Our group will re-convene in MIT next week to take stock of the summitry. Rumours are thick that the conference network will move to Brazil and India next year, and I look forward to helping with Urban Age if it happens in Mumbai, as some have suggested.

For the second time in two weeks, I’m back in Hyde Park, at the University of Chicago. While I’m officially attending the Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities and Computer Science on Sunday and Monday, on Saturday I sat in on the 100 Years of the All-India Muslim League Colloquium organised by Manan and Rajeev. It was a fascinating attempt to account for the fractured legacy of the Muslim League in colonial South Asia, and in postcolonial India and Pakistan. Better known as the party led by Quaid-e-Azam M.A. Jinnah which established the state of Pakistan in 1947, the League was founded a century ago in Dhaka, in the wake of the agitations surrounding the abortive Parition of Bengal in 1905-1906. Besides educating me about the history of the League, this was also an occassion to listen to several distinguished social and and cultural historians including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Muzaffar Alam.

I arrived in Chicago last night to spend a day at the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, and await the arrival of other friends and colleagues in the windy city on their way to the Madison South Asia Conference this weekend. I am appearing on a panel on Digital Humanities in South Asia in which I’ll be making a small presentation on the Crisis of the Database along with people from Chapati Mystery and the Land of Lime. The panel is Sunday 22 October from 10.30 a.m. to 12.15 p.m. — which might be considered the worst possible slot had there not also been another slot even earlier in the morning on Sunday.

Historian Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, whom I had known closely for the past seven years in London and Bombay, died of a sudden heart attack while at a conference on Four Cities in Modernity at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire on 23 April 2006. As a friend and mentor, his death was a great loss to me both personally and intellectually. I had looked forward to Raj’s guidance and advice as I embarked on my doctorate, which he had been urging me to pursue for many years. His last published work was “From Neighbourhood to Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Left in Bombay’s Girangaon in the Twentieth Century”, which appeared as the introductory essay in Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar’s One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon: An Oral History, a project with which I was involved as editor and reader when the stories were being collected in 1999-2000.

Historians Douglas Haynes and Subho Basu penned “Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (1953-2006): An Intellectual Biography” for the Economic & Political Weekly in Bombay in June 2006, which we republished on Wikipedia. Along with Raj’s friends and students, we also proposed a roundtable in for the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Boston from 22-25 March 2007, which has just been accepted for the conference. This roundtable, in memory of Raj, will be chaired by Frank Conlon and includes myself, Nikhil Rao, Subho Basu, Douglas Haynes, Lisa Trivedi and Samita Sen. Here is our abstract for Labour Space and Politics: Rajnarayan Chandavarkar and the History of Modern South Asia:

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar was one of the foremost scholars of urban and working class history writing on South Asia. His sudden death in April 2006 has been an inestimable loss to the academic community. The empirical depth of Chandavarkar’s scholarship stood out amongst his contemporaries. The impact of his work on the field remains to be assessed.

This roundtable will focus on several areas where Chandavarkar’s contributions remain significant and offer new directions for future scholarship. His challenge to universalising narratives of world capitalism opened up new ways of understanding the social spaces, political choices and organising strategies of urban working classes. Larger formations such as class and nationalist politics articulated with everyday relations amongst women, migrants and the urban poor. The earlier importance given to the workplace as the primary site of class mobilisation gave way to a wider understanding of how the spaces of the neighbourhood and countryside enabled workers to engage in urban politics. His attention to social organisation emphasised the shifting nature of class and community identities in the context of mass action, challenging functionalist conceptions of social structure and political agency.

This roundtable will situate Chandavarkar’s wide-ranging contributions to the historiography of modern South Asia, addressing critiques of his work as well as areas where his interpretations have gained acceptance. This roundtable also points to new directions which his work and mentorship have helped shape amongst his peers and colleagues. The participants include senior historians, younger scholars, and Chandavarkar’s former students from the U.S., U.K. and India.

My friend Manan Ahmed at the University of Chicago is co-organising a panel on digital archiving in South Asia at the Annual Conference on South Asia hosted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I haven’t been to the conference in three years, and Manan was kind enough to ask me to present something about my work with digital archiving and mapping, though I only just gave him my abstract for my presentation on The Crisis of the Database: Independent Research and Pedagogy in India Before and After the Digital Revolution:

This presentation will examine the recent history of networked research and pedagogic practice by voluntary initiatives, academic organisations and freelance researchers in India, and consider their consequences for organised scholarship in the humanities and social sciences of South Asia.

Over the past five years, the research landscape in India presents a strange paradox. At the moment when new technologies have enabled the emergence of vibrant new spaces such as mailing lists, blogs and wikis, and a remarkable vitality is shown by the formation of new collectives of researchers, media practitioners, and activists, higher education and university research has been sufffered institutional crisis and precipitous decline in India. While previously isolated communities of independent researchers have become increasingly connected, and new technologies promise to lower the barriers to online pedagogy and collaborative research, the response of traditional academic institutions to these changes have been primarily defensive. As higher education is privatised and vocationalised, organised research in the social science and humanities has become marginalised within India, or has shifted to foreign universities where, it is now widely assumed, serious students must go to receive training in formal research practice. This is a sad commentary on the history of the vast institutional complex in the social sciences built up by the postcolonial state, in which most of today’s senior scholars of South Asia received their training and pursued their careers as historians, sociologists and economists. These developments raise important questions about the future organisation and practice of pedagogy and research both within India, as well as in academic communities concerned with the study of South Asia in America and Europe.

While the crisis of these institutions posed by new forms of mapping, publishing and archiving online is apparent, we are still articulating the institutional forms appropriate to the new research practices and communities forming today. These forms include the emerging structures of collaboration in the era of large distributed databases such as geographic information systems (GIS), archives and repositories of digital texts, images and media; the connection between navigation and management of archives with new techniques of online pedagogy and self-education; and the role of non-academic research groups and institutions in sharing and exchanging data. This presentation will review the contemporary history of non-governmental organisations concerned with documenting, collecting, and training independent researchers in India on human rights, labour, gender, and the environment, and the legacy of the voluntary sector in organising and networking a vast archives of materials through small documentation centres whose history precedes the emergence of today’s networked technologies. This vibrant sphere of activist archiving and publishing, developed over the past thirty years outside of formal academic structures, is our most significant resource for thinking through the pedagogic consequences of digital technologies in the humanities and social sciences of South Asia.

Presented at the Roundtable on ‘Asian Cities and Cultural Change’ at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, July 2005

The past twenty years have witnessed the decisive end of attempts at state-centred urban planning in Mumbai. The post-Independence Development Plan, which has guided land, housing, and economic growth since the sixties, has been displaced in favour of piecemeal investments in infrastructure and transport, and housing and slum rehabilitation by the state, with increased participation from private builders and agencies. With the retreat of the state from its ambitious agendas of rational land-use, equitable distribution of services and resources, and protection of the environment, the instruments of abstract spatial planning used by the state have withered and mutated into new urban forms marked by severe exclusions and enclosures. Classical urban planning practice was historically premised on the segregation of the functions of modern urban life into residential, commercial/industrial, and public spheres, and their centralised location governed by state directives. However, Asian cities have constantly demonstrate the falsity of this separation of functions — with their vast districts of dense, mixed-use settlements governed by porous legalities, popular politics, and tactical negotiations over space and survival. This vast and complex economy has been inadequately imagined as the Third World ’slum’ or theorised as the ‘informal economy’. With the retreat of the state, centralised planning practice and its technocratic spatial imagination has been appropriated into a new spatial regime in which a predatory class of private builders dominates the production of formal housing for a minority of the rich, amidst rising inequality in access to housing and basic services for the majority of the urban poor in Mumbai [1].

Modern, western approaches to architecture, urban design and planning still treat urban housing as a place of residence, domesticity, and leisure — as a privileged site of social relations, and a prized object of consumption. However, a greater understanding of the cultural history of Asian cities must situate urban housing as a key unit of production in the urban economy, the material grid and medium through which everyday politics and culture are experienced. In mega-cities like Mumbai, the dissolution of large manufacturing industries in the eighties, and growth of new elite-oriented service economies in the nineties, has elevated the construction industry and land speculation into the primary circuits of cash and capital accumulation in the city [2]. While a functional and economic separation of home and workplace is a central tenet of modern urban spatial practice, in Asian cities like Mumbai this false spatial division poses severe obstacles to situating the production of housing as part of the larger ‘informal’ economy of small scale manufacturing, casual labour, and flexible employment which defines the urban landscape for the majority of the urban poor. Such a classical understanding of the role of the housing economy also lends support to the predatory urbanism and its regime of speculative accumulation, legal exclusion, and the violence of mass demolitions of the homes and workshops of the urban poor. The valorisation of the middle-class home and over-consumption in the urban media has its parallel in the marginalisation of the majority of the urban poor from land and housing — some 60% of the urban population of around 14 million citizens. Secure housing is now the most desired object of consumption by all classes, from land-less squatters and working slum-dwellers to established tenants and the middle classes. The new social and spatial relations of global Mumbai have given rise to various movements for housing and tenancy rights, and are now becoming the main arena for public politics.

Our presentation will focus on two practical interventions by the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) in these new urban landscapes in Mumbai, on understanding urban housing as social practice in the contemporary city. The first interventions include an online platform, called the Mumbai Free Map [3], in which a digital base map of Greater Mumbai is being made available in an accessible and interactive web-based interface. Through this platform — built completely on open source software, copyleft city maps, and public geo-data — communities can read and write free information on their neighbourhoods, buildings, public spaces and environment and assess the existing opportunities for self-development. This information, while ostensibly ‘public’, has previously only available to a closed circuit of builders, municipal officials, and their agents, and our hope is to create a new medium for communities to realise their spatial rights in Mumbai. The second intervention by CRIT which we shall discuss is a programme for Community Housing Support [4] providing financial models, policy advice, and architectural, design and information services to urban poor communities seeking to redevelop their housing through an open and decentralised design and financial model, with communities replacing builders as the agents of self-development. In this programme, CRIT is working with local housing associations in the Mumbai Tenants Federation and Slum Rehabilitation Society. Through an open design and production process, communities are actively involved in the design and construcion of integrated home and work units, spatial types which allow for inclusion and flexibility. The model of developing a community corpus to finance the housing project also allows use of the often lucrative profits from commercial land values to be reinvested in the maintenance of the housing by the community as a secure asset.

The presentation will focus on the new geographies of community resistance to the predatory forces of the new metropolitan environment, through our work with local housing rights movements and associations of the urban poor [5]. While the Asian city is famous for its rich local geographies and exotic cultural mixes, we need more detailed studies and analyses of the cultural history of housing in Asian cities — both as a material technology and as a social practice. The tactics and negotiations of urban poor communities in the context of Mumbai’s contemporary housing crisis indicate a new form of urban politics. The future directions will be articulated by a historical understanding of the production of urban housing as material culture in the Asia Pacific.

References

[1] “The City as Extracurricular Space” by Prasad Shetty, Anirudh Paul and Shekhar Krishnan at http://www.crit.org.in/papers/iacs forthcoming in the Journal of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, September 2005.
[2] Post-Industrial Landscapes Projects on Mill Lands at http://www.crit.org.in/projects/girni and Dock Lands at http://www.crit.org.in/projects/docklands
[3] Mumbai Free Map Community GIS (Geographic Information System) at http://www.crit.org.in/projects/gis
[4] Community Housing Experiment at Betwala Chawl at http://www.crit.org.in/projects/betwala
[5] Geographies of Resistance, presentation by Anirudh Paul at Workshop on Emerging Urbanism, SARAI-School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, http://www.crit.org.in/papers/saraispa

Lecture at the Future Academy Symposium at the Edinburgh College Art School of Architecture, March 2005, later published in Geetha Narayanan, ed., Tana Bana: Srishti School of Art Design & Technology Bangalore at Ars Electronica 2005 in Linz, Austria, August 2005<

Two distinct but inter-related phenomena have been dramatically reshaping the environments of academic institutions in India over the past five years. The first phenomenon is the widespread dissemination of networked media and information technologies, and the challenge this poses to large centralised structures, such as academic institutions and state bureaucracies. The second phenomenon is the decline of the traditional arts, humanities, and social sciences in the social prestige and market value they once commanded, and the erosion of the principle of liberal education and citizenship they represented. Taken together, these two technological and cultural shifts necessarily disrupt the institutional moorings of arts education, creating new spaces both inside and outside the academy for new pedagogic practices, which the academies of the future must seize on.

With regard to the first phenonemonon, virtual and networked forms of self-education, enabled by new media and information technologies, will soon have the potential to supersede the classroom and campus as an environment for learner-driven pedagogy, beyond the confining institutional frameworks evolved by the modern state (colonial and national) in its drive to standardise and certify graduates in the disciplines. Today, new technologies are lowering the barriers of access to the means of producing new and imaginative forms of creative reflection and civic engagement. What is left is to articulate a new pedagogy — and institutional forms appropriate to this practice — which gives young people the space, discipline and the equipment to create these new worlds and act on them, not just as good students or workers, but as confident citizens. Most teachers and college administrators are unprepared for these social and technical shifts for a variety of reasons — social and generational gaps in computer literacy; the technophobia sanctioned by academic culture; and the general crisis posed to academic hierachies and recruitments by open source models of intellectual property, publishing and archiving.

With regard to the second phenomenon, at least in India, historic biases in higher education towards technical education — and a decade of retrenchments and vocationalisation in arts colleges — have effectively destroyed what was left of the old arts-humanities-social sciences disciplines at the undergraduate level. The response of mainstream colleges to these changes in India has been primarily defensive, shoring up their role against a weakening state and an aggressive market — with the introduction of new vocationalised courses and degree programmes. The decline of the traditional arts and humanities courses, and their replacement by career-centric education, while a complex phenomenon, also presents new opportunities for pedagogic experiments, both inside and outside the curriculum and classroom. However, our imagination of academic institutions is still dominated by the sedentary imagery of the residential campuses and territorial enclaves of the elite universities, gated against the ‘real world’ outside.

Institutions have never been static forms or stable structures, but are constantly changing processes, better understood as nodal points in flows of people, ideas and resources which are always in motion. The residential campus, gated against or located outside the city, can no longer enforce its separation from the outside world, if it ever could. Today’s academy can neither be an ivory tower nor an exam factory, but must engage with its outside, the public spaces and arenas for civic action with which many artistic and cultural initiatives are now concerned. Similarly, the increasing mobility of students, faculty, and administrators across borders — whether driven by cultural curiosity or commercial necessity — is a fact in our era of globalisation. The question is not whether to be sedentary or not, but how we can evolve new pedagogic practices which creatively harness this increased mobility, making movement itself into a vital principle of learning.

It is a well-known cliché that today, all of us deal with information in much greater abundance and intensity than ever before. The Internet, the sign of this new economy, is a huge repository of information, with signs, images and stories flowing through its ever expanding networks. Any creative and critical engagement today also means learning to deal with such enormous archives and flows of information, and understanding how they are created. While on the one hand the world around us is increasingly mediated by new technologies and media forms that shape our perceptions acutely, on the other hand most of us do not have access to these technologies, nor are we encouraged to shape the mediated reality around us.

Any critical pedagogy today must address these questions, raised by the advent of new media practices, and the increasing importance of information and communication technologies to our everyday lives, especially in cities in India. The response of mainstream educational institutions has been primarily defensive, to shore up their role against a weakening state and an aggressive market — with the introduction of new diploma courses and degree programmes catered for lucrative careers in the corporate media, such as the Bachelors of Mass Media (BMM) courses in Mumbai. The responses from individual teachers and scholars, media producers and activists, and other groups and organisations is still being debated.

The technical complexities of computing and media production — or simple aversion to machines — have often negated the enhanced role and importance of the imagination in a time of mass mediation and increasing connectivity. With regard to education, this paradox is reinforced by a generational divide which is both social and technical. Many school and college students today have been socialised into the use, abuse and appropriation of sophisticated technologies and media from a very young age — unlike their teachers, parents, and mentors, who often find the learning curve much steeper. We underestimate the enhanced cultural and social literacy of a generation of kids raised on cable television, e-mail and chat rooms, and cheap mobile communications.

What we must recognise is that this conjuncture — of technophobia on the one hand, and of generational difference on the other hand — represents a significant reversal of standard pedagogic approaches. Vocationalisation has been one response to this dilemma, reflective of the weak institutional conditions prevailing in many colleges. Narrow technical instruction, by simply satisying the desires of the job market, cannot substitute for the work of the imagination — which makes technical skills and tools useful and exciting outside both the clasroom and the workplace, in the public sphere of citizenship and civic action. The decline of the traditional arts and humanities courses, and their replacement by career-centric education, while a complex phenomenon, also presents new opportunities for pedagogic experiments outside the space of the curriculum and classroom. In the next two sections, I describe one such extra-curricular experiment, the PUKAR Monsoon DOC-SHOP, which attempted to recognise and build on some of the paradoxes and insights outlined above.

PUKAR Monsoon 2003: “On Cities, On Water”

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research), a cross-sectoral collective of researchers and professionals based in Mumbai, has been deeply concerned with various concepts and practices of documenting urban spaces and environments since its inception two years ago. PUKAR views documentation not simply as a passive act of recording reality, but an active, imaginative process that allows us to participate in the construction of the reality around us. Similarly, our view of the city is not one of static forms or stable structures, but of a constantly changing urban processes in which the city is better understood as a nodal point in mobile flows of people, money, images, and resources.

We annually organise the PUKAR Monsoon —  a series of occassional lectures, workshops, presentations and activities from May to August every year, in which undergraduate college students in Mumbai address a specific urban theme through a variety of approaches. The theme chosen for this year’s PUKAR Monsoon was “On Cities, On Water”. Water as substance and as medium has been central to the urban experience throughout human history, particularly in coastal and port cities like Mumbai. In the context of globalisation, other dimensions of water, and of the relationship between cities and water are becoming increasingly visible and contested in the public arena — notably through the privatisation of water resources and infrastructure.

Our aim in the PUKAR Monsoon has been to enable young people to develop a critical understanding of these and other relationships between cities and water, and the cultural and political implications of these connections. The theme of water becomes a useful pedagogic device to explore new understandings of cities and urban life in the context of globalisation. Traditional approaches to understanding cities have often treated the urban environment as an static object of inquiry, with fixed boundaries and a coherent set of technical and social indicators related to infrastructure, population, and employment. The flip side of this technocratic understanding of the city has been sentimental imagery of the heritage conservationists, of beautiful colonial buildings and monuments, which objectifies the contemporary city as an irretrievable picture postcard.

As opposed to these geographies and imageries, which are based on fixed and static conceptions, a more mobile and process-oriented pedagogy recognises that neither cities nor water ever stand still, and are characterised by constant motion and flows. The attempt at documenting these flows of water — which spill out and extend across regions beyond the city and even the nation — reminds us that the formation of contemporary mega-cities like Mumbai is as much a local as a global process, linking the city in complex and unequal relationships with its local, regional and global environments.

PUKAR Monsoon DOC-SHOP

The PUKAR Monsoon 2003, timed at the beginning of the college year in Mumbai, thus provided us the context to explore some of our related concerns with new forms of pedagogy, documentation, and understandings of cities, in relation to the theme of water. The first event in the PUKAR Monsoon 2003 was the DOC-SHOP, in which we attempted to connect these concerns with new media technologies and practices to create new knowledge about the city.

DOC-SHOP — shorthand for “documentation workshop” — was a week-long series of intensive sessions that fostered a critical and intellectual engagement with the terms and practices of documentation through reading, discussion, and lectures, while also encouraging hands-on learning of technical skills in digital and print media. Twenty  six undergraduate students from arts, science, mass media, and architecture courses participated, almost all of them from Mumbai.

The DOC-SHOP was conducted by the PUKAR Associates, along with resource persons ranging from video editors, sound recordists, and new media artists to engineers, anthropologists and community activists. The structure of the DOC-SHOP was to combine a morning of lectures and interactions with practitioners, followed by an afternoon of shooting, recording, photography or other documentation of water in the city, and evenings spent in editing or reviewing the documentaries produced by the students. Five separate days were devoted to distinct media forms — video, photography, text, sound, and the web — followed by four days of production work on small multi-media documentary projects.

DOC-SHOP activities ranged from scripting of short films, writing poetry and short expressive essays, recording sounds of water captured from city streets and markets, to photographing the city’s waterfronts and public fountains, and developing web-based presentations to link different elements of video, text, sound and images about water and the city. The discussions in the DOC-SHOP included reflections on the digitalisation of still and moving images and the changing role of video and photo documentation, the history of state and market control of the FM airwaves and the idea of low-cost community radio, and understanding the changing nature of the archive and artistic and expressive practices in the age of the Internet. The emphasis throughout the DOC-SHOP was on combining practices of documentation in various media forms — through the use of digital cameras, recording devices, and computers — with a creative approach to the urban environment, using the city’s constantly changing and mobile landscapes as a medium for a new kind of engaged pedagogy outside the classroom.

The eight days of DOC-SHOP activities culminated in the DOC-SHOP Review on 27 May 2003, a public exhibition of short videos, photo essays, edited sound recordings, web art, and other small documentary projects produced by the students (a web archive of these projects, designed and built by one of the DOC-SHOP students, can be seen at http://www.pukar.org.in/doc-shop/). The DOC-SHOP Review concluded with a two-hour public discussion featuring film encyclopaedist and cultural studies scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, oral historian and feminist scholar C.S. Lakshmi, of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women), Mumbai, and documentary film-maker Madhushree Datta of Majlis, Mumbai.

A New Pedagogy?

Pedagogic interventions are important to a new generation of urban youth, whose critical understanding of society is mainly formed in the space of colleges, and through the world of the mass media. The PUKAR Monsoon — now in its second year — was conceived in a spirit of engagement with younger voices, which are often neglected as sources of serious reflection on our city and society.

While we are used to according to young people the role of creative social agents, and address both their imaginations and aspirations as future citizens, we are still unused to regarding them either as technical experts, or real producers of knowledge. How often have we heard the lament that post-liberalisation generation have shorter attention spans and are more apathetic than ever before? Everything from lack of political awareness, to mindless consumerism, to disinterest in reading long books, has been blamed on the alienation of today’s youth.

What these comments reflect is our inability to recognise the potential of new media practices to unleash new ways of learning from our information and media-saturated environments, particularly in cities. This technological shift necessarily disrupts the institutional moorings of mainstream education, creating new spaces outside the classroom for innovative pedagogic practice. Vocationalisation — and other forms of “dumbing down” in the media and public culture — are only one, rather weak, response to this new conjuncture. As opposed to vocationalisation, recently many pedagogic initiatives have intervened directly through the curriculum — taking advantage of the weak institutional conditions prevailing in many universities to introduce new courses and means of certification. While this has largely resulted in the proliferation of degree courses which narrow the scope of undergraduate education, it has also opened a space of opportunity for bold curricular initiatives such as those at the Centre for Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore (which now offers certificate and distance education courses, as well as PhD certification, in cultural studies).

The PUKAR Monsoon, while only in its second year, has based itself on a different kind of extra-curricular practice which uses the city as a pedagogic device for the creation of new knowledge. Through the DOC-SHOP, we realised that digital technologies are lowering the barriers of access to the means of producing new social imaginations, and more than ever before young people have the tools to build new and imaginative forms of creative reflection and civic engagement. What is left is to articulate a new pedagogy — and institutional forms appropriate to this practice — which gives young people the space and the equipment to create these new worlds and act on them, not just as good students or workers, but as confident citizens.

This essay draws on text prepared by Rahul Srivastava and Vyjayanthi Rao for the PUKAR Monsoon, and its argument is inspired by the work of Arjun Appadurai.

The PUKAR Monsoon DOC-SHOP was made possible through the participation of Rahul Srivastava (PUKAR), Paromita Vohra (PUKAR), Gauri Patwardhan (film editor), Neeraj Voralia (film editor), Rajesh Vora (photographer), Abhay Sardesai (PUKAR), Sadaf Siddique (film editor), Vickram Crishna (Radiophony India Pvt Ltd), Beatrice Gibson (new media artist and researcher), Indu Agarwal (SPARC), Hansa Thapliyal (Majlis), Qusai Kathawala (Transmit Audio Lab), Mukul Deora (Transmit Audio Lab), Ashish Rajadhyaksha (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore), C.S. Lakshmi (SPARROW), Madhushree Datta (Majlis), Shahid Khan (Apple Computer), Girish Menon (PUKAR) and Shonali Sarda (PUKAR).

Originally published in Humanscape Magazine special issue on Learning Beyond Teaching, edited by Shilpa Phadke, August 2003.