Panel Discussions

Panel Discussions

Changing Role of Women in the Age of the Digital

12th March 2019

Venue: AB 6/202, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar

Humanities and Social Sciences

Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar

Concept Note

The impact of the digital on South Asia, particularly on India has been momentous. Definitions of “new media” and “culture/s” have undergone paradigmatic shift post Web 2.0. Research and pedagogy have not remained untouched by this moment of the “digital” turn in civilizations. Gender roles, particularly the role of women in this new era have undergone landmark changes, affecting academics, personal, and entrepreneurial contributions.

The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar is pleased to explore and recognize contributions of an interdisciplinary nature in this digital shift. The department will organize panel discussions to commemorate International Women’s Day, celebrated worldwide on the 8th March every year. The discussions will largely focus on the theme of the changing role of “Women in the Age of the Digital”. The panels will have special emphasis on journalism, social demography, literary studies, philosophy, and history of science in the times of emerging digital aesthetics. The panels will locate themselves as well as explore challenges in the concept of ‘digital literacy’.

Biographical Notes

Madhumita Mazumdar is Associate Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information Communication Technology, Gujarat, India. Her research interests are broadly in the fields of social and cultural history, Science, Technology and Design, history of modernity and developmental practice in colonial and post-colonial India, economic and social history of Gujarat.

Rupa Jha is the Head of Indian Languages for the BBC working from Delhi. She is responsible for BBC Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi operation in India. Rupa is responsible to guarantee the excellence and originality of an impartial, robust and engaging Languages editorial output.

Nirmala Menon leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore, India. She is a faculty member of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Discipline of English, IIT Indore. She is the author of Migrant Identities of Creole Cosmopolitans: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality(Peter Lang Publishing, Germany, 2014) and Remapping the Postcolonial Canon: Remap, Reimagine, Retranslate(Palgrave Macmillan, UK 2017). She has published in numerous international journals and speaks, writes and publishes about postcolonial studies, digital humanities and scholarly publishing. She directs Ph.D. students is in their projects and runs DH projects from the research lab at IIT Indore. Her primary area of research is Postcolonial Literature and Theory. Her focus is on the comparative study of twentieth century postcolonial literatures in English, Hindi and other languages. Digital Humanities, Gender studies, Globalization and Translation studies are additional areas of research. Her interests are multilingual but also interdisciplinary; her research examines the ways in which literatures from different non-Western languages influence and can redefine and reframe postcolonial theoretical concepts. Prof. Menon is one the founders of Digital Humanities Alliance of India(DHAI).

Arka Chattopadhyay is Assistant professor of literary studies Humanities and Social Sciences in IIT Gandhinagar. He studies aspects such as the fundamental operational logic of a text, use of mathematical forms like geometry and arithmetic, the human obsession with counting, the moving body as an act of writing and love, and sexuality as a challenge to the limits of what can be written through logic and mathematics.

Tannistha Samanta is Assistant Professor with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. She is a Social Demographer by her research and academic interests. Her research interests draw from the intersecting disciplines of sociology, gerontology and public health to examine the sociological question of inequality adopting a range of methodological tools and praxis. Her research has been supported by grants received from the United Nations Population Fund, the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Population Foundation of India and Government of Gujrat.

ArnapurnaRath is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. Her research interests broadly cover the fields of South Asian narratives, Comparative literature, and Digital Humanities. She is primarily working on studying the intersections between narratives, cultures, and critical theories. Arnapurna has been actively developing Digital Humanities and New media studies at IIT Gandhinagar. Her extra academic interests are in creative writing, writing for social media, and in the performative arts.