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This article analyses how the infrastructural architecture of social networking sites (SNS) is conducive to the emergence of religious subjects and digital collectivities. I argue that SNS enable social connections, and subjectivities are created to reify discriminatory religious and political practices and discourses online. This study identifies and responds to three critical arguments about SNS and religious subjectivities. First, it challenges the liberal assumptions that advancement in SNS will lead to the creation of depoliticized and more rational societies. I argue that SNS deepens the already existing social segregations in the society through the creation of digital collectivities. Digital collectivities inform functional possibilities (ontology) and discursive modes (epistemology) of enacting religious subjectivities. These collectivities not only shape the ways in which users articulate their religious and political allegiance but also the content of their online presence. Finally, in unpacking the formation and existence of digital collectivities and how they are linked with the emergence of religious subjects, I examine the question of digital ontology—the debate regarding what a religious subject on SNS is and of epistemology—how is a religious subject defined.

Articulation of religious guidelines in the political milieu never takes place in a disembodied form; rather politically inscribed religious discourses are embedded within and conveyed through specific institutional channels, including media organizations and education institutions. My experiences of working as a media educator in villages in Gujarat have helped me understand how the learning of such discriminatory practices begin early as students use various linguistic and socio-cultural cues in order to make sense of the society. A classroom, however, provides the required space to entertain differences such that we can delimit the social hierarchies that are naturalized in the minds of young students through primary socialization. In this paper, I use Critical Media Literacy as a way to redefine classroom as a liminal space and create conditions for emergence of an alterity. Critical Media Literacy (CML) can provide young students with the skills required to upend the dominant discourse of religious violence, to create new narratives from the interstices- from the in-between, and pendulate between the fixed identities subsumed in binaries such as self-other, victim-perpetrator, us-them, and most importantly Hindus-Muslims. In this paper, I attempt to answer two research questions. First, how this dominant rationality of religious hatred is perpetuated through media texts and the socialization process in schools (Bhatia, 2017; Rajagopal, 2001); and how it influences the everyday experiences of young students in two villages in the Sanand tehsil of Ahmedabad district in Gujarat. Second, how can the classrooms be designed as spatial sites to encourage young students to counter their feelings of individualized prejudice and enact resistance. I illustrate how media educators can use CML to design classrooms as a liminal space and help students operate from the margins of the socialization they receive and thus be more open to different regimes of truth practiced in different religious communities.

In this article, we investigate the socio-technical ecology of Twitter, including the technological affordances of the platform and the user-generated discursive strategies used to create and circulate anti-Muslim disinformation online. During the first wave of Covid-19, right-wing followers claimed that Muslims were spreading the virus to perform Jihad. We analyzed a sample of 7000 tweets using Critical Discourse Analysis to examine how the online disinformation accusing Muslims in India was initiated and sustained. We identify three critical discourse strategies used on Twitter to spread and sustain the anti-Muslim (dis)information: (1) creating mediatized hate solidarities, (2) appropriating instruments of legitimacy, and (3) practicing Internet Hindu vigilantism. Each strategy consists of a subset of discursive toolkits, highlighting the central routes of discursive engagement to produce disinformation online. We argue that understanding how the technical affordances of Social Networking Sites are leveraged in quotidian online practices to produce and sustain the phenomenon of online disinformation will prove to be a novel contribution to the field of disinformation studies and Internet research.

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by the parliament of India on December 11, 2019. Muslim women and many other people in India are contesting this act on the grounds that it provides citizenship status on a religious basis. Key enactments of dissent in relation to anti-CAA protests have become visible globally through the media. One is the very visible presence of a local community of Muslim and other women in the physical space of protests in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi. We draw from on-site interviews with Muslim women protestors at Shaheen Bagh to examine how Muslim women are using their physical bodies in protest sites to show dissent and to challenge the hypermasculine Hindu body politic of India. Based in our grounded analysis, we explore four main themes in this study: visibility of Muslim women in protest sites, using social media for international visibility, pushing against fear, and using care as a protest strategy.

"This book offers an analysis of how Gen Z in the global South engages with the digital, both globally, and locally. The authors demonstrate how youth in the global South build digital worlds for themselves and others through active and producer-level participation"--

Chapter 1. Religion and governmentality -- Chapter 2. Methods and analysis -- Chapter 3. Analytics of governmentality and formulation of the religious subject -- Chapter 4. Media education as counter-conduct: Analyzing fields of visibility and regimes of knowledge -- Chapter 5. Media education as counter-conduct: Developing dialogic practices and analyzing change in subjectivities -- Chapter 6. Evaluating the role of Critical Media Education in mediating counter-conduct

This paper critically examines the neo-liberal conceptualization of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD), which imposes the linear and simplistic notions of empowerment and development on the users from the global South. Using the rapidly growing EdTech segment in India as a case, this paper observes that EdTech has been touted as a magic multiplier and a savior for countries like India that aspire to educate their large populations. This has prompted EdTech companies to pursue platformization and templatization to accomplish scalability and standardization in EdTech use. Based on immersive ethnographic research with youth from low-income families in three Indian cities—Ahmedabad, Delhi, and Vadodara—we argue that the practices of young people concerning EdTech resist standardization. Our analysis reveals that three major factors—challenges of access and autonomy, continued relevance of place-based learning and in-person interactions, and uneven quality and rigor—influence low-income students and families to not completely buy the promise of access, equity, and quality that EdTech companies and governments advance. We explore the significance of the socio-economic and cultural contexts of young learners in the global South context and argue that they aspire for personalization, place-based experiences, guidance/mentorship, high grades, and in-person interactions instead of standardization. They do not fully benefit by the experimentation, DIY practices, and tech-lead learning opportunities and resources offered by EdTech platforms in their current state.

Internet shutdowns authorized by the state are becoming a recurring case in countries under military or authoritarian rule, such as Sudan. This article examines how the military in Sudan shut down the Internet to cover up the June 3 massacre. The shutdown made it difficult for the protestors and civilians to share and document the human rights violations committed by the state from June 3 to July 9, 2019. We also demonstrate how the Internet shutdowns were instrumental in circulating state-sponsored disinformation campaigns delegitimizing the protests. The article expands on existing literature to explain how information vacuums are conducive to the spread of disinformation and the weakening of on-ground protest movements. Despite the crippling effects of the Internet shutdown in Khartoum, our analysis illustrates how protestors challenged designed technical and physical workarounds to circumvent the shutdown.

We examine how globally oriented-influencers from India utilize specific strategies of content creation to negotiate with the dominant logic of platform affordances to engage with global audiences. It involves individual negotiations by the influencers with the platform affordances in creating content that foregrounds their cultural realities and aspirations while remaining relevant to global audiences. We do so by deploying the critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) framework to understand influencers' strategic choices and discursive practices as they interact and negotiate with the platform affordances. Our analysis shows two processes that help the influencers communicate their content to the global audience and sustain their local connections and followership: (1) Templatization: a process through which influencers from the global South attune themselves to the technological possibilities of the platform and utilize its features to produce content with a set of replicable patterns, formats, and practices; and (2) Cultural brokering: a negotiation strategy which allows the influencers to foreground and express their quotidian lived realities and cultural experiences in an increasingly globalized digital environment.

In this article, we examine protest of India's passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registry of Citizens (NRC) which spurred instances of physical and digital protest. We study the intersections of gender, political subjectivities, and digital activism among anti-CAA-NRC activists, specifically the "Women of Shaheen Bagh." We discuss our data collection methods, description, and analysis of the protests in the context of larger questions, including how critical, feminist researchers may engage with data tools and how forms of gendered, transnational protest are mediated and represented via individual images, texts, and videos that make up social media data. We illuminate the formation of political subjectivities in the context of transnational, digital protest movements by re-appropriating computational and data tools. This article seeks to demonstrate an interdisciplinary engagement between critical, feminist approaches to knowledge and subject formation and data science approaches to social network analysis and data visualization techniques.