“Little Development Devices/Humanitarian Goods” seeks to explore objects or instruments designed to care about and improve the welfare of infrastructurally marginal populations (i.e. those lacking connection to “networked” forms of modern provisioning—such as water, sewerage, communication, electricity—or to services such as health care and finance). As our title suggests, we perceive two trajectories into this phenomenon.
The first derives from the legacy of the large, capital intensive and spatially fixed infrastructural projects of post-World War II development — such as dams, power plants, and road networks — which embody a substantive vision of societal transformation as laid out and organized by technocratic experts and government officials who act in the name, and for the benefit, of a whole nation. In contrast, the devices we highlight arose against the backdrop of sustained and polymorphous critiques of this older paradigm of development. They combine elements of earlier attempts to define more “appropriate” technology with new techniques for monitoring, calculation and testing. In reacting to perceptions of past failure, their normative rationality is oriented to immediate, measurable and testable outcomes.
The second trajectory stems from the parallel emergence of humanitarianism as a mode and set of techniques for crisis response, including the establishment of intergovernmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations devoted to the care of distant others, as well as the standardization of associated mobile technologies like refugee camps. The devices we examine here respond to perceived incapacities, failures and perverse outcomes of this very aid regime, even while seeking to further its general goals of alleviating pressing needs and saving lives. Many rely on market logic and present themselves as commodities more than gifts, ostensibly enrolling profit motives into the service of a greater good.
In this issue of Limn we seek to ask: What are we to make of the proliferation of such small devices? What do they tell us about the state of “development” and “humanitarianism” as projects? And what do we make of the convergence of humanitarian and developmental projects around them? What forms of life, and what kinds of subjects, do they work on and constitute? What relationships do they establish between expertise, government, and the purported beneficiaries of these devices? What politics do they make possible – or preclude? Do some appear analogous to hacks, exploiting the vulnerability of existing infrastructures for other ends? And what might a critical social science have to say about them?
Little: These devices are little in a number of senses. First, they are light, inexpensive, scalable, and portable; they may be deployed experimentally and flexibly, for small units of population. Second, they are little in the sense that they operate at the level of the “micro” in economics – their target is not the “national economy” or macroeconomic aggregations but individual preferences, aspirations, and calculations. Third, they are “minimal”; they are, for better or worse, deployed with relatively limited assumptions about the form of life into which they are to be inserted. None of this is to say that they need remain small scale. Some have, indeed, been deployed by national governments and have large aspirations (e.g. affecting national poverty or mortality rates).
Development: Although these devices may not define development in terms of national populations, they do aspire to social transformation, to improvement of conditions of existence and the quality of lives – even to saving the planet! They thus require and entail the assembly of new kinds of expertise, new visions of a better future (whether for individuals, communities, or nations), new articulations of populations and new instruments.
Devices: Here is where the assembly—as technical or techno-political work—takes place. Because they are deployed with “minimal” assumptions about context, a very great deal is packed into these devices themselves, and it has to be unpacked. Many are technologically-laden, depending on everything from GPS to mobile phones to solar panels. But they are not merely machines in the conventional sense of that word, drawing on forms of accounting, and various kinds of expertise in modeling and forecasting. They also embody norms, models of how people make decisions, assumptions about what people want, what might translate across scales, and what constitutes a good life.
Humanitarian: These are things that are designed to do good, intervening in worlds where large-scale infrastructures, like those for the delivery of health and energy, do not reach or have collapsed. They reflect an explicit desire to alleviate suffering and save lives. They focus on moments of present crisis and a future in which states may no longer have the capacity to build, manage or sustain universal infrastructures in territorial grids. As they move through contexts of design and use, and through spaces of poverty and humanitarian emergency, they remind us of just how difficult it has become to imagine ways of expressing care and concern without fostering markets.
Goods: These are things that also seek to do well (financially) while doing good. Humanitarian goods that are premised on conditions of state fragility often hold out the promise that they can transform that fragility in productive or profitable ways. Things like solar lanterns or nutritionally fortified foods, for example, are also built to generate economic value for a diverse array of investors, via sales to institutional consumers like humanitarian or aid organizations as well as directly to the poor. Thus, they present themselves as caring commodities rather than disinterested gifts.
Our listening practices are discursively constructed. In the sonic landscape of India, in particular, the way in which we listen and what we hear are often normative, produced within hegemonic discourses of gender, class, caste, region, and sexuality. . . This forum, Gendered Soundscapes of India, offers snapshots of sound at sites of trans/national production, marketing, filmic and musical texts. Complementing these posts, the accompanying photographs offer glimpses of gendered community formation, homosociality, the pervasiveness of sound technology in India, and the discordant stratified soundscapes of the city. This series opens up for us the question of other contexts in India where sound, gender, and technology might intersect, but, more broadly, it demands that we consider how sound exists differently in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. How might we imagine a sonic framework and South Asia from these locations? —Guest Editors Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta
For the full introduction to the forum, click here.
To read all of the posts in the forum, click here.
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“She compelled respect at once by refusing on any account to be phonographed: perhaps she thought, amongst other things, that if she committed her soul to a broken piece of wax it might get broken…my subsequent experiences showed that it was only too likely,” wrote the British musicologist A.H. Fox-Strangways in 1910 about Indian female singer Chandra Prabha, while remarking on the harsh reactions to the gramophone in India (90). Such deep-rooted discomfort with the gramophone speaks to the cognitive, perceptual and experiential challenges faced by a listener/performer when a new auditory technology substitutes familiar terrains of musical production.
In this post, I revisit the decades prior to and following the 1947 Partition of Bengal, a phase singularly volatile not only in India’s political but also its musical and technological histories. I examine how the introduction of European harmony/polyphony in the aural imaginary of Bengal negotiates ideologies espoused by the nationalists in the (re)constitution of gendered space post-Partition by transforming relations of consumption. The production of gendered domesticity was vitally related to rigid conceptions of physical space and its allocation in colonial Bengal which, further, influenced music reception in ways worth probing.
The auditory regimes prior to the emergence of recording/radio-broadcast typified public modes of listening based on live performances engendering affective flows and presupposed human proximity. This culture of aurality is inextricably tied to communal modes of consumption and performance, be it the high-end salon-tradition of the Bengali modern song, the hard-hitting agitprop strains of the Bengal wing of the IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) or even the stylized elite classical genres. The collective nature of musical practice conjures up traditional connotations of masculine spaces, especially in the case of the elite Bengali household where the gendered ideology of spatial orientation relegated the respectable Bengali woman (bhadramahila) to the interiors of the house (antahpur/andarmahal). The delights of salon-music were to be relished by the man of the house (babu).
‘Gramophone – a home entertainer’
Thus, the communitarian character of musical practice often made it elusive to respectable women. However, the emergence and subsequent sophistication of auditory technologies ushered a radical transformation to such a dynamic by dissociating music from the human performer. Besides leading to the obvious technological alienation in the listener, the privatization of the listening experience was accompanied by a condition of a penetrating solitude and interiority, a state speaking to the voices and /sounds emanating from the phonograph. At the sociological level, the entry of recording technology redefined long-held divisions of domestic space and the gendered dynamics thereof by not only democratizing musical consumption but also forging provisional collectivities of listeners often cutting across gender, class and caste. Besides, traditional associations of musical genres with specific loci- classical music with the salon/concert space for instance- gave way to a more fluid conception of domestic space assuming multiple sonic/musical identities depending on what the gramophone played. The phonographic interface, thus, radically reconfigures listening practices and produces a different paradigm of self, sound, community, and gender.
What is at stake here is not some covert form of linear technological determinism, but a more nuanced detour around auditory-technologies, spaces of consumption, and the affordances thereof that calibrate auditory experience along new registers. What merits contemplation is how (if at all) these technological innovations in the commercial arena complement and usher formal nuances and sonic innovations in the musical works they mediate. The gramophone renders problematic the uncritical conflation of the sonic and visual registers typical of live musical performance and, in the process, sets in motion a unique dynamic of interacting with musical sound. Severed from its visual footholds in live performance, phonographic sounds often provoke the listener to imagine the singing/performing body which, in turn, informs the way the sounds are processed mentally.
Vintage Gramophone spotted in Little India, Serangoon, Singapore, Image by Flickr User Linkway88, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Indian music has traditionally been based on a single melody which, in its skeletal grammar, is an individual mode of expression, even when performed by a group. The intrinsic form of Indian and traditional East Asian music in general exhibits a non-harmonic character. The concept of musical harmony proper is considered a European import. European harmony, polyphony, and counterpoint are in their very essences a set of disparate tonal registers forging a gestalt which impresses on the mind of the listener an overarching unity. At an experiential level, the polyphonic form embodies a distinct sonic ontology and a novel dimension, as it were, and thus cannot be reduced to merely a stylistic import. It induces a new auditory condition, a new register of being-in-listening (the lecture snippet from 57:08-.1:02:07 effectively demonstrates the morphing of the basic melody of a song into its polyphonic equivalent). The new auditory condition conjoins the familiarity of the melody with the markedly different yet complementing registers of the polyphony, creating a novel sensation for the uninitiated Bengali listener.
Among the very early records to employ musical polyphony in India were two iconic musical works of the mid-20th century, one devotional in intent– Aham Rudre from Mahishasurmardini (1931) composed by the legendary music director Pankaj Mullick–and the other, a professed experiment in introducing polyphony in Bengali music, Shurer Ei Jharna (1958), by the noted composer Salil Chowdhury.
In the current context, it is important to note how the sonic dimension of musical polyphony in Aham Rudre and Shurer Ei Jharna embodies and substitutes notions of aural communities and restages a communitarian character. Notably, the creation and circulation of these works paralleled the establishment of commercial state-radio in India (1930) and the first microgroove record in Kolkata in 1958 by the Gramophone Company.
The Gramophone Company in Calcutta marketed its records with the Bengali tagline “Shukhi Grihokon Shobhe Gramophone/Happy Homes Have Gramophones,” projecting the phonograph as the symbolic ideal of the domestic idyll and in the process confronting gendered spatial demarcations head-on by invading the auditory horizons of the secluded Bengali women. The striking presence of the gramophone in the iconic Gramophone Scene (1:35:17-1:35:28) in Satyajit Ray’s movie Ghare Baire–set in the backdrop of the 1905 Partition of Bengal–beautifully illustrates the sorority forged by the gramophone which, notably, draws even the marginalized widow Bouthan within its field of influence.
However, the gramophone superseded its commodity-character to serve not only in crass exhibitionism but also as an index of a masculine, elite consumerist culture where “serious music” and musical connoisseurship often became synonymous with the gramophone and recorded sound. A new breed of “record-collectors” came into existence, mainly belonging to the upwardly-mobile/elite classes whose passion for records was their most prominent identity-marker in the domestic realm, occasionally outweighing even their professional concerns.
But even as the radio and phonograph transcended the hitherto gendered character of musical reception by entering the women’s quarters and dissolving time-honored segregations of auditory spaces within the household, it had to contend with a deep-seated psychological discomfort in the listener, a fundamental unease with befriending technology that substituted the human. I argue that the newly insulated character of the radiophonic auditory experience was counteracted by significant efforts, conscious or otherwise, at sonically restaging and reclaiming the community lost in technological mediation.
Indian farmers gathered to listen the Farm Forum programme broadcast by All India Radio in the 1950s, Image Courtesy of Flickr User Public Resources.Org, (CC BY 2.0)
Given pet notions of musical anthropology and the chronological coincidence between the early uses of harmony and the entry and sophistication of technologically mediated music in Bengal one could, at the risk of slight oversimplification, posit that the import of the harmonic form at this significant juncture sonically compensates the auditory solitude induced by radio/phonograph by recreating a modified and idealized Platonic (Platonic here is used as an allusion to ‘music of the spheres’ to point towards how musical harmony since medieval times has been associated with ideal public) community and restaging it within the confines of the constitutive plurality of the polyphonic mode. As an aside, the initial introduction of polyphony in Shurer Ei Jharna (1958) garnered flak from a large section of the audience who cognized it as a group of amateur performers ‘singing out of key’ (Salil Chowdhury’s lecture from 30:31-31:15). Over the next few decades, however, this form was trans-culturated and seamlessly assimilated within the sonic vocabulary of the Bengali/Indian masses, so much so that without the regular vocal/instrumental counterpoint, commercial songs nowadays are often felt to be lacking hue.
The sonic changes that I have been investigating preceded or followed the Partition of Bengal, which informed the gendered patterns of popular musical consumption. It is well-known that the exigencies of the Partition proved emancipatory for women in that they were exposed to the vagaries of the workplace, leaving the confines of their quarters. It is with an often uncritical celebratory fervor that the Partition is credited with fashioning the independent, self-reliant and educated middle-class Bengali working woman, on occasion emerging as the sole bread-earner of the family. Jasodhara Bagchi says that the “partition accelerated the earlier trends of the twentieth century of abolishing the ‘purdah that had confined the Bengali bhadramahila to her antahpur (private quarters)…The same stroke that brought this flood of uprooted marginalised women to Calcutta also opened the door to many new opportunities for Bengali middle-class Hindu women. They came out of the private domain of domesticity and child rearing to take up public duties.’”(8) Uditi Sen, however, in her revisionist reading of the celebratory impulse argues that “situational aberrations” notwithstanding, the Partition did not lead to “a transformation of social norms or any substantive change of women’s ideal role within the bounds of the family.”(16)
In the aftermath of the Second World War, which had also witnessed the entry of women into the professional/public sphere, the USA launched a propaganda war to restore women to their hearth, revivifying the “cult of the housewife,” deploying films and popular music to promote the trope of the ideal housewife. Redefining domestic spaces as woman’s space had also been in the cards for the Indian state post-Partition, which had to a large extent been governed by patterns of popular media consumption. Arguably, the coincidental emergence of musical harmony and sophistication of private auditory technologies in the years following the Partition contributed to efforts to restore women to their private quarters, by compensating the lost professional community of the self-reliant working woman with the poetic/sonic community embodied by the polyphonic form, in the process enlivening her insipid lived quarters. Popular media technologies often employ innovation in content to revivify clichéd formats; musical harmony coupled with sophisticated audio-reproduction provides a classic instance of inaugurating a new sonic dimension in popular music which provides a powerful and enthralling form of domestic leisure.
Thus, in the context of early 20th century Bengal, the gramophone was a significant import which not only reconfigured perceptual registers and musical cultures but also listening practices by entering the interiors of elite Bengali households. Besides democratizing the listening experience, which till then had largely been restricted to male constituencies, the gramophone privatized musical consumption. It was through the introduction of musical polyphony, which is intrinsically ‘public/ communal’ as regards its sonic character, that this impulse was counteracted. As mentioned earlier, these technical/musical innovations widened the scope and impact of musical performance and arguably contributed to the reconstitution of gendered domestic space post-Partition which points to subtle and complex relations among technology, (musical) genre and gender.
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Featured Image: Screen Capture from by SO! Ed. Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire
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Ronit Ghoshis a postgraduate student at the Department of Art and Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark. His research interests include aesthetic philosophy, critical sound studies and the sociology of Indian popular music. He has published articles on sound studies in the International Journal on Stereo and Immersive Media and The Rupkatha Journal and has an article forthcoming in the Journal of Sonic Studies.He is a classical violinist and an aspiring music composer.
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Good Data: Call for Proposals for an INC Theory on Demand edited bookEditors: Angela Daly (Queensland University of Technology), Kate Devitt (Queensland University of Technology) & Monique Mann (Queensland University of Technology).
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Edited by: Stephen J. Collier, Jamie Cross, Peter Redfield and Alice Street
November 2017. This issue of Limn examines the recent profusion of micro-technologies in the worlds of humanitarianism and development, some focused on fostering forms of social improvement, others claiming to alleviate suffering, and many seeking to accomplish both. From water meters, micro-insurance and cash transfers, to solar lanterns, water filtration systems, and sanitation devices, examples proliferate across the early 21st century landscapes of international aid. Although small-scale endeavors are far from novel, today these devices are animated by different intellectual and moral energy, drawing on novel financial and organizational resources. Many blur distinctions between public and private interests, along with divisions between obligations, gifts and commodities. At the same time, they entail novel configurations of expertise, political obligation and forms of care. The articles in this issue explore these new convergences of developmental and humanitarian projects, alongside reworked relationships between experts, governments, and purported beneficiaries, focused on fostering “participation” and “partnerships” rather than nation-building.
Contributors include:
Jacqueline Best, Marc Boeckler, Brenda Chalfin and Xhulio Binjaku, Jamie Cross, Vincent Duclos, Robert Foster, Christopher Kelty, Meena Khandelwal and Kayley Lain, Austin Lord, Amy Moran Thomas,
Jonathan Morduch, Peter Redfield, David Reubi, Anke Schwittay and Paul Braund, Tom Scott Smith, Alice Street, and Tatiana Thieme
Coming Soon… The next issue of Limn (#9) examines the recent profusion of micro-technologies in the fields of humanitarianism and development, some focused on fostering forms of social improvement, others claiming to alleviate suffering, many seeking to accomplish both. Although small-scale endeavors are far from novel, today’s micro-devices are animated by new intellectual energy, channels of finance, and moral ambition. … Continue reading →
Our listening practices are discursively constructed. In the sonic landscape of India, in particular, the way in which we listen and what we hear are often normative, produced within hegemonic discourses of gender, class, caste, region, and sexuality. . . This forum, Gendered Soundscapes of India, offers snapshots of sound at sites of trans/national production, marketing, filmic and musical texts. Complementing these posts, the accompanying photographs offer glimpses of gendered community formation, homosociality, the pervasiveness of sound technology in India, and the discordant stratified soundscapes of the city. This series opens up for us the question of other contexts in India where sound, gender, and technology might intersect, but, more broadly, it demands that we consider how sound exists differently in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. How might we imagine a sonic framework and South Asia from these locations? —Guest Editors Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta
For the full introduction to the forum, click here.
To read all of the posts in the forum, click here.
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“Indian traffic tends to be one of the noisiest, but that is true of all third world countries…What doesn’t make sense is when you try to remove it from that context. Two people can’t be whispering to one another in the middle of a bench by the sea in Bandra. Will you hear someone sitting next to you on that bench?,” asks sound designer Dileep Subramaniam indignantly. We are discussing the Indian film industry’s norm of looping (or “dubbing”) sound and dialogue at the post-production stage, which has traditionally given India cinema’s sound track an unrealistic degree of clarity. For a loud country, Indian films have been in the habit of incorporating remarkably few ambient sounds into their sound track, until the practice of synchronized sound recording began to infiltrate Hindi film aesthetics in the late 1990s.
The break from post-synchronized sound occurred over a relatively brief period of time in India, as a majority of the commercial films moved away from MOS (motor only sound or no sync sound) to synchronized sound, which refers to the recording of sound alongside image during a film shoot. Industry professionals argue that sound technologies underwent revolutionary changes in comparison to image technologies in India between 1995 and 2002, as the introduction of digital editing platforms weaned the Bombay film industry away from its reliance on mono-tracks and primitive stereo-tracks, directly to Dolby digital multi-tracks. Hindi cinema almost entirely skipped the intermediary technological stage of stereo ultrasound, used for several years in Hollywood. Today, an amalgam of sync sound and Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR) characterize Bollywood cinema’s soundscapes.
We have been more attuned to Hindi cinema’s soundscapes than to the production and pre-production practices of sound recording and the composition of sound crews, which follows a disciplinary habit in film studies of prioritizing film aesthetics over other aspects of film’s materiality and production. This lopsided emphasis has meant that we have missed out on the complex ways in which the story of film sound is part of a larger story of social change in India, wherein formal shifts are of a piece with new employment opportunities and a realignment of India’s middle class. These social and professional changes have impacted Indian class and gender relations in disparate ways.
On the set of Bhagum Bhag filmed on Brighton Station, image by Flickr User Simon Pielow,(CC BY-SA 2.0)
Based on conversations that I conducted in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 2009 and 2013 with sound professionals working on Bollywood’s location shoots, I comment on sociological aspects of Bollywood’s increasing adoption of sync sound recording in location shoots, particularly with regard to its implications for class and gender relations within the film industry. My point will be two-fold. One, as the Hindi film form gravitates toward internationally recognizable codes of aural and visual realism, an expanding social range of skilled and unskilled workers are attracted to professions related to location sound recording. Two, despite the diversifying social profile of these professionals, women remain structurally excluded from all levels of the profession.
The change from non-sync to sync sound in Hindi films has created a demand for trained creative technicians and sound engineers, and equally for those who can work as bouncers and sound-security personnel on the field. Security personnel are crucial to recording location sound in a high-decibel country. According to Line Producer Raj Hate (with commercials and the location-heavy Miss Lovely to his credit, the practice of “sound lock ups” started with television commercials in India during the late 1990s before it was adopted by film shoots. “Sound lock” is a phrase used by Bollywood professionals to describe the practice of securing an area to ensure silence, in order to get the best location sound. Many of those working in this pool of unskilled labor in Bollywood today come from Mumbai’s economically depressed migrants who have traveled to the city in search of employment.
For instance, Security Provider Narendra Baruah started with security work on the film Lagaan (2001), the first big-budget film shot with sync sound, although it was preceded by the smaller scale Bombay Boys (1998), which also recorded in sync. Baruah created Active Squad Security while working on sound security for the location shoot of Veer Zaara (2004). He has provided security protection to stars (such as Madhuri Dixit Nene, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Preity Zinta), but his primary employment is in sync sound security. He retains a small group of men on a monthly salary with additional per diem top-ups during assignments, which may range between INR 5,000 to 10,000 to over 20,000 a day, depending on the nature of the shoot. Additionally, he hires men on a temporary basis from a pool of local Mumbaikars and immigrants seeking employment in the big city. Baruah’s company is in competition with actor Ronit Roy’s security company ACE and movie star Salman Khan’s Tiger Security. Although he lacks their star profile and their facility with English, he has made a name for himself through his entrepreneurial practice and expertise in shooting at “jhopad pattis” (slums) for films such as Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Barah Aana (2009).
Bollywood Film Set, Image by Flickr User Rhys Tom, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Shot in Dharavi, Barah Aana required twenty men because of the high sound levels of the urban slum. As Baruah points out, jhopad pattis are the hardest places in which to secure sound for location shoots because “A pressure cooker’s whistle goes off somewhere, or a TV starts up, or a child starts crying” (“Kahien cooker ki seeti bajti hai to kabhi TV chalu hai aur bacchha rota hai.”). Open locations for films with smaller budgets also do not require ID cards for film crews, so Baruah finds that one of his greatest challenges is teaching his staff to memorize faces and manage crowds with diplomacy rather than violence. The phenomenon of Baruah and his crew working on a contract-basis with a range of films is what philosopher and sociologist Maurizzio Lazaratto discusses as the reconfigured “anthropological realities of work” in the new global work space, where “polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form” of global labor.
The social range of Baruah’s crew reveals a disparity between Bollywood blockbusters’ onscreen transnational and cosmopolitan backgrounds, and the class diversity of those involved in producing them. As Hagen Koo argues in relation to the shrinking middle class in America and Western Europe against the expanding middle class of India and China, representations of the global middle class that narrowly refer to “the upper segments…in developing countries, whose members are affluent and globally oriented in their lifestyle and mobility pattern” are woefully inadequate (“The Global Middle Class”). Without rendering Bollywood professionals into mere representatives of their class, I can confirm based on my conversations on the field that the assorted workers enabling sync sound shoots in India today come from a range of social classes, which reveals a negotiation and redistribution of work across different classes of professionals, particularly when we consider the work of sound security personnel in conjunction with the work of sound engineers on site. On-the-ground compositions of production crews are more complex and hybrid than what is suggested by a Bollywood blockbuster’s flat image of urbane cosmopolitanism, by Mumbai’s segregated urban spaces, or by the hostile monocultures of Hindutva pushed by Shiv Sena’s divisive politics.
Filming of Bollywood movie “Agent Vinod” on set in Riga, Latvia, August 2010, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
At the other end of the social spectrum and hierarchy of labor among people involved in Bollywood’s revolution in sound are highly skilled sound artists and engineers. Early experimenters in sync and location sound (such as Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihlani) provided opportunities to Bollywood’s new generation of creative audio technicians, who have become key players in the industry’s innovations in sync sound recording, digital sound editing and audio mixing. Dileep Subramaniam worked in sync sound for Nihlani’s television features during the 1980s, and for BBC’s Channel 4 nature documentaries, which made it easier for him to work with transnational productions such as Merchant Ivory’s Deceivers (1988) and Shekhar Kapoor’s Bandit Queen (1995).
Location recordist, production mixer and sound designer Baylon Fonseca edited sound on the digital workstation Audio Vision from Avid for Nihlani’s Sanshodhan (1995) at a time when most Hindi film producers and directors “considered it almost witchcraft.” With Sanshodhan, he initiated methods for digital sync sound recording and mixing that are standard practice in India now. The integration of trained sound engineers into the Hindi film industry has made a palpable difference to its cinema’s sound quality, even as Hindi cinema’s increasing social legitimacy with white-collar workers allows Bollywood to seem like a valid career choice for Indians from the middle and upper middle classes. Nevertheless, high net-worth engineers have to buck traditional social norms—ranging from familial expectations to cultural notions of respectability—to consider sound work in the film industry as a valid career path.
All this is assuming that the engineers are men. Indian women face a double burden in entering such a profession: they must work against social prejudice to pursue careers in science and technology, and then apply that training to the field of media production, which does not possess the social legitimacy of most jobs in engineering. Effectively, new opportunities created by the use of sync sound in Hindi cinema does not bring much promise to women. Women are entirely omitted from the unskilled end of the location sound spectrum because of the incipient threat of violence and aggression against women in India’s public spaces. Under the strain of Hindutva’s India and Shiv Sena’s Mumbai, wherein the concept of protecting women’s honor becomes the violent pretext to restrict their freedom of movement, women are presumptively excluded from sound security work. Women are also largely absent from sound engineering because of the gendering of the hard sciences. In proportion to men, few Indian women are encouraged to enter the sciences, and fewer can choose to use it as the path into film work, so that they are structurally sidelined from high-end work in sound technologies.
Bollywood Film Set, Image by Flickr User Dani Venn, (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Strong female characters on screen and strong female voices incorporated into the timbre of a film’s soundscape can be cause for celebration. But such inclusions rarely change the social and professional make-up of a film’s production crew. Further, merely adding women to the ranks of security personnel or sound engineers will not presumptively result in a more feminist or inclusive film text. On-screen representations do not reflect pre-production and production practices in simple ways. Despite these cautionary notes, is worth our while to invest some time and thought to how gender relations are impacted along different tiers of film production, as production practices shift in response to Hindi-cinema’s post-globalization aesthetics. Considering the gendered make up of professionals in Hindi cinema’s shift to sync sound recording on location shoots reveals several things. It demonstrates that professional opportunities, social norms and political pressures accompany formal changes in cinema. It allows us to consider what professional shifts in film sound recording in the wake of globalization look like in relation to men as opposed to women, providing an embodied perspective to abstract discussions of social change. And it chastens us against making naïve assumptions about inclusiveness.
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Featured Image:On the set of Salaami Ish, filmed on Brighton Station,, image by Flickr User Simon Pielow, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Priya Jaikumar is Associate Professor at the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is the author of Cinema at the End of Empire, and several articles and book chapters in publications such as Screen, Cinema Journal, The Moving Image, World Literature Today, Hollywood Abroad, Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, Postcolonial Cinema Studies, Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, The Slumdog Phenomena, Empire and Film and Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender.
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For the further development of its hybrid publication strategy – combining digital and print books and other media – the Institute of Network Cultures is looking for an
Intern with a strong interest in (digital) publishing
3-6 months, 4 days a week, starting February 2018
You will work on international publications in the field of online media in different formats (print, PDF, EPUB). The internship offers both practical experience and a chance to conduct research in the field of hybrid publishing. A strong command of the English language in reading and writing is necessary, as most of the publications are in English. We are looking for someone with a keen interest or background in new media, writing & editing and/or the book industry. It is possible to do research for a thesis within this internship.
The Institute of Network Cultures (INC) is a media research center that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications, and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink as part of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). The institute acts as a framework sustaining several research projects, with a strong focus on publications. For more information see http://networkcultures.org/. For an overview of all INC publications go to http://networkcultures.org/publications. The INC collaborates closely with the PublishingLab.
Internship duties include:
Researching digital publications and developing research proposals in the field;
working with the hybrid publishing workflow;
assisting with the production of new titles, both print and electronic, including editing manuscripts.
The intern will be a part of a small team within a large institution. Other tasks within the team may include:
Attending meetings;
communication and PR;
researching and writing blog posts;
collecting and reviewing interesting and relevant literature;
assisting with other projects in the INC;
being part of the crew at INC events.
We offer:
The opportunity to be part of a dedicated, informal, and inspirational organization with extended international networks;
experience in the front line of new developments in publishing;
a chance to enhance your writing, editing, media, and research skills;
a small monthly compensation.
For further information you can contact Inte Gloerich at inte@networkcultures.org or +31 (0)20 5951865.
Applications: if you are interested please send your resume and cover letter to inte@networkcultures.org before November 26th 2017.
Underneath a blogpost Samuel Moore and Janneke Adema wrote, which was originally published on the LSE Impact Blog, here.
The Radical Open Access Collective launched its new website earlier this week. Open access has always been about more than just improving access to research, and Janneke Adema and Samuel A. Moore here highlight what the Radical OA Collective can offer. A focus on experimentation with new forms of publishing and authorship; the promotion of traditionally underrepresented cultures, languages, and publics; and an understanding of publishing as a relational practice, highlighting and caring for the relationships involved throughout the process, all form part of the Radical OA Collective’s underlying philosophy.
This week saw the launch of a new website for the Radical Open Access Collective, a vibrant community of presses, journals, publishing projects, and organisations all invested in not-for-profit and scholar-led forms of academic publishing. The members of this collective showcase the wide variety of alternative forms and models of open access publishing currently experimented with, mainly in the humanities and social sciences. This in a context where, although open access is now finally gaining ground, the spirit of experimentation that originally fuelled this movement is being progressively sidelined by a growing reliance on and implementation of specific, market-driven open access publishing models (particularly those connected to exorbitant article and book processing charges); models which do not necessarily suit, support or sustain open access publishing in the humanities and social sciences, but which do serve commercial stakeholders’ interests and the current publishing status quo.
The Radical OA Collective reminds us that experimentation with new forms of publishing remains essential, and that open access has always been about more than just improving access to research. As a movement open access has also focused on exploring and promoting not-for-profit, institutional and academic-led publishing alternatives, for example. This is to provide a counterpoint to the commercial legacy system and the vast profits it extracts from our scholarly research and communication interactions. This system has posed specific risks to specialised book publishing in the humanities, to the publication of books by early-career researchers, and to the dissemination of research from those working in the global south or writing in languages other than English; all of which, although essential to sustaining the scholarly conversation, often lack a direct market appeal. To counter this the Radical OA Collective highlights the importance of making publishing more diverse, equitable, and open to change, where it wants to ensure that new and underrepresented cultures of knowledge are able to have a voice. Members of the collective therefore work together to champion the variety of alternative models for scholarly communication that currently exist, and the collective is keen to build alliances with other initiatives interested in building a collaborative and non-competitive publishing ecosystem; one which supports a progressive and multi-polar knowledge commons.
During open access week, we’d like to highlight three examples of what radical open access, and the Radical OA Collective specifically, brings to open access.
1. A focus on experimentation
Members of the collective do not shy away from asking difficult questions about what publishing is and, with that, what it can become. Many initiatives within the collective see their publishing projects as an extension of their own critical work and a way to explore different modes of publishing, often deterred by our (still very paper-centric) established publishing forms and practices. As such they have been keen to experiment with publication forms, models, processes, relations, and agencies, cutting through the stabilisations within scholarly publishing–from the fixed book to the single author–that, often uncritically, have become disciplinary norms. This open-ended critical experimenting has become a guiding principle for many initiatives to explore the potentially more politically and ethically progressive possibilities made possible by technological developments and digital tools; to investigate how these might impact on the ways in which research will be conducted, disseminated and consumed in the future. As an ongoing critical process, experimenting can therefore be seen as a form of intervention into the object-formation and increasing marketisation of publishing and academia.
Many of the projects involved in the collective see open access as essential to enabling these new forms of (digital) experimentation. This may be through communal authoring and editing of wiki books (see Open Humanities Press’ Living Books about Life series); anonymous or collective authorship (in the case of an Uncertain Commons, for example); or multimodal or digital-only publications, publishing platforms and software (including ground-breaking initiatives such as Vectors and Scalar, but also newer projects, such as electric press and Textshop Experiments) next to projects that want to focus on what openness means for images and visual forms of communication (i.e. Photomediations Machine) for example. But alongside experiments such as these we also want to highlight projects that aim to cut across both disciplinary boundaries and distinctions between practice and theory (for example Goldsmiths Press, which also focuses on publishing literary and artistic works), as well as scholarly communities that are experimenting with the creation of new communities and social networks to share research and establish cross-disciplinary alliances (from MediaCommons Press, to The BABEL Working Group and Humanities Commons).
2. Underrepresented cultures
One of the main motivations underlying the Radical OA Collective concerns the promotion of diversity and equitability within academic publishing, and this entails the creation of environments where traditionally underrepresented cultures can fully participate. This includes presses and alliances that promote publishing and collaboration in specific regions; for example CLACSO, which brings together hundreds of research centres and graduate schools in the social sciences and humanities, predominantly in Latin American countries, or African Minds, which, next to publishing works from African academics or organisations, has conducted in depth research on the state of the university press in Africa. Members also promote publishing in different languages; see, for example, Éditions Science et Bien Commun, a Quebec-based press publishing research by and for francophone countries in the Global South, or meson press, which (next to books in English) is keen to publish and translate media theory books in German.
There is also a focus on providing opportunities to early-career researchers to publish, and not only to publish but to help them directly with the publishing process and familiarise themselves with it. Mattering Press, which originates from a peer-support group of early-career researchers, in particular wants to stimulate those at the beginning of their academic careers, as do publications such as Capacious:Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, dedicated to the publication of writings and creative works by degree-seeking students. punctum books is well-known for providing space for the publication of works of so-called “para-academic” theorists and practitioners, often independent or precariously employed researchers or those in so-called “alt-ac” positions. These projects and the collective as a whole are dedicated to opening up scholarship to publics that are new or currently underserved, including those writing on niche topics or conducting experimental research for which the commercial publishing market doesn’t always provide a space.
3. Ethics of care
One of the things for which the Radical OA Collective stands out is its members’ focus on the ethics and politics of publishing. For example, many initiatives foreground an ethics of care, as part of which publishing is understood as a relational practice, highlighting and caring for the relationships involved throughout the publishing process, from authors, editors and reviewers to typesetters, copy-editors, indexers and beyond. This involves, amongst others, paying, rewarding or otherwise acknowledging people fairly for their labour wherever possible, while ensuring that the efforts of volunteers are not exploited or overly relied upon. Well aware of the high amounts of volunteer labour that academic-led initiatives depend on, the collective has made this one of its focal points, writing about and discussing the diverse forms of labour academic publishing relies upon, arguing for it to be valued more in various ways (that are not necessarily monetary). A focus on labour issues is all the more important in a predominantly commercial publishing environment, given the large amounts of academic volunteer labour (from peer reviewing to editing, to liking and bookmarking and building relationships in exchange for usage data in SSRNs) that is needed to sustain it and maintain the exorbitant profits its stakeholders have come to expect.
The Radical OA Collective therefore seeks to redirect this volunteer labour where possible towards more progressive forms of publishing, for example by shifting it away from commercial profit-driven publishers and gifting it to developing not-for-profit open access projects instead. Related to this is a commitment to taking time and care with regard to the published object itself, something that is often lacking in profit-oriented modes of publishing. But perhaps most important, as Eileen Joy of punctum books writes, is for the collective to care for “ourselves and each other” in the face of marketised cultures of higher education that require researchers to work long hours and think of themselves as “brands”:
“This would be to think of Community, or the Collective, as a sort of ‘mutual admiration society’, but also as a Convalescent Ward, in which ‘taking care’ (of ourselves and each other) would be more important than ‘performing’ according to so-called ‘professional’ standards and protocols.”
Next to bringing together this community of people eager to change publishing, to make it better and more just, the collective wants to support other academics eager to set up their own presses and projects, or those disillusioned with the commercial solutions currently on offer. We share advice and offer support from those within the community who have already gained experience with publishing in this manner and are willing to help others in a horizontal and non-competitive manner. We have started to formalise this through the creation of an information portal with links to resources on funding opportunities for open access books, open-source publishing tools, guidelines on editing standards, ethical publishing and diversity in publishing, and OA literature useful to not-for-profit publishing endeavours. We want to turn this into a toolkit for not-for-profit publishers in the future (and this will be of use not only to academic-led presses, but hopefully also to university presses, and library-run and society publishers, for example). We have also set up a directory of academic-led presses, to help legitimise this form of publishing as a “model” and make scholars aware that there are publishing alternatives out there.
If you run a not-for-profit OA publishing initiative or are interested in starting your own scholar-led publishing project, we encourage you to join the Radical OA mailing list and help us further build this supportive and inclusive publishing environment.
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
The Radical OA Collective reminds us that experimentation with new forms of publishing remains essential, and that open access has always been about more than just improving access to research. As a movement open access has also focused on exploring and promoting not-for-profit, institutional and academic-led publishing alternatives, for example. This is to provide a counterpoint to the commercial legacy system and the vast profits it extracts from our scholarly research and communication interactions. This system has posed specific risks to specialised book publishing in the humanities, to the publication of books by early-career researchers, and to the dissemination of research from those working in the global south or writing in languages other than English; all of which, although essential to sustaining the scholarly conversation, often lack a direct market appeal. To counter this the Radical OA Collective highlights the importance of making publishing more diverse, equitable, and open to change, where it wants to ensure that new and underrepresented cultures of knowledge are able to have a voice. Members of the collective therefore work together to champion the variety of alternative models for scholarly communication that currently exist, and the collective is keen to build alliances with other initiatives interested in building a collaborative and non-competitive publishing ecosystem; one which supports a progressive and multi-polar knowledge commons.