This introductory workshop is designed to introduce King's students from the Contemporary India module in the MSc Global Affairs programme to the Artefacts of Resistance project as a work in progress.

Artefacts of Resistance: creating archives of transnational protest movements, by Dr Srilata Sircar from the King’s India Institute in the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy and Manu Luksch from Somerset House Studios, will create a digital media archive documenting contemporary protest movements that builds on transnational solidarity networks. 

The workshop will concentrate on the conceptual motivation, (back-end, researcher-facing) technical infrastructure, and front-end design, while also briefly pointing out the performative aspect of the project (which will be developed later in the summer). 

Registered participants will have been given access to the back-end archive in advance and will need to bring their own devices (laptop/tablet - ideally with a keyboard). 

After a contextualising introduction and guide through basic operations of the archive, participants will together develop ideas for novel metadata tagging, ‘smart’ searching, and embedding of items from the archive in different public-facing websites. 

There will also be a more political/philosophical discussion of the conflicting demands of public accessibility to an archive, the safety of contributors, and moderation/curation of material.  

Students of the Contemporary India module in the MSc Global Affairs programme can register here.

Bios

Dr Srilata Sircar is Lecturer in India and Global Affairs at the King's India Institute. She received her PhD in Human Geography from Lund University, Sweden in 2017. Her research focuses on the politics of caste and gender in postcolonial South Asia across urban and agrarian settings. She is the convener of the Confronting Caste podcast and webinar series. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as Geoforum and Gender, Place and Culture. She has contributed to publications like The Conversation, The Hindu, and Feminism in India.

Manu is Roberta Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University (2021), a Resident Artist at Somerset House, Artist in Residence at Birkbeck’s School of Law, and formerly Open Society Fellow 2018/19. She is founding member of ambientTV.NET (Ambient Information Systems), a long-time collaboration with composer-mathematician Mukul Patel.

This workshop is part of King’s Edge, a hub of activities and events that seek to inspire university experience and enrich students’ life at King's.