From the Footholds of Media Studies: Debating Infrastructures Past and Present

The Promises and Fractures of Infrastructures: Infrastructural Imaginaries and the Realities of our Built World

About

I begin my talk by recounting how and why my study of television distribution, more than a decade ago, sparked my interest and thinking on Infrastructure. This recounting has its footholds in grasping broadcast distribution as a site of a networked media economy and infrastructures. From this context, I situate my learnings from this research in light of the recent interest and scholarship on infrastructures more widely. In doing so, I consciously attend to past and present of infrastructures outside the media economy. This is geared to understand how the emergent, wider study of infrastructures have elicited the intellectual curiosity and attention of media studies scholars. Of particular interest to me are the incremental questions posed in this scholarship, the concepts evoked, and ways of grasping the very idea of infrastructures. In the last section of my talk, I reflect on the challenges facing the area of study being termed as Infrastructure Studies, and ways in which its multi-disciplinary scholarship can move ahead. In particular, I spotlight the needs and constraints involved in Historicising, Sectoralizing, and Disciplining the subject matter of Infrastructure Studies.

Speaker

Vibodh Parthasarathi

Associate Professor
Centre for Culture, Media and Governance
Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi 

Vibodh Parthasarathi maintains a multidisciplinary interest in media policy, digital transitions, and policy literacy. Associate Professor at the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, he has been invited as a visiting scholar at University of Queensland, KU Leuven, University of Helsinki, Lund University, and IIT Bombay.  Vibodh has been at the forefront of media policy research in India, and a winner of numerous grants, including from Ford Foundation, Canada’s IDRC, SSRC, and University Grants Commission. Widely published in scientific journals, his co-edited works include the best-selling Platform Capitalism in India (Palgrave 2020), the critically  acclaimed  double-volume Indian Media Economy (OUP 2018), and the triptych Communication Processes (Sage 2007, 2009, 2010; republished Aakar 2023). His innovations in teaching media governance have been put together in Pedagogy in Practice (Bloomsbury 2022). Vibodh serves on the expert community of Media and Journalism Research Centre, on the founding editorial board of Platforms & Society, and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Digital Media and Policy. A frequent invitee to public and expert discussions on media policy, Vibodh has a Masters from Erasmus University, and a Ph.D. from University of Helsinki. His work is @Academia

Event information

DATE

Thursday, February 13, 2025

TIME

1:00 - 2:15 p.m.

LOCATION

Projection Theater
Northwestern Qatar
Northwestern University in Qatar
Education City, Qatar
+974 4454 5100
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