Keynote Address
Moderated by Jing Wang
Wednesday March 22nd, 4:30-6:30pm EST
Room 500
Annenberg School For Communication, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
Followed by a Reception at the Annenberg Plaza Lobby
Purnima Mankekar
Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Purnima Mankekar has conducted interdisciplinary research on television, film, and digital media, and on publics/public cultures with a focus on the politics of affect. She has completed a book on affective labor and futurities in the Business Process Outsourcing industry in Bengaluru, India titled Future Tense: Affective Labor and Disjunctive Temporalities (with Akhil Gupta). Her new ethnographic project is on the sociopolitical implications of Artificial Intelligence in India.
Her teaching interests include digital and “virtual” anthropology; theories of affect; feminist anthropology and ethnography; postcolonial and women of color feminism; anthropological approaches to sexuality, queer theory, and queer of color critique; and Asian American and South Asian Studies.
She is the author of Screening Culture, Viewing Politics (Duke; 1999) and Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality (2015; Duke 2015); Caste and Outcast (co-edited with Gordon Chang and Akhil Gupta; Stanford University Press; 2002) and Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia (co-edited with Louisa Schein; Duke; 2013). She has been awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Duke University (1997-98); a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2000-01); a Stanford University Humanities Center fellowship (2005-06); and a Senior Research Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2013).
Keynote: Genealogies of Hate and Algorithmic Archaeologies
My talk takes as a point of entry three events that have occurred in India: the lynching of Muslim men who are suspected of eating or selling beef, the erotics of hate enacted in campaigns against alleged “Love Jihad,” and mutations of caste violence in Digital India. My objective is to ask what it might mean to study such phenomena. My concern here is not methodological or how to conduct this research. Instead, my interest is epistemological, that is, in the kinds of knowledges we must produce to understand the imbrication of genealogies of hate with algorithmic archaeologies. Put another way, I am concerned with an epistemological project that is motivated by particular forms of knowledge production. I propose that making sense of these brutal killings entails extending an archaeology of contemporary information technology to foreground corporeality and embodiment; affect; and, as a counter-narrative to paradigms of semiocapital and virality, a feminist insistence on situated knowledges. Borrowing from Laura Marks’ powerful explication of “suspicious evidence,” I am interested in how a rigorously empirical archaeology of contemporary information technology, algorithms, and artificial intelligence must seek out histories of “forgettings, misappropriations, and disavowals” (2010:25).
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