IRC19 – Proposed Session – #CallingOutAndIn

Internet Researchers Conference 2019 – #List – Call for Sessions

Session Plan

Lists are empowering; they offer a method of curating—things, experiences, people, events. As elements of an archive, they are a powerful tool for including and marking something as important. A list is not a neutral collection of objects; it comes into being within a specific logic, an articulated or unseen/unspecified rules, or criteria by which these objects are either included or excluded. In the context of the #MeTooIndia movement, lists have been weaponized by survivors of sexual abuse or harassment, serving to call out behaviours that for many years had been normalized, accepted, or simply ignored, but a patriarchal system. The list, in this instance, becomes a means around which survivors can rally and find support, while also being a tool for punitive action of various kinds, from legal to administrative to social. While “naming and shaming” (or naming to shame) was the purpose that gained currency in the popular discourse, we would like to explore the multiple meanings and experiences that underlie and are implicated by the act of listing. With specific but not exclusive attention to the list that is commonly referred to as LoSHA, the papers on this panel approach the logic and culture of lists and listing as modalities of feminist action.

To begin with, Usha Raman looks at calling out through listing as a meaning making, legitimating, even therapeutic act for those who participate in the creation of the list as well as those who engage with it in different ways. Radhika Gajjala, along with Riddhima Sharma and Tarishi Varma then go on to discuss the role of feminist digital narratives as evidence and the ways in which they could transgress and rupture institutional/legal/academic institutions and infrastructures. Following this, Pallavi Guha discusses the #MetooIndia movement as the second wave to #LoSha movement, which started in 2017, and points to who and what is still left out of the online narrative of sexual harrassment. Sai Amulya Komarraju applies Sara Ahmed’s ideas about affective economies to look at the responses of feminists and feminist organizations to the two waves of #metoo in India and at the responses of the state and the judiciary following incidents of sexual harassment at work. Finally, Sugandha Sehgal asks, in the context of #LoSHA and #MeTooIndia, how the digital list as spreadable and replicable social media content proliferates online, while also exploring the opportunities digital listing as a form of activism offers to contemporary feminist praxis in the Global South.

Session Team

Usha Raman, professor, Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad.

Radhika Gajjala, professor of Media and Communication Studies and American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University.

Riddhima Sharma, is a doctoral scholar at Bowling Green State University.

Tarishi Varma, is a doctoral scholar at Bowling Green State University.

Pallavi Guha, assistant professor of communication and new media, Towson University, USA.

Sai Amulya Komarraju is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad.

Sugandha Sehgal is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.