Sahana Udupa
Biographic Data
| ID | 121383 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sahana Udupa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sahana |
| FAMILY NAME | Udupa |
| SIGNATURE | UDUPA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3647-9570 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Online anti-immigrant discourse in Germany: Ethnographically backed analysis of user comments
This article investigates discourse- and language-specific features of online anti-immigrant extreme speech in Germany. We analyze a context rich dataset collected and annotated through a collaborative effort involving fact-checkers, ethnographers and natural language processing (NLP) researchers. Using a bottom-up annotation scheme, we capture the nuances of the discourse and develop a typology of lexical innovations. The analysis combines thema…
Tackling online misogyny in political campaigns: Promise and limitations of artificial intelligence
Studies on the resurgence of right-wing regimes in the Global South have lately offered more evidence for how misogynistic attacks against dissenting voices constitute important elements of populist rhetoric online. A significant recent trend is the active incorporation of gendered narratives within digital influence and disinformation strategies aimed at securing political gains for sponsoring interest groups. Based on the case of online misogyn…
Shadow Politics: Commercial Digital Influencers, 'Data,' and Disinformation in India
This article builds on ethnographic research among an emergent group of self-styled political consultants and digital influencers in India to highlight the contours of what is defined here as 'shadow politics' and its implications for disinformation research and policy. Shadow politics refers to the dual structure of 'official' and 'unofficial' streams of campaign organization that can integrate diverse influence actors with the party campaign sy…
Critical Academy under Attack: A Panel Discussion
Scholars working within different critical theory traditions are not unfamiliar with the experience of encountering dismissive representations of their work, including from parts of the academy that disavow the politics of academic research and knowledge production. However, the political project of delegitimizing critical research and scholarship seems to be intensifying. Signifiers like “critical theory”, “critical race theory” and “gender theo…
Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media
Ethical scaling for content moderation: Extreme speech and the (in)significance of artificial intelligence
In this article, we present new empirical evidence to demonstrate the severe limitations of existing machine learning content moderation methods to keep pace with, let alone stay ahead of, hateful language online. Building on the collaborative coding project "AI4Dignity" we outline the ambiguities and complexities of annotating problematic text in AI-assisted moderation systems. We diagnose the shortcomings of the content moderation and natural l…
Multiple interfaces: Social media, religious politics, and national (un)belonging in India and the diaspora
In India and its diaspora in the UK, online activities of various sorts-tweeting, blogging, messaging, trolling, and tagging-have become central to tensions surrounding religion's presence in public life and the stakes of belonging to the nation. Three clusters of social media practices undergird these digital mediations: piety, surveillance, and fun. Such practices reveal how internet-enabled mediations reenergize religion as a political categor…
Social Media: Power and Politics
By centering and unpacking the “social” in social media, anthropological scholarship has drawn on its disciplinary strengths in excavating the social, cultural, and everyday dimensions of mediated milieus, offering, in turn, some unique contributions toward understanding the political cultures and sociocultural ramifications of internet‐enabled social media. While social media have been the subject of intense scrutiny in other disciplines, anthro…
Shadow Politics: Front Stage and the Veneer of Volunteerism
This article proposes the metaphor of “shadow” to examine two interrelated aspects of digital politics in India: online surveillance of politically inclined actors and datafied shadow texts aimed at managing front stage politics. The specificity of “shadow politics” emerges from ongoing transformations that are deeply interwoven with the digital, first with the data driven confidence around the “total certainty” of tracking and calibrating voter …
Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech
Millennial India”: Global Digital Politics in Context
In this special issue, we examine the two decades of digital media expansion in India, the world’s second largest Internet user domain, to propose the idea of “millennial India.” Millennial India highlights the processes of digitalization as a distinct sociopolitical moment entailing new conditions of communication, and the stakes of “millennials” who are drawn to digital media to articulate political matters. These processes, we suggest, have le…
Enterprise Hindutva and social media in urban India
This paper delineates ‘enterprise Hindutva’ as a mediatized form of Hindu nationalism shaped largely by the affordances of social media and the cultural practices surrounding them in urban India. Enterprise Hindutva is argumentative, experientially voluntary and capable of working with contradictions. It inhabits the ideological project envisioned as a range rather than a point of convergence. Enterprise Hindutva suggests that it is through the v…
Media As Politics in South Asia
Viral video
This chapter carefully examines the protest scene on the Azad Maidan which turned into a "riot" on that fateful day of 2012 and its aftermath, to pry open questions of mediation that underlie religious imagining and political friction in South Asia, in times of rapid digital media growth. It draws upon ethnographic analysis of observations and interviews with police officers, cyber lawyers, Muslim organizations and rally protestors in Mumbai city…
Gaali cultures: The politics of abusive exchange on social media
On the rapidly expanding social media in India, online users are witness to a routine exchange of abusive terms and accusations with choicest swearwords hurled even for the seemingly non-inflammatory political debates. This article draws upon anthropology of insult to uncover the distinctness, if at all, of online abuse as a means for political participation as well as for the encumbering it provokes and relations of domination it reproduces as a…
Fast time religion: News, speculation, and discipline in India
In this article, I take the expanding religious programs on private news television in India, and Bangalore city in particular, as a lens to explore new intersections between media and Hindu religiosities, and the conditions that facilitate synergies between religious enterprise, media creativity, and economic mediation in a liberalizing era. I suggest that a new confluence of temporalities underlies this synergy. As the linear progressive narrat…
Indian Transnationalism Online: New Perspectives on Diaspora, by Ajaya Kumar Sahoo and Johannes G. de Kruijf (eds)
Changing with The Times of India (Bangalore): Remaking a post-political media field
This article examines the changing relationship between the elite English-language press and its interface with urban politics in India's best known high-tech centre, Bangalore. Print journalism remains a core feature of India's growing multi-media news field, and this article critically analyses the profound changes in the political role of news in the last two decades. The changing relationship between the dominant news media and the state in t…
Desire and democratic visibility: News media’s twin avatar in urban India
Drawing on empirical explorations of rapid media expansion and urban transformation in India, this article builds a theoretical model of desire–visibility disjunction which seeks to overcome the limitations of a public–private division running through journalism literature. This framework, I suggest, could advance media theory by drawing attention to recent urban transformation, globalization and the specificities of news cultures in urban India.…
News media and contention over "the local" in urban India
Exploring the highly competitive bilingual news field in urban India, I illustrate how localization of news content has led to conflictual discourses around who should constitute "the local" and for what end. Mediatized contests over "the local" frame urban politics along linguistic and cultural divides, articulated through populist challenges to neoliberal media discourses of "the global local." In turning a critical eye to these mediatized cont…
Print communalism: The press and the non-Brahmin movement in early Mysore, 1900-30
The emergence of a modern public sphere is attributed, in part, to the expansion of the print media, with newspapers playing a key role in the formation of an 'imagined community', usually imagined as a national unity. However, the role of the press in the non-Brahmin movement in princely Mysore shows that rather than shaping the formation of a homogenous and expandable rational public, newspapers identified themselves with and promoted the cause…
Enterprise Hindutva and social media in urban India
This paper delineates ‘enterprise Hindutva’ as a mediatized form of Hindu nationalism shaped largely by the affordances of social media and the cultural practices surrounding them in urban India. Enterprise Hindutva is argumentative, experientially voluntary and capable of working with contradictions. It inhabits the ideological project envisioned as a range rather than a point of convergence. Enterprise Hindutva suggests that it is through the v…
Gaali cultures: The politics of abusive exchange on social media
On the rapidly expanding social media in India, online users are witness to a routine exchange of abusive terms and accusations with choicest swearwords hurled even for the seemingly non-inflammatory political debates. This article draws upon anthropology of insult to uncover the distinctness, if at all, of online abuse as a means for political participation as well as for the encumbering it provokes and relations of domination it reproduces as a…
Millennial India”: Global Digital Politics in Context
In this special issue, we examine the two decades of digital media expansion in India, the world’s second largest Internet user domain, to propose the idea of “millennial India.” Millennial India highlights the processes of digitalization as a distinct sociopolitical moment entailing new conditions of communication, and the stakes of “millennials” who are drawn to digital media to articulate political matters. These processes, we suggest, have le…
News media and contention over "the local" in urban India
Exploring the highly competitive bilingual news field in urban India, I illustrate how localization of news content has led to conflictual discourses around who should constitute "the local" and for what end. Mediatized contests over "the local" frame urban politics along linguistic and cultural divides, articulated through populist challenges to neoliberal media discourses of "the global local." In turning a critical eye to these mediatized cont…
Print communalism: The press and the non-Brahmin movement in early Mysore, 1900-30
The emergence of a modern public sphere is attributed, in part, to the expansion of the print media, with newspapers playing a key role in the formation of an 'imagined community', usually imagined as a national unity. However, the role of the press in the non-Brahmin movement in princely Mysore shows that rather than shaping the formation of a homogenous and expandable rational public, newspapers identified themselves with and promoted the cause…
Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media
Ethical scaling for content moderation: Extreme speech and the (in)significance of artificial intelligence
In this article, we present new empirical evidence to demonstrate the severe limitations of existing machine learning content moderation methods to keep pace with, let alone stay ahead of, hateful language online. Building on the collaborative coding project "AI4Dignity" we outline the ambiguities and complexities of annotating problematic text in AI-assisted moderation systems. We diagnose the shortcomings of the content moderation and natural l…
Critical Academy under Attack: A Panel Discussion
Scholars working within different critical theory traditions are not unfamiliar with the experience of encountering dismissive representations of their work, including from parts of the academy that disavow the politics of academic research and knowledge production. However, the political project of delegitimizing critical research and scholarship seems to be intensifying. Signifiers like “critical theory”, “critical race theory” and “gender theo…
Changing with The Times of India (Bangalore): Remaking a post-political media field
This article examines the changing relationship between the elite English-language press and its interface with urban politics in India's best known high-tech centre, Bangalore. Print journalism remains a core feature of India's growing multi-media news field, and this article critically analyses the profound changes in the political role of news in the last two decades. The changing relationship between the dominant news media and the state in t…
Multiple interfaces: Social media, religious politics, and national (un)belonging in India and the diaspora
In India and its diaspora in the UK, online activities of various sorts-tweeting, blogging, messaging, trolling, and tagging-have become central to tensions surrounding religion's presence in public life and the stakes of belonging to the nation. Three clusters of social media practices undergird these digital mediations: piety, surveillance, and fun. Such practices reveal how internet-enabled mediations reenergize religion as a political categor…
Tackling online misogyny in political campaigns: Promise and limitations of artificial intelligence
Studies on the resurgence of right-wing regimes in the Global South have lately offered more evidence for how misogynistic attacks against dissenting voices constitute important elements of populist rhetoric online. A significant recent trend is the active incorporation of gendered narratives within digital influence and disinformation strategies aimed at securing political gains for sponsoring interest groups. Based on the case of online misogyn…
Shadow Politics: Commercial Digital Influencers, 'Data,' and Disinformation in India
This article builds on ethnographic research among an emergent group of self-styled political consultants and digital influencers in India to highlight the contours of what is defined here as 'shadow politics' and its implications for disinformation research and policy. Shadow politics refers to the dual structure of 'official' and 'unofficial' streams of campaign organization that can integrate diverse influence actors with the party campaign sy…
Fast time religion: News, speculation, and discipline in India
In this article, I take the expanding religious programs on private news television in India, and Bangalore city in particular, as a lens to explore new intersections between media and Hindu religiosities, and the conditions that facilitate synergies between religious enterprise, media creativity, and economic mediation in a liberalizing era. I suggest that a new confluence of temporalities underlies this synergy. As the linear progressive narrat…
Desire and democratic visibility: News media’s twin avatar in urban India
Drawing on empirical explorations of rapid media expansion and urban transformation in India, this article builds a theoretical model of desire–visibility disjunction which seeks to overcome the limitations of a public–private division running through journalism literature. This framework, I suggest, could advance media theory by drawing attention to recent urban transformation, globalization and the specificities of news cultures in urban India.…
Print communalism: The press and the non-Brahmin movement in early Mysore, 1900-30
The emergence of a modern public sphere is attributed, in part, to the expansion of the print media, with newspapers playing a key role in the formation of an 'imagined community', usually imagined as a national unity. However, the role of the press in the non-Brahmin movement in princely Mysore shows that rather than shaping the formation of a homogenous and expandable rational public, newspapers identified themselves with and promoted the cause…
Changing with The Times of India (Bangalore): Remaking a post-political media field
This article examines the changing relationship between the elite English-language press and its interface with urban politics in India's best known high-tech centre, Bangalore. Print journalism remains a core feature of India's growing multi-media news field, and this article critically analyses the profound changes in the political role of news in the last two decades. The changing relationship between the dominant news media and the state in t…
Desire and democratic visibility: News media’s twin avatar in urban India
Drawing on empirical explorations of rapid media expansion and urban transformation in India, this article builds a theoretical model of desire–visibility disjunction which seeks to overcome the limitations of a public–private division running through journalism literature. This framework, I suggest, could advance media theory by drawing attention to recent urban transformation, globalization and the specificities of news cultures in urban India.…
News media and contention over "the local" in urban India
Exploring the highly competitive bilingual news field in urban India, I illustrate how localization of news content has led to conflictual discourses around who should constitute "the local" and for what end. Mediatized contests over "the local" frame urban politics along linguistic and cultural divides, articulated through populist challenges to neoliberal media discourses of "the global local." In turning a critical eye to these mediatized cont…
Indian Transnationalism Online: New Perspectives on Diaspora, by Ajaya Kumar Sahoo and Johannes G. de Kruijf (eds)
Fast time religion: News, speculation, and discipline in India
In this article, I take the expanding religious programs on private news television in India, and Bangalore city in particular, as a lens to explore new intersections between media and Hindu religiosities, and the conditions that facilitate synergies between religious enterprise, media creativity, and economic mediation in a liberalizing era. I suggest that a new confluence of temporalities underlies this synergy. As the linear progressive narrat…
Media As Politics in South Asia
Viral video
This chapter carefully examines the protest scene on the Azad Maidan which turned into a "riot" on that fateful day of 2012 and its aftermath, to pry open questions of mediation that underlie religious imagining and political friction in South Asia, in times of rapid digital media growth. It draws upon ethnographic analysis of observations and interviews with police officers, cyber lawyers, Muslim organizations and rally protestors in Mumbai city…
Gaali cultures: The politics of abusive exchange on social media
On the rapidly expanding social media in India, online users are witness to a routine exchange of abusive terms and accusations with choicest swearwords hurled even for the seemingly non-inflammatory political debates. This article draws upon anthropology of insult to uncover the distinctness, if at all, of online abuse as a means for political participation as well as for the encumbering it provokes and relations of domination it reproduces as a…
Enterprise Hindutva and social media in urban India
This paper delineates ‘enterprise Hindutva’ as a mediatized form of Hindu nationalism shaped largely by the affordances of social media and the cultural practices surrounding them in urban India. Enterprise Hindutva is argumentative, experientially voluntary and capable of working with contradictions. It inhabits the ideological project envisioned as a range rather than a point of convergence. Enterprise Hindutva suggests that it is through the v…
Millennial India”: Global Digital Politics in Context
In this special issue, we examine the two decades of digital media expansion in India, the world’s second largest Internet user domain, to propose the idea of “millennial India.” Millennial India highlights the processes of digitalization as a distinct sociopolitical moment entailing new conditions of communication, and the stakes of “millennials” who are drawn to digital media to articulate political matters. These processes, we suggest, have le…
Social Media: Power and Politics
By centering and unpacking the “social” in social media, anthropological scholarship has drawn on its disciplinary strengths in excavating the social, cultural, and everyday dimensions of mediated milieus, offering, in turn, some unique contributions toward understanding the political cultures and sociocultural ramifications of internet‐enabled social media. While social media have been the subject of intense scrutiny in other disciplines, anthro…
Shadow Politics: Front Stage and the Veneer of Volunteerism
This article proposes the metaphor of “shadow” to examine two interrelated aspects of digital politics in India: online surveillance of politically inclined actors and datafied shadow texts aimed at managing front stage politics. The specificity of “shadow politics” emerges from ongoing transformations that are deeply interwoven with the digital, first with the data driven confidence around the “total certainty” of tracking and calibrating voter …
Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech
Critical Academy under Attack: A Panel Discussion
Scholars working within different critical theory traditions are not unfamiliar with the experience of encountering dismissive representations of their work, including from parts of the academy that disavow the politics of academic research and knowledge production. However, the political project of delegitimizing critical research and scholarship seems to be intensifying. Signifiers like “critical theory”, “critical race theory” and “gender theo…
Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media
Ethical scaling for content moderation: Extreme speech and the (in)significance of artificial intelligence
In this article, we present new empirical evidence to demonstrate the severe limitations of existing machine learning content moderation methods to keep pace with, let alone stay ahead of, hateful language online. Building on the collaborative coding project "AI4Dignity" we outline the ambiguities and complexities of annotating problematic text in AI-assisted moderation systems. We diagnose the shortcomings of the content moderation and natural l…
Multiple interfaces: Social media, religious politics, and national (un)belonging in India and the diaspora
In India and its diaspora in the UK, online activities of various sorts-tweeting, blogging, messaging, trolling, and tagging-have become central to tensions surrounding religion's presence in public life and the stakes of belonging to the nation. Three clusters of social media practices undergird these digital mediations: piety, surveillance, and fun. Such practices reveal how internet-enabled mediations reenergize religion as a political categor…
Online anti-immigrant discourse in Germany: Ethnographically backed analysis of user comments
This article investigates discourse- and language-specific features of online anti-immigrant extreme speech in Germany. We analyze a context rich dataset collected and annotated through a collaborative effort involving fact-checkers, ethnographers and natural language processing (NLP) researchers. Using a bottom-up annotation scheme, we capture the nuances of the discourse and develop a typology of lexical innovations. The analysis combines thema…
Tackling online misogyny in political campaigns: Promise and limitations of artificial intelligence
Studies on the resurgence of right-wing regimes in the Global South have lately offered more evidence for how misogynistic attacks against dissenting voices constitute important elements of populist rhetoric online. A significant recent trend is the active incorporation of gendered narratives within digital influence and disinformation strategies aimed at securing political gains for sponsoring interest groups. Based on the case of online misogyn…
Shadow Politics: Commercial Digital Influencers, 'Data,' and Disinformation in India
This article builds on ethnographic research among an emergent group of self-styled political consultants and digital influencers in India to highlight the contours of what is defined here as 'shadow politics' and its implications for disinformation research and policy. Shadow politics refers to the dual structure of 'official' and 'unofficial' streams of campaign organization that can integrate diverse influence actors with the party campaign sy…
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Media studies (10 works) · Law (9 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Social media (6 works)