Adrian Athique
Biographic Data
| ID | 139323 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adrian Athique |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adrian |
| FAMILY NAME | Athique |
| SIGNATURE | ATHIQUE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9692-4421 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Intersectoral capital movement and repositioning of television in the Indian media economy
With the growth of digital streaming platforms, the Indian media economy is witnessing widespread changes that challenge the business models of traditional media sectors. The article attempts to trace the overall movement of investment capital between the television sector and other sectors of the economy as a consequence of the digital transition. The study uses a combination of network analysis and qualitative analysis to detail a tectonic shif…
Navigating Digital Identities: Instagram, Postcolonial Esthetics, and Indonesian Youth Culture
This article examines how Indonesian youth strategically navigate Instagram to shape their digital identities through practices deeply entangled with postcolonial esthetics and global consumerism. Based on visual analysis of Instagram account, participant observation, and in-depth interviews, the study highlights how users create and manage dual accounts—a main account curated to meet social expectations and an alternate account used to explore m…
Asian platform capital: An overview
In the introduction to this special section, we interrogate the question of capital in platform capitalism. We argue that the present paradigm for exploring platform capitalism emphasizes procedures and infrastructures of datafication, but tends to neglect the strategic intent of capital. We therefore revisit notions of ‘data capital’ and ‘platform capital’ that rest upon the broad hegemony of ‘Big Tech’ and an assumed equivalence between data an…
Super apps as escrow platforms: An ecosystem analysis of Grab Indonesia
In this paper, we explore the Southeast Asian super app Grab as an exemplar of how digital platforms function as transactional infrastructures. We focus on Grab’s operations in Indonesia, where it has become the leading peer-to-peer (P2P) payment provider and a leading actor in the ‘financial inclusion’ of unbanked and underbanked populations. The foundational basis of our argument is that Grab should be understood as a financial business rather …
Household platforms as transactional infrastructures: The case of Urban Company
Much of the literature on platform labor in the Global South has focused upon the hyper-visible workforces of urban transport and influencers in the attention economy. Nonetheless, there have been significant attempts to ‘platformize’ the often invisible economies of domestic labor. In this article, we interrogate the case of Urban Company, a household platform offering domestic services in urban India. UC offers its upper middle class clientele …
Abot kamay: Embedding digital transactions in the Philippines
In this article, our principal interest is in the meaning-making of local users as digital transactions platforms become more prevalent in the everyday exchange cultures of the Philippines. Revisiting Polanyi's concept of embeddedness, we present an ethnographic study showing how disparate communities in Metro Manila are adapting their transactional practices in line with transaction platform affordances. Highlighting the Filipino concept of ‘ ab…
Platform Capitalism in India
Integrated commodities in the digital economy
At the heart of the digital economy is the willful imposition of a powerful combination of hardware and software, time and data, surveillance, prediction and behavourial control. This article argues that a central ambition of digital society has been the pursuit of an integrated commodity form. The novelty of this integrated commodity stems not only from the convergence of production and consumption but also from the subsumption of sociability it…
Extraordinary issue: Coronavirus, crisis and communication
It does not need to be said that we live in extraordinary times. The majority of the world's population are living under some form of movement restrictions, and our daily work, sustenance and sociability have been almost entirely mediatized. As scholars of media and communication, there are critical developments in play that deserve our attention and our voice, and Media International Australia is pleased to offer this first selection of articles…
Market matters: Interdependencies in the Indian media economy
In the complex operations of the Indian media economy, the phrase 'media markets' requires careful consideration as an analytical concept. As a noun, 'media markets' is typically used to refer to a spread of media businesses and/or consumer sectors. Closer examination reveals that there tend to be multiple markets operating simultaneously within any media business (for products, capital, labour, audience, etc.). This implies an 'economy of market…
The Politics of Digital India: Between Local Compulsions and Transnational Pressures
Transforming India into a digital state has been an objective of successive governments in India. However, the digital, by its very nature, is a capricious, multi-dimensional entity. Its operationalization across multiple sectors in India has highlighted the fact that the digital compact with publics in India is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, devices such as mobile phones have enabled access and efficiencies, and on the other, they have incr…
A great leap of faith: The cashless agenda in Digital India
This article assesses the rationale for India’s November 2016 demonetization, in terms of its origins and impact over the following year. I argue that this intervention was conceived and understood as part of a larger international monetary experiment. The article draws upon international media commentary, impact assessments by Indian scholars and the professed goals of the Government of India. Having established a direct link between demonetizat…
Media, civilization and the international order
This article is intended to provoke debate around the assumed relationships between media, culture and civilization. To begin with, it considers how the concept of civilization has been framed, and periodically re-framed, in media theory by shifts in the international order of communication. In parallel with this historiography, the article revisits a body of research that explored the evolution of television audiences in alignment with the cultu…
Intellectual Balkanization or Globalization: The Future of Communication Research Publishing
Digital Transactions in Asia: Economic, Informational, and Social Exchanges
Soft power, culture and modernity: Responses to Bollywood films in Thailand and the Philippines
India's official embrace of the soft power concept and the popular equation of Bollywood films with India's international image are discussed here with reference to their contemporary convergence. This article seeks to make the case that the underlying claims of the soft power doctrine necessitate an empirical test at the level of grassroots reception. Further, this article also seeks to shift the emphasis from ‘impressing the West’ towards inter…
Bollywood in Manila: The spectre of moral comparisons
This article explores inter-Asian media reception using the example of Bollywood films and the setting of Metro Manila in the Philippines. Drawing upon a series of interviews and focus groups with both the existing audience and “unexposed” viewers from the “mainstream,” this study takes an interest in how audiences establish the “common ground” that allows them to decode Bollywood narratives. By rescaling the dynamics of inter-cultural media exch…
The dynamics and potentials of big data for audience research
This article considers the future of audience research in an era of big data. It does so by interrogating the dynamics and potentials of the big data paradigm in an era of user-generated content and commercial exploitation. In this context, it is proposed that the major dynamics of big data are a conjoint application of numerology and alchemy in the information age. On this basis, the potentials of new data techniques are addressed in light of th…
Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale
Indian News Media: From Observer to Participant , by Usha M. Rodrigues and Maya Ranganathan
Diasporic films and the migrant experience in New Zealand: A case study in social imagination
Drawing upon interviews and focus groups with Asian migrants, this article interrogates responses to ‘diasporic’ films that seek to represent multicultural experiences in contemporary New Zealand. We argue that these responses provide an effective demonstration of the operation of the ‘social imagination’, a discursive process that articulates the fundamental linkage between symbolic representation, community formation and social action. As our r…
Intermedia in South Asia: The fourth screen
Piracy at the Frontier: Uneven Development and the Public Sphere
In the decades following Indian Independence, the exponential growth of urban populations, the encroachment of slums on all open lands, the expensive and exhaustive hurdles to commercial premises and the chronic shortage of leisure capacity in overcrowded Indian cities all contributed to a delivery mechanism that operated on the street. Even during the heady days of India's 'liberalisation' economy at the end of the millennium, India's media revo…
Multiplexes, corporatised leisure and the geography of opportunity in India
While earlier cinemas were built in response to growing urban populations during the twentieth century, the first wave of multiplexes in India were built in anticipation of future wealth. In recent years, multiplex developments have been targeting various areas identified for growth in the urban redevelopment plans now being adopted across India, anticipating a larger “consuming class” spreading beyond existing pockets of affluence and occupying …
Transnational audiences: Geocultural Approaches
The exchange of information, discourse and meaning across a bewildering array of cultural, geographic and political barriers has become a central concern for a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As such, there is a growing body of empirical work in academic journals and doctoral theses that addresses particular instances of transnational reception. It is nonetheless fair to say that as a field of study, our knowledg…
Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale
A great leap of faith: The cashless agenda in Digital India
This article assesses the rationale for India’s November 2016 demonetization, in terms of its origins and impact over the following year. I argue that this intervention was conceived and understood as part of a larger international monetary experiment. The article draws upon international media commentary, impact assessments by Indian scholars and the professed goals of the Government of India. Having established a direct link between demonetizat…
Transnational audiences: Geocultural Approaches
The exchange of information, discourse and meaning across a bewildering array of cultural, geographic and political barriers has become a central concern for a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As such, there is a growing body of empirical work in academic journals and doctoral theses that addresses particular instances of transnational reception. It is nonetheless fair to say that as a field of study, our knowledg…
Integrated commodities in the digital economy
At the heart of the digital economy is the willful imposition of a powerful combination of hardware and software, time and data, surveillance, prediction and behavourial control. This article argues that a central ambition of digital society has been the pursuit of an integrated commodity form. The novelty of this integrated commodity stems not only from the convergence of production and consumption but also from the subsumption of sociability it…
Leisure capital in the new economy: The rapid rise of the multiplex in India
The ascendance of the multiplex film theatre in India has great significance in the creation of new public space, and is part and parcel of the long-running contestation of modernity and citizenship in postcolonial India. However, while the histories of urbanism, cinema and modern politics are usefully indicative of each other, their relationship in this instance also needs to be further related to the history of leisure capital in India and, in …
From cinema hall to multiplex: A public history
The reconfiguration of the social spaces in which the theatrical exhibition of feature films takes place, from dedicated single-screen large capacity cinema halls to multiplex venues, has progressively transformed cinema exhibition across the world since the 1980s. The rise of the multiplex in India since 1997 has been an integral, and highly visible, component of the general spread of mall culture; with multiplex venues often being housed within…
Media audiences, ethnographic practice and the notion of a cultural field
This article will consider in detail the implications of a diffuse social imagination for existing paradigms of ethnographic audience research. The notion of a 'cultural field research model will be offered here as an alternative structure for locating media communities as sites of social practice. This is a theoretical framework that reformulates the conception of media audiences as 'imagined communities by replacing a demographically constitute…
Intellectual Balkanization or Globalization: The Future of Communication Research Publishing
The dynamics and potentials of big data for audience research
This article considers the future of audience research in an era of big data. It does so by interrogating the dynamics and potentials of the big data paradigm in an era of user-generated content and commercial exploitation. In this context, it is proposed that the major dynamics of big data are a conjoint application of numerology and alchemy in the information age. On this basis, the potentials of new data techniques are addressed in light of th…
The ‘crossover’ audience: Mediated multiculturalism and the Indian film
I can't keep it inside my head anymore! All this preaching by the Western media about what I should appreciate from my own popular culture. One Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha 2004) comes alon
The global dynamics of Indian media piracy: Export markets, playback media and the informal economy
In recent years, Indian media producers have increased their efforts to combat the effects of piracy on their export earnings. They are facing a number of challenges, many of which can be traced to the particular nature of the Indian film industry itself and the idiosyncratic development of its political-economy over the past six decades. This article explores the dynamics of Indian media piracy and, in doing so, makes the case that Indian cinema…
Watching Indian Movies in Australia: Media, community and consumption
This article draws on a body of interviews conducted during 2003–04 with movie‐viewers, distributors and exhibitors of Indian movies in Australia, primarily in the Sydney region of New South Wales. My immediate concern is with the manner in which Indian movies reach an audience in Australia and how that audience is described, both by themselves and by those who seek to cater to them. The wider context of this study is its contribution to a transn…
Market matters: Interdependencies in the Indian media economy
In the complex operations of the Indian media economy, the phrase 'media markets' requires careful consideration as an analytical concept. As a noun, 'media markets' is typically used to refer to a spread of media businesses and/or consumer sectors. Closer examination reveals that there tend to be multiple markets operating simultaneously within any media business (for products, capital, labour, audience, etc.). This implies an 'economy of market…
Diasporic films and the migrant experience in New Zealand: A case study in social imagination
Drawing upon interviews and focus groups with Asian migrants, this article interrogates responses to ‘diasporic’ films that seek to represent multicultural experiences in contemporary New Zealand. We argue that these responses provide an effective demonstration of the operation of the ‘social imagination’, a discursive process that articulates the fundamental linkage between symbolic representation, community formation and social action. As our r…
A Line in the Sand: The India–Pakistan Border in the Films of J.P. Dutta
This article examines the visualisation and narrative construction of the India–Pakistan border, and human interactions across that liminal space, as depicted in two films directed by J.P. Dutta, the high-profile, multiple award-winning war film Border (1997) and his subsequent feature Refugee (2000), which was more loosely described in its publicity literature as ‘a human story’. 1 1 Border, dir. J.P.Dutta, J.P. Films, 1996; and Refugee, dir. J.…
Bollywood and 'Grocery Store' Video Piracy in Australia
This article seeks to examine the ongoing struggle between narrowcast media piracy practices serving migrant communities and the attempts currently being made by players in the Indian film industry to legitimate, and thus capitalise on, the circulation of Indian films in key offshore markets. This article poses the question of whether an alternative network of distribution is likely to emerge which might supplant Asian food stores as the primary …
Extraordinary issue: Coronavirus, crisis and communication
It does not need to be said that we live in extraordinary times. The majority of the world's population are living under some form of movement restrictions, and our daily work, sustenance and sociability have been almost entirely mediatized. As scholars of media and communication, there are critical developments in play that deserve our attention and our voice, and Media International Australia is pleased to offer this first selection of articles…
Media, civilization and the international order
This article is intended to provoke debate around the assumed relationships between media, culture and civilization. To begin with, it considers how the concept of civilization has been framed, and periodically re-framed, in media theory by shifts in the international order of communication. In parallel with this historiography, the article revisits a body of research that explored the evolution of television audiences in alignment with the cultu…
Watching Indian Movies in Australia: Media, community and consumption
This article draws on a body of interviews conducted during 2003–04 with movie‐viewers, distributors and exhibitors of Indian movies in Australia, primarily in the Sydney region of New South Wales. My immediate concern is with the manner in which Indian movies reach an audience in Australia and how that audience is described, both by themselves and by those who seek to cater to them. The wider context of this study is its contribution to a transn…
Bollywood and 'Grocery Store' Video Piracy in Australia
This article seeks to examine the ongoing struggle between narrowcast media piracy practices serving migrant communities and the attempts currently being made by players in the Indian film industry to legitimate, and thus capitalise on, the circulation of Indian films in key offshore markets. This article poses the question of whether an alternative network of distribution is likely to emerge which might supplant Asian food stores as the primary …
Multiplex Cinemas and Urban Redevelopment in India
The aim of this article is to introduce the phenomenon of the multiplex theatre as it is being played out within the complex urban geographies of metropolitan India. Since its inception a decade ago, the multiplex cinema in the subcontinent has become an intrinsic component of a new leisure infrastructure configured around the notion of a 'consuming class' keen to take its place amongst a 'global middle class'. The dramatic growth in multiplex ci…
The ‘crossover’ audience: Mediated multiculturalism and the Indian film
I can't keep it inside my head anymore! All this preaching by the Western media about what I should appreciate from my own popular culture. One Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha 2004) comes alon
The global dynamics of Indian media piracy: Export markets, playback media and the informal economy
In recent years, Indian media producers have increased their efforts to combat the effects of piracy on their export earnings. They are facing a number of challenges, many of which can be traced to the particular nature of the Indian film industry itself and the idiosyncratic development of its political-economy over the past six decades. This article explores the dynamics of Indian media piracy and, in doing so, makes the case that Indian cinema…
A Line in the Sand: The India–Pakistan Border in the Films of J.P. Dutta
This article examines the visualisation and narrative construction of the India–Pakistan border, and human interactions across that liminal space, as depicted in two films directed by J.P. Dutta, the high-profile, multiple award-winning war film Border (1997) and his subsequent feature Refugee (2000), which was more loosely described in its publicity literature as ‘a human story’. 1 1 Border, dir. J.P.Dutta, J.P. Films, 1996; and Refugee, dir. J.…
Media audiences, ethnographic practice and the notion of a cultural field
This article will consider in detail the implications of a diffuse social imagination for existing paradigms of ethnographic audience research. The notion of a 'cultural field research model will be offered here as an alternative structure for locating media communities as sites of social practice. This is a theoretical framework that reformulates the conception of media audiences as 'imagined communities by replacing a demographically constitute…
Leisure capital in the new economy: The rapid rise of the multiplex in India
The ascendance of the multiplex film theatre in India has great significance in the creation of new public space, and is part and parcel of the long-running contestation of modernity and citizenship in postcolonial India. However, while the histories of urbanism, cinema and modern politics are usefully indicative of each other, their relationship in this instance also needs to be further related to the history of leisure capital in India and, in …
From cinema hall to multiplex: A public history
The reconfiguration of the social spaces in which the theatrical exhibition of feature films takes place, from dedicated single-screen large capacity cinema halls to multiplex venues, has progressively transformed cinema exhibition across the world since the 1980s. The rise of the multiplex in India since 1997 has been an integral, and highly visible, component of the general spread of mall culture; with multiplex venues often being housed within…
Multiplexes, corporatised leisure and the geography of opportunity in India
While earlier cinemas were built in response to growing urban populations during the twentieth century, the first wave of multiplexes in India were built in anticipation of future wealth. In recent years, multiplex developments have been targeting various areas identified for growth in the urban redevelopment plans now being adopted across India, anticipating a larger “consuming class” spreading beyond existing pockets of affluence and occupying …
Transnational audiences: Geocultural Approaches
The exchange of information, discourse and meaning across a bewildering array of cultural, geographic and political barriers has become a central concern for a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As such, there is a growing body of empirical work in academic journals and doctoral theses that addresses particular instances of transnational reception. It is nonetheless fair to say that as a field of study, our knowledg…
Diasporic films and the migrant experience in New Zealand: A case study in social imagination
Drawing upon interviews and focus groups with Asian migrants, this article interrogates responses to ‘diasporic’ films that seek to represent multicultural experiences in contemporary New Zealand. We argue that these responses provide an effective demonstration of the operation of the ‘social imagination’, a discursive process that articulates the fundamental linkage between symbolic representation, community formation and social action. As our r…
Intermedia in South Asia: The fourth screen
Piracy at the Frontier: Uneven Development and the Public Sphere
In the decades following Indian Independence, the exponential growth of urban populations, the encroachment of slums on all open lands, the expensive and exhaustive hurdles to commercial premises and the chronic shortage of leisure capacity in overcrowded Indian cities all contributed to a delivery mechanism that operated on the street. Even during the heady days of India's 'liberalisation' economy at the end of the millennium, India's media revo…
Indian News Media: From Observer to Participant , by Usha M. Rodrigues and Maya Ranganathan
Transnational Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale
Soft power, culture and modernity: Responses to Bollywood films in Thailand and the Philippines
India's official embrace of the soft power concept and the popular equation of Bollywood films with India's international image are discussed here with reference to their contemporary convergence. This article seeks to make the case that the underlying claims of the soft power doctrine necessitate an empirical test at the level of grassroots reception. Further, this article also seeks to shift the emphasis from ‘impressing the West’ towards inter…
Bollywood in Manila: The spectre of moral comparisons
This article explores inter-Asian media reception using the example of Bollywood films and the setting of Metro Manila in the Philippines. Drawing upon a series of interviews and focus groups with both the existing audience and “unexposed” viewers from the “mainstream,” this study takes an interest in how audiences establish the “common ground” that allows them to decode Bollywood narratives. By rescaling the dynamics of inter-cultural media exch…
The dynamics and potentials of big data for audience research
This article considers the future of audience research in an era of big data. It does so by interrogating the dynamics and potentials of the big data paradigm in an era of user-generated content and commercial exploitation. In this context, it is proposed that the major dynamics of big data are a conjoint application of numerology and alchemy in the information age. On this basis, the potentials of new data techniques are addressed in light of th…
The Politics of Digital India: Between Local Compulsions and Transnational Pressures
Transforming India into a digital state has been an objective of successive governments in India. However, the digital, by its very nature, is a capricious, multi-dimensional entity. Its operationalization across multiple sectors in India has highlighted the fact that the digital compact with publics in India is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, devices such as mobile phones have enabled access and efficiencies, and on the other, they have incr…
A great leap of faith: The cashless agenda in Digital India
This article assesses the rationale for India’s November 2016 demonetization, in terms of its origins and impact over the following year. I argue that this intervention was conceived and understood as part of a larger international monetary experiment. The article draws upon international media commentary, impact assessments by Indian scholars and the professed goals of the Government of India. Having established a direct link between demonetizat…
Media, civilization and the international order
This article is intended to provoke debate around the assumed relationships between media, culture and civilization. To begin with, it considers how the concept of civilization has been framed, and periodically re-framed, in media theory by shifts in the international order of communication. In parallel with this historiography, the article revisits a body of research that explored the evolution of television audiences in alignment with the cultu…
Intellectual Balkanization or Globalization: The Future of Communication Research Publishing
Digital Transactions in Asia: Economic, Informational, and Social Exchanges
Platform Capitalism in India
Political science (25 works) · Sociology (19 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Media studies (14 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (11 works) · History (11 works) · History (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Art (9 works)