Akanksha Awal
Biographic Data
| ID | 211365 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Akanksha Awal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Akanksha |
| FAMILY NAME | Awal |
| SIGNATURE | AWAL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8684-7795 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 5 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 5 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Sovereigns Surveilled: Lawyers, Naughty Boys, and Other Parasites in an Uttar Pradesh Police Station
The Human Capacity for Love: Review of All That Breathes and All We Imagine as Light
To speak as another: Hacking, ghost-writing and the dark side of kinship on Indian social media
This paper investigates the use of digital impersonations on Facebook and WhatsApp among young people in Ghaziabad, India. It conceptualizes these borrowed identities as “avatars” that allow people to use digital media without claiming authorship. This paper shows how people seamlessly operate multiple digital IDs—their own, their siblings’, parents’, and girlfriends’—masking behind the IDs of their kin and friends by hacking into their accounts …
Love as Enjoyment: Hopelessness, Play, and Desirable Futures in Ghaziabad, India
Some young middle-class women in Ghaziabad have little hope that love will lead to a desirable future. Therefore, they kindle desire in casual encounters that they describe as "enjoyment" and cultivate a sensibility of living in the moment. Enjoyment departs from love (pyaar) as depicted in mass media like Bollywood that leads to marriage. Instead, through enjoyment, college-attending women move through fantasies of love (pyaar) leading to marria…
Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms
Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of …
Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms
Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of …
Love as Enjoyment: Hopelessness, Play, and Desirable Futures in Ghaziabad, India
Some young middle-class women in Ghaziabad have little hope that love will lead to a desirable future. Therefore, they kindle desire in casual encounters that they describe as "enjoyment" and cultivate a sensibility of living in the moment. Enjoyment departs from love (pyaar) as depicted in mass media like Bollywood that leads to marriage. Instead, through enjoyment, college-attending women move through fantasies of love (pyaar) leading to marria…
Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms
Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of …
The Human Capacity for Love: Review of All That Breathes and All We Imagine as Light
To speak as another: Hacking, ghost-writing and the dark side of kinship on Indian social media
This paper investigates the use of digital impersonations on Facebook and WhatsApp among young people in Ghaziabad, India. It conceptualizes these borrowed identities as “avatars” that allow people to use digital media without claiming authorship. This paper shows how people seamlessly operate multiple digital IDs—their own, their siblings’, parents’, and girlfriends’—masking behind the IDs of their kin and friends by hacking into their accounts …
Love as Enjoyment: Hopelessness, Play, and Desirable Futures in Ghaziabad, India
Some young middle-class women in Ghaziabad have little hope that love will lead to a desirable future. Therefore, they kindle desire in casual encounters that they describe as "enjoyment" and cultivate a sensibility of living in the moment. Enjoyment departs from love (pyaar) as depicted in mass media like Bollywood that leads to marriage. Instead, through enjoyment, college-attending women move through fantasies of love (pyaar) leading to marria…
Sovereigns Surveilled: Lawyers, Naughty Boys, and Other Parasites in an Uttar Pradesh Police Station
Feeling (2 works) · Psychology (2 works) · Sociology (2 works) · Aesthetics (1 works) · African history and culture analysis (1 works) · Ambivalence (1 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (1 works) · Art (1 works) · Digital media (1 works) · Epistemology (1 works)