Ursula Rao
Biographic Data
| ID | 95943 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ursula Rao |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ursula |
| FAMILY NAME | Rao |
| SIGNATURE | RAO U |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leipzig University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4923-859X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 174 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 35 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Fickle infrastructure
The Meantime of Development
This text develops the notion of meantime of development to excavate a temporal orientation that underscores techno-optimist engagement with the future. The discussion bounces off Jharkhand’s experience with the new smart version of India’s Public Distribution System (PDS), as an instance of using aspirational technology to fix long-standing social ills. The system deploys biometric IDs (Aadhaar) for policing distribution and preventing fraud and…
CHAPTER 7 Embedded/Embedding Media Practices and Cultural Production
Making Informal Sacred Geographies
Inspired by recent debates in material religion, and using the example of the central Indian city of Bhopal, this article characterizes an informal Hindu religious geography that flourishes in the interstices of India’s planned urbanity. The small wayside shrines that dot Indian cities usually arise spontaneously, created by believers who discern divine manifestations and begin to worship these. Traces of ritual activities animate others to follo…
Theorising Media and Practice
Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and …
Policy as Experimentation
English Abstract: The article starts with puzzlement about the optimism of a new generation of (Indian) policy-makers who believe that investing in digitally managed publicly funded health insurance (PFHI) schemes can dramatically improve health security in India, provide poor people with seamless access to high-quality hospital care and contribute significantly towards achieving universal health coverage. In view of persistent high social inequa…
Remediating the Local Through Localised News Making
In the new millennium, post the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the accompanying growth of the advertisement market, Indian newspapers have seen a tremendous increase in profitability. Circulation figures of newspapers have skyrocketed, not least due to the attention editorial teams pay to local news. Overall, the number of vernacular newspapers has grown, national dailies produce separate city additions for metropolitan regions and many…
Re- Spatializing Social Security in India
This chapter analyzes the changing logic and logistics of welfare security in the biometric governance era. Power is exercised spatially, and in modern nation-states it follows a model Gupta and Ferguson call “vertical encompassment”. Citizens are cared for by institutions that communicate hierarchically. Information about needs travels upwards, from district and state to national statistics, and eventually it informs decisions at central governm…
Aadhaar
Aadhaar means ‘foundation’ or ‘support’ in several Indian languages. Utter the word ‘aadhaar’ anywhere across the length and breadth of India today, and you will most certainly evoke India’s nation
Response to ‘The Aadhaar debate
At this historical juncture, when digital governance is fundamentally re-forming social relations, we need critical knowledge about the emerging texture of society. This text responds to Reetika Khera’s important intervention about the need for more timely studies of Aadhaar. Building on Angelia Chamuah’s and Lawrence Cohen’s comments, I argue for the need to ask broader questions about the changing character of the political as it emerges in the…
Population Meets Database
This article traces the processes of making identities in digital India. By zooming into the two processes of enrolling in and using Aadhaar, it questions the distinction between identification and identity that pervades discussions of new technologies and shows that all Aadhaar-related procedures are productive of identity as a socially mediated process of creating or denying the condition for belonging. Following the introduction of Aadhaar, be…
Global cities
This chapter highlights the productive role of class struggle and cultural identities for shaping the character of global cities. Global or world cities are hubs for the coordination of global economic flows. This thesis is at the core of a debate that emerged in the mid-1980s about the changing world capitalist system. In contrast to approaches that prioritize class conflict as a primary lens for understanding life struggles in the global city, …
Sacred Space
Sacred space has an ambivalent status. It is located in the here and now and at the same time functions as an opening to another world. Sacred spaces are thresholds to a larger universe. They allow humans to communicate with gods and spirits. To capture the ways in which spiritual power is enshrined in places, buildings or landscapes, it is necessary to consider the association of sacred spaces with material objects, collective rituals, and bodil…
Biometric Bodies, Or How to Make Electronic Fingerprinting Work in India
The rapid spread of electronic fingerprinting not only creates new regimes of surveillance but compels users to adopt novel ways of performing their bodies to suit the new technology. This ethnography uses two Indian case studies - of a welfare office and a workplace - to unpack the processes by which biometric devices become effective tools for determining identity. While in the popular imaginary biometric technology is often associated with pro…
Politics, Politicking
Talking back to the state
In this article we propose a different approach to the study of neoliberalism. We shift away from institutionally focused accounts of neoliberalism as a strategy of rule, to examine the way citizens engage with neoliberal reform. While there is a burgeoning body of literature on the expansion of civil society, new entrepreneurship and novel governmentalities, not enough is known about the ways the state is restructured by the social processes tha…
Red Tape. Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India
Subverting ID from above and below
This article traces the contours of a new biometric project in India that aims to develop a universal biometric database for the unique identification of India’s residents (UID, The Indian Unique Identification Project). It was launched in 2009 and by mid-2013 registered 430 million enrolments, making it the largest biometric experiment in the world. What is the rationale for and structure of this new instrument of governance and how does it affe…
Tolerated Encroachment
Inclusive growth is the new popular slogan animating development initiatives across the globe. Embracing the common rhetoric of rights discourses, the Indian government is investing heavily in novel welfare schemes for empowering poor people on the assumption that granting them access to the official market will put them on track for upward mobility and economic progress. In this article I use a case study of a massive slum relocation scheme in t…
News for Consumer Citizens
Mass media have always played a crucial role for negotiating the image of the nation. This holds true also for India. My article reflects changes in the Indian media market and examines how reshaped media outlets contribute towards generating fresh images of the nation for public consumption. The focus is on English language newspapers which are consumed by the growing Indian middle classes. How do newspapers influence the relation between commer…
Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia/Varieties of Activist Experience. Civil Society in South Asia
Inter-publics
This article develops the notion of interconnected publics as a means to understand better both the escalation of Hindu political activism in the 1990s in India and its subsequent waning in the new millennium. I argue that the prime visibility of Hindu fundamentalism in the 1990s was a result of the effective—yet tenuous—connection between various spaces for public communication. The emerging 'inter-public' effectively imbricated the private view…
Working the Night Shift
News as Culture
At the turn of the millennium, Indian journalism has undergone significant changes. The rapid commercialization of the press, together with an increase in literacy and political consciousness, has led to swift growth in the newspaper market but also changed the way news makers mediate politics. Positioned at a historical junction where India is clearly feeling the effects of market liberalization, this study demonstrates how journalists and infor…
Neoliberalism and the rewriting of the Indian leader
In this article, I discuss recent changes in Indian leadership images. In a commercialized press, political journalists have adopted new writing styles that turn former political heroes into ambiguous human beings. This development is fueled by a neoliberal restructuring that has fundamentally altered journalists' professional environment. By viewing press activity through the lens of a major ideological shift, I seek to contribute to an emerging…
Making the Global City
There is a growing scholarly interest in the spatialisation of class relations in post-industrial cities. Gentrified suburbs exclude the poor and re-work notions of public property and urban citizenship to the advantage of the rich. My study moves beyond the sanitised places of the inner city and shows how the cleaning mission affects life in the new spaces of deprivation. I analyse home making in a resettlement colony of Delhi. After being remov…
Theorising Media and Practice
Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and …
Tolerated Encroachment
Inclusive growth is the new popular slogan animating development initiatives across the globe. Embracing the common rhetoric of rights discourses, the Indian government is investing heavily in novel welfare schemes for empowering poor people on the assumption that granting them access to the official market will put them on track for upward mobility and economic progress. In this article I use a case study of a massive slum relocation scheme in t…
Aadhaar
Aadhaar means ‘foundation’ or ‘support’ in several Indian languages. Utter the word ‘aadhaar’ anywhere across the length and breadth of India today, and you will most certainly evoke India’s nation
Biometric Bodies, Or How to Make Electronic Fingerprinting Work in India
The rapid spread of electronic fingerprinting not only creates new regimes of surveillance but compels users to adopt novel ways of performing their bodies to suit the new technology. This ethnography uses two Indian case studies - of a welfare office and a workplace - to unpack the processes by which biometric devices become effective tools for determining identity. While in the popular imaginary biometric technology is often associated with pro…
News as Culture
At the turn of the millennium, Indian journalism has undergone significant changes. The rapid commercialization of the press, together with an increase in literacy and political consciousness, has led to swift growth in the newspaper market but also changed the way news makers mediate politics. Positioned at a historical junction where India is clearly feeling the effects of market liberalization, this study demonstrates how journalists and infor…
Policy as Experimentation
English Abstract: The article starts with puzzlement about the optimism of a new generation of (Indian) policy-makers who believe that investing in digitally managed publicly funded health insurance (PFHI) schemes can dramatically improve health security in India, provide poor people with seamless access to high-quality hospital care and contribute significantly towards achieving universal health coverage. In view of persistent high social inequa…
Subverting ID from above and below
This article traces the contours of a new biometric project in India that aims to develop a universal biometric database for the unique identification of India’s residents (UID, The Indian Unique Identification Project). It was launched in 2009 and by mid-2013 registered 430 million enrolments, making it the largest biometric experiment in the world. What is the rationale for and structure of this new instrument of governance and how does it affe…
Population Meets Database
This article traces the processes of making identities in digital India. By zooming into the two processes of enrolling in and using Aadhaar, it questions the distinction between identification and identity that pervades discussions of new technologies and shows that all Aadhaar-related procedures are productive of identity as a socially mediated process of creating or denying the condition for belonging. Following the introduction of Aadhaar, be…
Neoliberalism and the rewriting of the Indian leader
In this article, I discuss recent changes in Indian leadership images. In a commercialized press, political journalists have adopted new writing styles that turn former political heroes into ambiguous human beings. This development is fueled by a neoliberal restructuring that has fundamentally altered journalists' professional environment. By viewing press activity through the lens of a major ideological shift, I seek to contribute to an emerging…
Caste and the Desire for Belonging
Questions of power and competition have figured prominently in the expanding debate about Dalit assertion. This article moves beyond the rhetoric of caste wars to engage with the affective and emotional dimension of caste. The focus is on the urban environment, where caste unity is challenged by the centrifugal forces of urban living. The article demonstrates how Khatiks in Bhopal are reunited through a festival culture that straddles class diffe…
Response to ‘The Aadhaar debate
At this historical juncture, when digital governance is fundamentally re-forming social relations, we need critical knowledge about the emerging texture of society. This text responds to Reetika Khera’s important intervention about the need for more timely studies of Aadhaar. Building on Angelia Chamuah’s and Lawrence Cohen’s comments, I argue for the need to ask broader questions about the changing character of the political as it emerges in the…
Inter-publics
This article develops the notion of interconnected publics as a means to understand better both the escalation of Hindu political activism in the 1990s in India and its subsequent waning in the new millennium. I argue that the prime visibility of Hindu fundamentalism in the 1990s was a result of the effective—yet tenuous—connection between various spaces for public communication. The emerging 'inter-public' effectively imbricated the private view…
How to Prove Divinities? Experiencing and Defending Divine Agency in a Modern Indian Space
Exploring material collected in the Hindu Temples of the Indian state capital Bhopal, this article deals with the problem of how to accommodate the divine in the modern world. It explores how the presence of the divine—in the form of revelations, miracles, mediums and prophets—is accommodated in the contemporary discourse of urban India. I show that the communication with deities is understood in terms of ‘sensory experience’ and ‘physical experi…
Ina Rösing
How to Prove Divinities? Experiencing and Defending Divine Agency in a Modern Indian Space
Exploring material collected in the Hindu Temples of the Indian state capital Bhopal, this article deals with the problem of how to accommodate the divine in the modern world. It explores how the presence of the divine—in the form of revelations, miracles, mediums and prophets—is accommodated in the contemporary discourse of urban India. I show that the communication with deities is understood in terms of ‘sensory experience’ and ‘physical experi…
Sefik Alp Bahadir (Hg.)
Winfried Gebhardt, Ronald Hitzler und Michaela Pfadenhauer (Hg.)
Andreas Hepp und Waldemar Vogelgesang (Hg.)
Celebrating Transgression
Celebrating Transgression
Transgression is the stock in trade of a certain kind of anthropological sensibility that transforms fieldwork from strict social science to something more engaging. It builds on Koepping’s idea that participation transforms perception and investigates how transgressive practices have triggered the re-theorization of conventional forms of thought and life. It focuses on social practices in various cultural fields including the method and politics…
Ritual als Performanz Zur Charakterisierung eines Paradigmenwechsels
The article characterizes a paradigmatic change in ritual studies in the last twenty years, by discussing the impact of the 'performative turn' in the social sciences for the analysis of ritual action and ritual efficacy. Two streams of theories are distinguished: (1) studies that re-conceptualize the relation between ritual and its social contexts, viewing it as a dynamic encounter that includes negotiation, adjustment and persuasion, and (2) st…
Caste and the Desire for Belonging
Questions of power and competition have figured prominently in the expanding debate about Dalit assertion. This article moves beyond the rhetoric of caste wars to engage with the affective and emotional dimension of caste. The focus is on the urban environment, where caste unity is challenged by the centrifugal forces of urban living. The article demonstrates how Khatiks in Bhopal are reunited through a festival culture that straddles class diffe…
From the Edge of Power
Arbeit am Ruf - Medienstrategien indischer Patrone
The paper is an anthropological study of news-making practices in India. News-making is characterized as an interactive process that is shaped through the coordinated action of journalists and citizens and as such has consequences for the way local (political) life is recreated. The case study interrogates media activities accompanying the controversy about the making of the film Water by the Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta in the holy city of Ben…
News as Culture
At the turn of the millennium, Indian journalism has undergone significant changes. The rapid commercialization of the press, together with an increase in literacy and political consciousness, has led to swift growth in the newspaper market but also changed the way news makers mediate politics. Positioned at a historical junction where India is clearly feeling the effects of market liberalization, this study demonstrates how journalists and infor…
Neoliberalism and the rewriting of the Indian leader
In this article, I discuss recent changes in Indian leadership images. In a commercialized press, political journalists have adopted new writing styles that turn former political heroes into ambiguous human beings. This development is fueled by a neoliberal restructuring that has fundamentally altered journalists' professional environment. By viewing press activity through the lens of a major ideological shift, I seek to contribute to an emerging…
Making the Global City
There is a growing scholarly interest in the spatialisation of class relations in post-industrial cities. Gentrified suburbs exclude the poor and re-work notions of public property and urban citizenship to the advantage of the rich. My study moves beyond the sanitised places of the inner city and shows how the cleaning mission affects life in the new spaces of deprivation. I analyse home making in a resettlement colony of Delhi. After being remov…
Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia/Varieties of Activist Experience. Civil Society in South Asia
Inter-publics
This article develops the notion of interconnected publics as a means to understand better both the escalation of Hindu political activism in the 1990s in India and its subsequent waning in the new millennium. I argue that the prime visibility of Hindu fundamentalism in the 1990s was a result of the effective—yet tenuous—connection between various spaces for public communication. The emerging 'inter-public' effectively imbricated the private view…
Working the Night Shift
News for Consumer Citizens
Mass media have always played a crucial role for negotiating the image of the nation. This holds true also for India. My article reflects changes in the Indian media market and examines how reshaped media outlets contribute towards generating fresh images of the nation for public consumption. The focus is on English language newspapers which are consumed by the growing Indian middle classes. How do newspapers influence the relation between commer…
Subverting ID from above and below
This article traces the contours of a new biometric project in India that aims to develop a universal biometric database for the unique identification of India’s residents (UID, The Indian Unique Identification Project). It was launched in 2009 and by mid-2013 registered 430 million enrolments, making it the largest biometric experiment in the world. What is the rationale for and structure of this new instrument of governance and how does it affe…
Tolerated Encroachment
Inclusive growth is the new popular slogan animating development initiatives across the globe. Embracing the common rhetoric of rights discourses, the Indian government is investing heavily in novel welfare schemes for empowering poor people on the assumption that granting them access to the official market will put them on track for upward mobility and economic progress. In this article I use a case study of a massive slum relocation scheme in t…
Talking back to the state
In this article we propose a different approach to the study of neoliberalism. We shift away from institutionally focused accounts of neoliberalism as a strategy of rule, to examine the way citizens engage with neoliberal reform. While there is a burgeoning body of literature on the expansion of civil society, new entrepreneurship and novel governmentalities, not enough is known about the ways the state is restructured by the social processes tha…
Red Tape. Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India
Politics, Politicking
Global cities
This chapter highlights the productive role of class struggle and cultural identities for shaping the character of global cities. Global or world cities are hubs for the coordination of global economic flows. This thesis is at the core of a debate that emerged in the mid-1980s about the changing world capitalist system. In contrast to approaches that prioritize class conflict as a primary lens for understanding life struggles in the global city, …
Sacred Space
Sacred space has an ambivalent status. It is located in the here and now and at the same time functions as an opening to another world. Sacred spaces are thresholds to a larger universe. They allow humans to communicate with gods and spirits. To capture the ways in which spiritual power is enshrined in places, buildings or landscapes, it is necessary to consider the association of sacred spaces with material objects, collective rituals, and bodil…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Economics (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works)