Over the last couple of decades, mobilizations around various identities have increasingly become digital. After an initial period of excitement about the possible dawning of a new age of emancipation and democratization, however, we witness a sobering moment: Cognitive capitalism has quickly moved to appropriate the new forms of communication by translating visibility, attention, and outrage into financial gain; multi-mediated activism has repeatedly failed to transcend traditional power structures and provide long-term alternatives; and neofascist movements have used misinformation campaigns to spread their influence.

Amidst this convoluted moment, we ask: How do online visibilities and the mediatization of marginalized communities play out “on the ground”? Who gains from the newfound visibility, and who remains unseen? How does communicative capitalism (Dean 2010) further forms of visibility, and how do they translate into emancipatory politics – if at all? In short, we are interested in how studies of religious and ethnic minorities in South Asia contribute to our current attempts to understand and theorize this “mediatization of reality” (Couldry and Hepp 2018).

Through our empirical case studies, we want to probe into the limits of online visibility as a transformative dimension of political mobilization. This approach needs to stay open to questions of precarity, new populisms/fascisms, and the (im-)possibilities of participation within civil and political society. Particular interest will be given to the links between mobilization and the political economy of social media.

 

Organized by "Freigeist Project - The Populism of the Precarious" @Institute of Social- and Cultural Anthropology. Funded by Volkswagen Stiftung. Visuals ©Christoph Marx