Course Designer
Bishakha Datta leads the pioneering gender, sexuality and technology portfolio at Point of View. Bishakha, who started her working life as a journalist, writer and filmmaker, explores marginal, invisible, and silenced points of view across her work.
Her documentary work includes In The Flesh, a film on the lives of three sex workers, and Taza Khabar, which delves into a unique women-run rural newspaper. Books she edited include Nine Degrees of Justice, a collection of essays on the struggle against violence on women in India, and And Who Will Make the Chapatis?, an anthology on rural women's political participation. She is the co-founder of the online imprint, Deep Dives, which publishes long-form essays on ‘the way we live now’. She is also a wikipedian, on the board of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), and on the advisory board of the Software Freedom Law Centre.
Course Designer
Nishant Shah (he/him) is a Professor of Global Media and the Director of the Digital Narratives Studio at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a knowledge partner with Point of View (Mumbai).
After co-founding the Centre for Internet & Society (India) in 2008, he has since then, worked in various academic roles as the Director of Digital School at Leuphana University in Germany, and the Vice-President of Research at ArtEZ University of the Arts in The Netherlands. He is also a knowledge partner with Digital Asia Hub (Singapore/Hong Kong), and Radboud Institute of Culture and History (Nijmegen). Nishant actively positions his work at the intersections of academic research, humanist traditions of story-telling and meaning making, and capacity development for hopeful change practice. His last two books Really Fake( University of Minnesota Press) and Overload, Excess, Creep: An Internet From India (Institute of Network Cultures / Leftword Books), are available for open digital access. His current preoccupations are about expanding and exploring the affordances of digital authorship, authenticity, and authority towards collective action.
Course Designer
Dr Padmini Ray Murray is a feminist researcher, maker and the founder-director of Design Beku - a collective of researchers, artists, technologists and designers who work towards making design and digital practice more locally rooted, contextually relevant and ethical.
Padmini Ray Murray's research-led practice focuses on challenging acts of infrastructural and algorithmic violence, and creating alternative digital spaces and imaginations that are characterised by feminist values, specifically an ethics of care. To explore the possibilities of manifesting these spaces, Padmini founded Design Beku, a design and digital collective, that aims to dismantle expectations created by market-driven notions of design by following design justice principles, that advocate designing with communities, and not for. Her creative work includes Visualising Cybersecurity (with Paulanthony George & CIS, 2019) about how cybersecurity is represented in the media; On Affecting the Archive (as artist in residence at Serendipity Arts Festival, 2020); an animated short entitled Appa and his Invisible Mundu on data and digital rights (with Varun Kurtkoti and Paulanthony George, 2021. She was the curator for Smarter Digital Realities, working with 21 residents from India and Bangladesh about technology and the city, and performing Abhi.Neta Aayenge (as part of Last Seen), a digital theatrical work developed under the aegis of Refunction, a grant for experimental work online awarded by the Goethe Institut in 2020. Her work Gathering Multitudes has been recently featured as a highlight of the Wired Women programme for the NEoN Digital Arts Festival and recently exhibited her work as part of a residency, Unstacked: articulations of the algorithmic condition at Khoj Studios.
Learning Partner
Anushka Nair is a performance artist, researcher, writer. She is a graduate of MA Performance Practices from ArtEZ University of Arts, NL. Her artistic practice -research dives into the affective, sensuous and entangled nature of more than human bodies through performance art.
Her work is situated in the intersections of new materialism, phenomenology, ecology and feminism. Her immersive performances probe into physical, political, socio-cultural and symbolic webs of matter, exploring transformation in dynamic environments of exchanges. From beetroots to everyday objects, she performs the self and bodies of the world in the quest to find a more-than-one state of identity through care, inclusivity and deep intimacy. Her paper Roo(u)ting: Cultivating relations with matter through performance art was presented at the Sentient Performativities Forum by Art.earth (UK) and Schumacher College (ENG) and her performance works were published in Friend of The Artist (US). Other publications include Notes in Space, an essay (Thespo Ink (IND), and Where is We? , a video essay with ArtEZ Press (NL). She is also a trained actor, physical theatre practitioner and expressive arts therapist and is currently exploring her curatorial flair.
Learning Partner
Dr. Madhavi Shivaprasad has completed her doctoral degree in gender studies. She's currently senior content writer for StellarFi while dabbling as an independent researcher with Design Beku.
Her research largely focuses on digital media studies, gender and sexuality, and disability studies. For her doctoral dissertation, she focussed on women stand-up comedians in India, exploring the potential for stand-up to be a liminal space between feminist activism and entertainment. She also enjoys writing feature stories on Indian popular culture as she binge-watches content on most OTT platforms. Right now, she's trying to figure out if she's professor material as her nine-month old daughter is teaching her new ways of understanding, nay, pushing all kinds of corporeal boundaries and loving every minute of it.
Learning Partner
My research focuses on the relationships between made objects, the maker and the behaviour of making, in the context of spreadable digital media (and behaviours stemming from it).
I study internet memes inside and outside of India and phenomena such as dissent, satire, free expression and ambivalent behaviour fostered by them. The research is at the intersection of digital ethnography, culture studies, human-computer interaction, humour studies and critical theory. I spend my time watching people. I draw them, the way they are, the way some people want to be and sometimes I have interesting conversations with them.
Project Anchor
As the Communications Associate at Point of View, Afrah (she/they) works across multiple programmes to conceptualize and execute tailored, multimedia campaigns that amplify voices at the intersections of gender, sexuality, technology and disabilities. Afrah graduated from FLAME University with a BBA Comms. in 2019 and joined rePurpose Global in 2020 as a Creative Campaign Manager for a portfolio of global climate conscious brands, such as GTEch. Her academic and professional background in campaigning and marketing drives her curiosity to explore digital platforms as catalysts of social impact.
Project Anchor
Prarthana Mitra (they/she) is a writer and qualitative researcher exploring alternative spaces in their culture, communications and development practices. At Point of View, they are anchoring The Digital Everyday, which comes on the heels of consulting for UNICEF India, The Union, USAID, Nutrition International, and Participatory Research in Asia. Prarthana has also acted as research consultant on award-winning films Kalsubai (2020) and Nehemich (2023), and led outreach and programs at Doc Society’s Good Pitch 2021 and Climate Lab-South Asia 2022. Keen on exploring gender, identity, and social justice through culture, they also write extensively on new media and audio practices, besides dabbling in creative non-fiction and speculative fiction.
Project Anchor
Senjuti Sangia (she/her) is a researcher and designer (sometimes both, sometimes neither) at Design Beku. Her current work and hopes are around compounding intersectional feminist theories with research and participatory tools to co-make alongside communities while subverting the prevailing notion of design for social justice. She take a keen interest in elements of theatre and interpreting commonplace linguistics. As part of The Digital Everyday, she worked with the core team to visualise the course.
Project Anchor
A lover of tea, solitude, and all things artsy, Vaishali Soni (she/her) made her way into illustrations and design after doing a brief stint in journalism. Her work as a graphic designer and illustrator at POV intersects across all programmes and social media. In her free time, she is busy working on her art studio - Khaas by Vaishali Soni - and making pinterest boards for her wardrobe.
Project Anchor
Yashita (she/her) is a Knowledge Associate at Point of View. She helps anchor The Digital Everyday and is working on other projects around Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence and on Data, Personhood, and Privacy. She graduated from Davidson College, NC, in 2022, where she majored in Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her senior honors thesis compared how people in privileged and subaltern groups in India used the internet to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Yashita also has a keen interest in archives and oral history, having worked and done research with the Counsel Club LGBTQ Archives in Kolkata and been a Digital Archivist and Citizen Historian at the 1947 Partition Archive.
