Evolving Citizenship Discourses in "Digital India": The Case of #SupportCAA
In December 2019, the Indian parliament implemented the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that gives non-Muslim immigrants from the neighbouring countries easy access to Indian citizenship. Across India, the CAA has garnered support and provoked protests in equal measure. My talk explores the manifold contradictions, paradoxes and counteractions in the way the CAA has been "engineered" and set in motion, how this echoes in the digital public sphere, and how #SupportCAA constantly negotiates between two parallel objectives: first, to achieve a pan-national unification of non-Muslim 'Indians' (practically, Hindus); and second, to reconfigure India as a site for the pan-Hindutva communion.
Avishek Ray is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Technology Silchar. He is the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Representation, Agency & Resilience (Routledge, 2021), co-author of Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India (Routledge, 2024) and co-editor of Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India (SAGE, 2020). His research appears in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Contemporary South Asia, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, Tourism, Culture & Communication, among others; and he has held research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh , Purdue University Library, Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, Mahidol University, IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies (Vienna), Pavia University and University of Minnesota. In 2021, his academic excellence was recognized with the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship.
The lecture will take place in Room 104/201, located in the building opposite CERES, Universitätsstraße 104, on the second floor.
