Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media

We are happy to announce the print and web publication of Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media.

Crisis/Media, the fourth publication in the Sarai Reader series, examines issues of global crises — (war, civil conflict, terrorism and state terror, the deep instabilities of everyday life, technologies of surveillance and political life, threats to the freedom of expression) — and critically analyses the representation of these crises in the media. Are the crises in the media also instances of crises of the media? Have current forms of media practice lost the ability to articulate questions of conflict and contention, other than in terms of crises? Can media practitioners evolve
forms of practice that are not beholden to the idea of Crisis?

The Sarai brings together several distinguished critical voices, as well as new, emerging writers from all over the world (and especially from South Asia) to attend to ideas, situations, contexts and dillemmas related to crises and the media.Authors include:
Arundhati Roy, Ranjit Hoskote, Taslima Nasrin, Geert Lovink, Soenke Zehle, Nandita Haksar, Toby Miller, Martin Shaw, Ravi Vasudevan, Shahid Amin, Ivo Skoric, Nancy Adajania, Raqs Media Collective, Nitin Govil, Ranjani Mazumdar, Shohini Ghosh and others.

For the complete table of contents, and the text of the introduction, see below. The complete text of Crisis/Media, like the entire contents of previous readers, is available for free browsing and download as pdf files at Sarai Reader 4

For Purchase, Distribution and Other Enquiries, mail to:

publications@sarai.net
or, contact:

Publications

Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India

Tel : (+91) 11 2396 0040

Website:www.sarai.net

E mail: dak@sarai.net

Produced and Designed at the Sarai Media Lab

TABLE OF CONTENTS OF SARAI READER 04: CRISIS/MEDIA

Introduction


APPROACHING CRISIS

Bearing Inconvenient Witness: Notes in Pro/Confessional Mode — Ranjit Hoskote

Peace is War: The Collateral Damage of Breaking News — Arundhati Roy

Financialization, Emotionalization and Other Ugly Concepts — Toby Miller

Interventionist Media in Times of Crisis — Soenke Zehle

Western Wars and Peace Activism: Social Movements in Global Mass-Mediated Politics — Martin Shaw

IMAGE DISTURBANCE

Let us Become Children! Training, Simulations and Kids — Kristian Lukic

What is to be Done? — Bhrigupati Singh

Disreputable and Illegal Publics: Cinematic Allegories in Times of Crisis — Ravi Vasudevan

Protesting Capitalist Globalization on Video — Oliver Ressler

Barcelona Pictures — Sasja Barentsen

From One Crisis to the Next: The Fate of Political Art in India — Nancy Adajania

On Representing the Musalman — Shahid Amin

Machines Made to Measure: On the Technologies of Identity and the Manufacture of Difference — Raqs Media Collective

CRISIS MEDIA — CASE STUDIES

Media Representations of the Kargil War and the Gujarat Riots — Subarno Chatterji

Small Town News — Taran N. Khan

'Out of the Box': Telelvisual Representations of North East India —Daisy Hasan

Lost in Transit: Narratives and Myths of The Crash of Egypt Air Flight 990 in Egyptian and American Newspapers — Mahmoud Eid

Of Nasty Pictures and 'Nice Guys': The Surreality of Online Hindutva — Christiane Brosius

Media Looking Beyond Crisis? The Urdu/Pakistani Press in New York after 9/11 — Rehan Ansari

Tried by The Media: The S A R Geelani Trial — Nandita Haksar

TRUTH/TESTIMONY

'I Saw it on CNN so it Must be True...Wrong !' — Craig Etcheson
  Refugee Camps — Amy West

Readers vs. Viewers — Ivo Skoric

Cracks in the Urban Frame: The Visual Politics of 9/11 — Ranjani Mazumdar

Truth Telling, Gujarat and the Law — Arvind Narrain

CAUTION: REPORTERS AT WORK

Massacres and the Media: A Field Reporter Looks Back on Gujarat 2002 — Darshan Desai

The Everyday Life of a Srinagar Correspondent: Reporting from Kashmir — Muzamil Jaleel

A Reporter in Prison — Iftikhar Gilani

Covering Kashmir: The Datelines of Despair — Basharat Peer

Mumbai(Dongri)-Gujarat-Mumbai-Kashmir: Pages from my Diary — Zainab Bawa

WAR CORRESPONDENCES: FIRST PERSON PLURAL

Thoughts on Afghanistan in Five Parts — Meena Nanji

On Experiencing Afghanistan — Daphne Meijer

The Afghan eXplorer - The Computing Culture Group — MIT Media Lab

Waiting: Entries from a Filmmaker's Diary in and around Tel Aviv - Anna Faroqhi

Last Email from the Gaza Strip — Rachel Corrie

Guerrila News Network's Digital Documentaries: Interview with Stephen Marshall — Geert Lovink

Synchronicities: Baghdad/Delhi — Anand Vivek Taneja

Portrait of a Day in Baghdad — Paul Chan

Diary of a News Cameraman: Baghdad, July 2003 — Shakeb Ahmed

Rescued Pages of War-Sense — Tarun Bhartiya

DEEP INSTABILITIES

Politics in the Picture: Witnessing Environmental Crises in the Media — Sanjay Kak

The Toxic Times of India: The Plastic Monster and a State of Emergency — Ravi Agarwal

Remembering SARS in Beijing: The Nationalist Appropriation of an Epidemic — Sanjay Sharma

Evictions - Projections: Watching Dharmendra in Suburban Lagos — Hansa Thapliyal

Mediated Guilt: The Illusion of Participation in Delhi's Social Welfare Advertisements — Omar Kutty

Journey through a Disaster: A Filmmaker's Account of the Gujarat Earthquake, 2001 — Batul Mukhtiar

CYBERMOHALLA STREET LOGS

LOG OO1, 20th October, 2003 — Dakshinpuri Cybermohalla Media Lab

INFORMATION = POLITICS

P2P: Power to the People — Janko Röttgers

War in the Age of Pirate Reproduction — Nitin Govil

Floss and the 'Crisis': Foreigner in a Free Land? — Martin Hardie

Introducing AIDC as a Tool for Data Surveillance
— Beatriz Da Costa + Jamieson Schulte + Brooke Singer

Anagrams of Orderly Discorder (For the New Global Order) — Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa + Adrian Ward

The Tools and Tactics of A Festival: Looking Back at N5M4 — David Garcia

The Revenge of Low-tech: Autolabs, Telecentros and Tactical Media in São Paulo — Ricardo Rosas

CONTESTING CENSORSHIP

Reasonable Restrictions and Unreasonable Speech — Lawrence Liang

'The Whole Constitution Goes for Six': Legislative Privileges and the Media — Sudhir Krishnaswamy

Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms — Shohini Ghosh

Homeless Everywhere: Writing in Exile -—Taslima Nasreen

ALT/OPTION

Manifesto Against Labour — Gruppe Krisis

Digital Declaration — Infossil Corrective

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements