Dr. Fathima Nizaruddin
Biography
Fathima Nizaruddin is an academic and documentary filmmaker from India with a keen interest in practice based artistic research. She finished her PhD in 2017 from the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, London. She was a post-doctoral fellow of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC), Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. During her fellowship period with IRGAC, she was an affiliated fellow with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi and a visiting research fellow with the Department of Gender and Media Studies for the South Asian Region, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She was an Assistant Professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi from 2007-2020. Her articles have appeared in journals such as HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, International Journal of Communication (IJoC) and Asiascape: Digital Asia.
Project Description
Understanding the platformization of specific political communication processes in India
This subproject will use the context of the transformation of specific political communication processes in India under the conditions provided by platform capitalism to examine how this transformation might have an impact on the course of democracy in the country. It will map the links between the expansion of the circulatory space for certain political positions in contemporary India and the platformization of communication ecosystems that align with these political positions. The role played by transnational capital in changing the communication landscape in the country after the advent and popularity of social media platforms will be analyzed to understand how such changes could have contributed towards a majoritarian shift. The subject formations that sediment around this majoritarian shift and their relationship with democratic spaces will be studied. The manner in which the existing platform ecologies and the conditions of labour around it shape these subject formations will be a key point of inquiry for the project. Multiple methods including digital ethnography, discourse analysis, biographical interviews and arts-based methods will be employed during the course of the study. The sub project will consider the proliferation of misinformation within the media environment in India as an important vector that influences political communication. Together with an analysis of the role of social media in this proliferation, the study will also take into account the older trajectories of the use of misinformation in political communication in the country since the colonial times. The manner in which the communication processes around specific political configurations are shaped by the current architecture of major social media platforms will be examined. The subproject will use empirical examples from two states in India i.e., Uttarakhand and Kerala to ascertain the possibilities for changes within the current communication ecosystems around digital platforms to ensure the future sustenance and expansion of democratic spaces
Publications
- Nizaruddin, F. (2024). Academic Tamasha and Its Limits under the Shadow of Authoritarianism.In A. Fleschenberg, K. Kresse, & R. Castillo Cordillera (Eds.), Thinking with the South Reframing Research Collaboration amid Decolonial Imperatives and Challenges. De Gruyter.
- Nizaruddin, F. (2023) The Kabir Project and Possibilities for Using Transmedia Work to Disrupt Right-Wing Narratives of Othering. In M. Freeman & J. Dalby (Eds.), Transmedia Selves: Identity and Persona Creation in the Age of Mobile and Multiplatform Media. Routledge.
- Nizaruddin, F. (2022). Hindu Majoritarianism and Authoritarian Shifts in the Age of Informational Capitalism in India. In IRGAC (Ed.), Global Authoritarianism. Perspectives and Contestations from the South. Transcript.
- Mukherjee, R., & Nizaruddin, F. (2022). Digital Platforms in Contemporary India: The Transformation of Quotidian Life Worlds. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 9(1-2), 5-18
- Nizaruddin, F. (2022). Institutionalized Riot Networks in India and Mobile Instant Messaging Platforms. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 9(1-2), 71-94.
- Nizaruddin, F. (2021). Role of Public WhatsApp Groups Within the Hindutva Ecosystem of Hate and Narratives of “CoronaJihad”. International Journal Of Communication, 15, 18.
- Nizaruddin, F. (2020). Resisting the configurations for a Hindu nation. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10(3), 726–733. https://doi.org/10.1086/711891