[Commlist] CFP: Digital Culture Wars in South Asia

DIGITAL CULTURE WARS IN SOUTH ASIA

Edited by Dr Munira Cheema (King's College London) and Dr Asif Ali 
Akhtar (King's College London)

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS — abstract deadline 15 October 2026

Social media and digital platforms have already transformed cultures of 
political engagement across South Asia, introducing new forms of 
polarisation and new modes of mobilisation, as conditions for the 
production and suppression of discourse shift. The accelerating 
deployment of AI technologies compounds existing precarities: 
disinformation becomes deepfakes, troll armies become bot networks, 
censorship becomes algorithmic, as the boundaries between authentic and 
synthetic political speech dissolve. Yet the dominant frameworks for 
analysing these transformations, including platform governance, digital 
rights and media literacy, were largely developed for Western liberal 
democracies where stable institutions, formal media markets, and 
regulatory states are taken as given. South Asia's conditions differ in 
kind: states that simultaneously produce and censor disinformation, 
media ecologies where pirated and informal circulation is the norm 
rather than the exception, and publics structured by caste, sect, 
language, and colonial history that were never unified into a single 
deliberative sphere. This volume takes these conditions as its starting 
point for examining how digital culture wars are produced, circulated, 
and contested across the region.

THE VOLUME

This interdisciplinary collection begins from a single claim: the 
digital has not replaced legacy media, it has absorbed, accelerated, and 
transformed it. Political talk shows designed for broadcast now 
circulate as clipped, captioned, and re-edited fragments that spread 
informally across WhatsApp networks while being sorted and surfaced by 
YouTube's recommendation systems. Cinematic content generates political 
controversy not at the box office but through trailer reactions, meme 
remixes, and coordinated platform campaigns. We are interested in 
exploring how this remediation of older media forms through digital 
infrastructure reshapes the form, scale, and affective intensity of 
ideological conflict, and what it means for political life across the 
region.

THEMATIC AREAS

We invite contributions engaging with the following areas, understood 
not as discrete categories but as intersecting domains.

Propaganda, Censorship, and the Viral Spread of Disinformation. 
Television propaganda formats remediated through digital circulation; 
algorithmic amplification; AI-generated deepfakes and synthetic media; 
WhatsApp and Telegram as "closed media" disinformation ecologies; 
co-existence, on "open media" platforms, of state censorship and viral 
amplification as complementary strategies of information control; and 
internet disruption as an instrument of control, from blanket national 
blackouts to suspensions geofenced to protest sites — Sri Lanka's 
platform blocks during the 2022 Aragalaya, nationwide mobile shutdowns 
in Pakistan in May 2023, Bangladesh's near-total blackout during the 
July 2024 uprising, the platform ban that precipitated Nepal's Gen Z 
protests in 2025, and the Delhi-area shutdowns during India's student 
protests in 2026.

Informational Governmentalities and Data Insecurity. Global internet 
platforms produce new forms of datafication which connect with the 
postcolonial nation-states of South Asia within changing configurations. 
Platform bans, including TikTok in India and Nepal and X in Pakistan and 
its subsequent unbanning, produce new modes of controlling digital 
content flows. At the same time, the state is digitising population 
records through biometric national databases such as India's Aadhaar, 
Pakistan's NADRA, and Bangladesh's NID. How can we think about the 
interconnection of states and platforms in new ways through the problems 
that are unfolding?

Populism, Factionalism, and Cultural Mobilisation. Populist aesthetics 
in cinema and digital media; religion, myth, and prophecy in mediated 
nationalisms; influencer politics and micro-celebrity populism; 
factional media ecosystems structured by caste, sect, and linguistic 
solidarity, not one public sphere fragmenting but multiple overlapping 
publics in collision.

Gender, Sexuality, Religion, Caste, and Digital Contestation. The double 
bind of digital visibility, in which recognition and targeting are 
inseparable; anti-queer backlash and feminist counter-mobilisation; 
caste and media representation in online culture wars; digital 
harassment as organised political strategy; platform-enabled communal 
violence, from Sri Lanka's Facebook-implicated anti-Muslim riots in 2018 
and after the 2019 Easter bombings, to the Facebook-driven anti-Hindu 
attacks in Bangladesh in 2021.

Vernacular Dissent, Peripheral Nationalism, Satire, and Counter-Publics. 
Meme cultures and digital vernacular politics; humour, parody, and irony 
as political weapons under conditions of surveillance and censorship; 
peripheral and sub-state nationalisms sustained in regional-language 
digital publics — Kashmiri, Baloch, Ladakhi, Manipuri — whose claims run 
from secession to constitutional inclusion, and whose repertoires 
increasingly arrive from elsewhere; visual cultures of protest; diaspora 
digital networks sustaining dissent across borders, as with the Tamil 
diaspora's transnational activism since the end of Sri Lanka's civil war 
in 2009; politics of visibility; the precarity of digital archives under 
repressive regimes.

Methodology and Ethics. Researching polarised digital environments; 
researcher and participant safety; fieldwork under precarious 
conditions; platform access and archival instability; computational 
approaches to multilingual and vernacular media; AI-assisted methods for 
analysing large-scale mediated conflict.

THEORETICAL ORIENTATIONS

The volume takes theoretical sophistication as a premise, not allegiance 
to a single school. The critical vocabularies most ready to hand, 
including public-sphere and counter-public theory, platform governance 
and data colonialism, were largely built elsewhere, and part of the 
volume's work is to test them against conditions they did not 
anticipate. Several tensions animate it: what counter-public theory 
(Fraser) and pirate modernity (Sundaram) still illuminate, and where 
South Asian media ecologies exceed them, as work on mediated 
nationalisms (Rajagopal) and digital vernaculars (Udupa) suggests; and 
what actual subalternity offers empirically when set against theories of 
datafication and data colonialism as platforms become infrastructures 
(Mukherjee; Plantin and Punathambekar). Couldry's and Chouliaraki's 
reflections in Ethics of Media raise important questions about whether, 
and under what conditions, disengagement from digital platforms may be 
desirable or necessary.

We invite contributors to think either through or against these 
frameworks, to challenge and complicate them in light of the 
proliferating digital culture wars of the region. There are discourse 
networks and public spheres, but also information bubbles, foams, and 
algorithmic undercurrents. We do not seek theoretical uniformity. What 
do the affordances and limitations of social media platforms mean in 
settings marked by political contestation, inequality, and uneven access 
to visibility? What might platform disengagement entail for dissenting, 
marginalised, and oppositional voices that continue to rely on these 
infrastructures for expression, mobilisation, and community-building? We 
seek theoretically diverse vantage points that converge on a shared 
problem: the mediated production of cultural conflict in South Asia.

EDITORS

Dr Munira Cheema, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
Dr Asif Akhtar, Lecturer, King's College London

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Abstract: 300 to 400 words
Author bio: 100 words per author
Language: English
Chapter length if accepted: 6,000 to 9,000 words
Submission email: (digitalculturewars /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(digitalculturewars /at/ gmail.com)>

TIMELINE

Abstract submission deadline: 15 October 2026
Notification of acceptance: 15 November 2026
Full chapter submission: 15 January 2027
Expected publication: 2028
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