[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
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—platform governance, digital rights, 
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—TikTok in India and Nepal, 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 (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—public-sphere and counter-public theory, platform governance, 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: 300–400 words
  * Author bio: 100 words per author
  * Language: English
  * Chapter length (if accepted): 6,000–9,000 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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