IRCCS Public Seminar: DIGITAL INTIMACY: YOUNG WOMEN IN INTER-ASIA
Event Details:
Date: 6 June 2025 (Friday)
Time: 2:00 - 3:00pm (GMT+8 Hong Kong)
Vunue: Humanities Research Hub (D3-P-04E, EduHK, Tai Po) & Online
Language: English
Registration: https://forms.gle/PmDKQVyosDUhapgt8
Speaker
Professor Tejaswini Niranjana
Director, Centre for Asian Studies,
GITAM University, India
Adjunct Professor, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Tejaswini Niranjana is Director, Centre for Asian Studies, GITAM University, India, and Adjunct Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her books include Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (2020), both published by Duke University Press. Recently, she edited Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford UP, 2020). She is the co-producer of three documentary films related to music, and the curator of Saath-Saath, the India-China music collaboration project (http://saathsaathmusic.com). Her book, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), has impacted a wide range of fields from anthropology and history to post-colonial studies. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently awarded with the National Translation Prize for Fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association. She was Chair of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society from 2015-2019.
Abstract
DIGITAL INTIMACY: YOUNG WOMEN IN INTER-ASIA
Regimes of neoliberalisation and the emergence of new consumer cultures across Asia undergird the expansion of digital mediation in everyday life. The collaborative multi-sited research project on Digital Intimacy, spanning four cities – Hong Kong, Singapore, Guangzhou and Bangalore – has investigated the ways in which young university-going women relate to friends, families and lovers in a situation of digital ubiquity. As female selves re-make themselves today through education, consumption and labour, they draw on much longer histories inter-referenced by our research. These are histories of how the discourses of nation and modernity are entwined with the re-shaping of gender and sexuality. 19th and early 20th century debates around culture, tradition and modernity crucially hinge on the ‘woman question’ that we discuss in comparative perspective and bring into the present day.
The broader digital ecosystem that shapes new modes of relationality today provides the context within which the current redrawing of boundaries between private and public is taking place. Modalities of friendship, kinship and sociality in general are being transformed through the types of digital intimacy our project engages in their specific manifestations in the four sites of the project, drawing on in-depth ethnographic interviews.