Radhika Gajjala (PhD, University of Pittsburgh, 1998) is Professor of Media and Communication (joint appointed faculty in American Culture Studies) at Bowling Green State University.
She has published books on Cyberculture and the Subaltern (Lexington Press, 2012) and Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women was published (Altamire, 2004). She has co-edited collections on Cyberfeminism 2.0 (2012), Global Media Culture and Identity (2011), South Asian Technospaces (2008) and Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice (2008).
She is currently continuing work on two interrelated projects on microfinance online, digital financialization to P2P lending and borrowing based in social media practices, marketing, philanthropy and neoliberal entreprenuership with a focus on “women’s work”, value and tacit practices/contributions in transitioning economic times through an (auto)ethnographic focus on craft communities (book in-progress as of 2013 Summer). This project continues to link with examinations of the ITization and NGOization of Global socio-economic work and play environments started in Cyberculture and the Subaltern and examines the connections between money and presentations of self/identity and value in global work-space, virtual worlds and on coding and placement of affect and labor in DIY and craft networks.
She is also a member of the Fembot Collective and FemTechnet and is co-editor (with Carol Stabile) of ADA: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology.
Note on Digital Humanities
My work with what has now come to be termed as “Digital Humanities” dates back to the 1990s when we used to call it “Humanities for Computing,” “Technology and the Humanities” and so on. Early collaborations supported by the Institute Advanced Technology in the Humanities (when John Unsworth was Director of the institute) included my work with the Spoon collective (as moderator of the Postcolonial listproc and founder of a couple other listprocs focused on women) and explorations in the PMCMOO and Lingua MOO. My research into South Asian Digital Diasporas through postcolonial and subaltern studies framewords resulted in further engagements in various digital environments. In addition I have used immersive environments such as textbased MUDs and MOOs, secondlife, various social media tools and gaming environments in my teaching at both graduate and undergraduate levels. My research continues to investigate issues around “digital subalternity” and women’s digital labor in contemporary global spaces of work and play. Explorations around cyberculture and the subaltern have led me to offline spaces in rural India and to look at issues around craft communities, women and microfinance, women and mobile phone apps, carework and gendering of space/place through the deskilling of labor. I am particularly engaged in researching contradictions around digital inclusion and the production of archives of subalternity and asking what the “decolonizing” of “Digital Humanities” would look like.
Links
Bowling Green State University – Faculty Page
ADA: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology