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Accepted Paper:

#AanaJaana- Curating 'textual' writing through cheap digital technologies as a form of self-authorship from the margins  
Arya Thomas Ayona Datta (University College London)

Paper short abstract:

This paper posits that as a polycentric practice, #AanaJaana offers an appropriate metaphor to expand the 'contact zone' in order to decolonise gendered knowledge and power across digital-analogue margins by looking at self authorship in the margins.

Paper long abstract:

Using Marie Louise Pratt's notion of 'contact zone', we examine #AanaJaana as a space of encounters that emerges by visually 'composing-with' as well as 'learning-with' the realities and constraints of space, technology and power. Based on self-authorship over a period of 6 months within a 'safe space' of a WhatsApp group of young women living in the urban margins, we draw attention to #AanaJaana as a set of crosscutting networks of power dynamics over women's bodies across the home, mobile phone and the city. #AanaJaana refers to how young women in the margins negotiate the 'freedoms' of moving (aana) in online space with the 'dangers' of going out (jaana) into the city, or the restrictions of entering (aana) online space with the freedom of leaving (jaana) home. We argue first, that #AanaJaana is a space of confinement because of the infrastructural paralysis in the peripheries, second that it is also at the same time translocally produced by referencing several textual, digital and material spaces of self-realisation. Finally, we argue that #AanaJaana is a space of intertextuality through encounters between emojis, shorthand, voice notes on the mobile phone, with parody and dark humour of their gendered experiences that can transform shame, humiliation and fear into reflection, resistance and agency.

Panel P22a
Researching the post-pandemic city through digital ethnography
  Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -