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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
This paper highlights the interplay of local contexts and online political information in shaping political attitudes and negotiating 'offline' inequalities and power relations among young underprivileged men in Kolkata (India), through insights from a digital ethnographic study.
Paper long abstract:
The Indian state of West Bengal is undergoing a unique political tension. Amid 34-year communist rule and stagnant industry, the party ruling the state, Trinamool Congress– with its brand of minority-appeasing women-centric politics– fights the growing pressure of masculinist Hindutva politics of Bharatiya Janata Party in the central government. For urban young men with low economic and cultural capital, having just entered adulthood, this has potential impact on their life chances and attitudes towards work, politics and gender as they rely on the Internet for how to vote, seek romantic partners and succeed in the unforgiving job-market.
This paper is based on nine months of (digital) ethnographic fieldwork in 2023-24 with 20 young men aged 18-22 from underprivileged backgrounds in Kolkata. Through the political experiences of individuals of different social groups, I try to understand their political habitus in Kolkata with its processes of stratification and embedded power relations. With that context, I show how the everyday domestication of online political information impacts their political attitudes forming both a tool and medium of negotiating or reinforcing the multi-pronged inequalities of their ‘offline’ lives. The findings point to the importance of family political history and religion in shaping their political attitudes leading often to stereotyping ‘the other’ in their online interactions. This research extends the knowledge of relationship between media, gender and politics to men from underprivileged settings, underscoring the importance of specific local and life contexts in how interaction with technology shapes realities for youth in the Global South.
Inequality, polycrises and young people in the global South
Session 2