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Accepted Paper:
The Limits of Solidarity in Indian Muslim Twitter
Max Kramer
(Freie Universität Berlin)
This presentation focuses on the imagination of solidarity among online active Indian Muslims on Twitter. I will investigate the mediation of solidarity within what is often called IMT (Indian Muslim Twitter) as an imaginary community of discourse.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation focuses on the imagination of solidarity among online active Indian Muslims on Twitter. I will draw on online ethnography and conversations with practitioners to flesh out some conceptual stakes of debates that deal with the possibilities of solidarity as they pertain to activism on digital platforms. My focus will be on Indian Muslim and lower-caste Muslim activists and intellectuals. I will investigate the mediation of solidarity within what is often called IMT (Indian Muslim Twitter) as an imaginary community of discourse. The activists I engage with are all highly visible and often the target of moral outrage by the Hindu right and/or by upper-caste Muslims. The debates on solidarity usually center on normative and practical understandings of Islam and/or bahujan (anti-elite majoritarian) politics. My research question is about the limits of solidarity as they pertain to agency in the digital space. I will argue that the imaginary limitations on solidarity need to be contextualized in respect to the limitations on human agency at the intersections of digital infrastructures, commodified communication and moral-political self-understandings of these practices. I argue that IMT-discourse is an excellent field site to explore the limitations to express solidarity within platform capitalist environments.