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Paper short abstract

Examining Adivasi (Indigenous) media in Jharkhand, India, this paper analyzes how digital affordances enable "visual sovereignty" while reinforcing algorithmic exclusion. It frames digital sociality as a struggle for Indigenous future-making against state narratives and extractivist erasure.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the ambivalent affordances of digital media in the Indigenous (Adivasi) territories of Jharkhand, India, where the “technoscape” serves both as a site of decolonial resistance and as a mechanism of digital colonialism. Drawing on multimodal ethnography with the Akhra Collective and the Adivasi Lives Matter (ALM) network, I analyze how Adivasi creators navigate a polarized media ecology defined by state erasure and corporate extraction.

I argue that digital platforms afford Adivasi communities a "visual sovereignty" (Raheja 2010)—allowing for the circulation of counter-narratives that challenge the state’s depiction of Adivasis as "primitive" impediments to development. Specifically, I trace how creators use features such as geotagging and hashtags (e.g., #AdivasiTech) to document deforestation and assert land rights, effectively hacking algorithms to render Indigenous epistemologies visible.

However, these affordances are fraught with polarization. The same algorithmic architectures that permit visibility also enact "technological containment," where Indigenous content is throttled or demonetized under the logic of surveillance capitalism (Couldry and Mejias 2019). Furthermore, state-sponsored media initiatives utilize these platforms to co-opt Adivasi identity, creating a fractured digital sociality. By analyzing these tensions, this paper demonstrates that for Adivasi communities, digital affordances are not merely technical features but political battlegrounds. Ultimately, I propose a framework of "relational media literacy," where Indigenous kinship networks repurpose digital tools to build transnational solidarity and envision pluriversal futures beyond the binary of the nation-state.