I showcase here textual and visual gems of a geek mixed methods ethnography in political science and sociology, focusing mainly on educated youth, representation and political becoming in contemporary India. The repository gravitates around a monograph in preparation on campus activism and Indian democracy, and introduces the curated material of an archival exhibition on student politics. I have a growing interest in text analysis and the study of populist speeches. Content is open access.
§︎ Research foci
• Youth activism as political self-fashioning
• Political archives and the pamphleteers
• Populist style as political representation
• Political intermediaries, elites and subalterns
• Ethnography of political ambition in India
• Text analysis, speeches and lifeworlds
§︎ Contents
• Publications: articles · preprints · op-eds
• Collaborations: ceri · iiit-d · icas-mp
• Datasets: parcha · dips
• Curation: memories of change
• Syllabi: sciences po · king's · cemis
• Code: r · python
• Photography: fieldword photos
• E-library: nonfiction
How and where is democracy “hacked”? By examining the political rhetoric of Narendra Modi on the digital platform Twitter, this article shows that populist communication is tailored to a particular audience profile rather than a particular social media.
This article proposes to explore populism diachronically as a political career. Contra ideationalists, this ethnographic study of an Indian youth leader ‘entering populism’ helps to reconsider the phenomenon as an a-ideological attempt to become politically autonomous.
What constitutes a convincing expressions of political connect, relatedness and commonness? Exploring Narendra Modi’s Mann ki baats, we suggest that part of the answer lays in the overlapping lexical and stylistic realm of Modi and another set of audience-pullers: spiritual gurus.
We hypothesize that populism relies on a mimesis of the putative people as a metaphor of the majority. It requires anti-elitism to be complemented by a people-leaders’ identification abolishing the symbolic distance between the represented and the representative.
This is the replication file of the draft manuscript submitted to the American Political Science Review. It is titled ‘Aping the People’: Populist Identification as Mimesis in Narendra Modi’s Speeches. The SMUR version of the article is found above.
This presentation at the TCPD centre of Ashoka University aims at mapping Indian Prime Ministers’s speeches and their affinities with populism, by comparing them to seemingly non-political actors: religious gurus and policy planners.
The management of the coronavirus spread is not only a global rupture, it also signals the consolidation of the personalistic and intimate rapport between Modi and the people, which routinizes direct populist appeals through disfiguring democratic institutions.
Twitter fall of political debates involving students in university campuses. This is a recording of the retweets of @compulsiveparchawala, a bot that tracks Indian student leaders on the platform. This material is exhibited…
The following themes are contained in this zine: #1 Emergency, #2 Hindu nationalism, #3 Reservations, #4 Liberalization, #5 Gender, #6 Caste, #7 Dissent. Designed by Shemal Pandya and printed on A1 paper, it guides…
Student and youth politics do not only inform the everyday life of campuses, they also engross the imagination of filmmakers who reflect on the broader significance of their involvement in public life. Bhasmang Joshi…
Nivedita Menon is a feminist writer and activist. She’s currently a professor of political thought at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. This material is exhibited as part of the Memories of Change exhibition.
Most speeches of Narendra Modi are found on the Narendra Modi website, on the Press Information Bureau and on the PM India website. However, some of the campaign speeches, mostly in Hindi and Gujarati…
These are preparatory sketches prior to the making of the figures of the draft article “Aping the People”: A Text Analysis of Populist Mimesis in Narendra Modi Speeches. A copy of the final figures are available on the…
Here can be found the R markdown script of the article in preparation “Aping the People”: A Text Analysis of Populist Mimesis in Narendra Modi Speeches. Here you can run the results of the text analysis…
In his Independence Day speeches, Narendra Modi has repeatedly used the words ‘sister’, ‘brother’ and ‘team’. The Prime Minister’s rhetorical technique is inherent in populism, a version of politics that crystallises when a leader…