Event: Nishant Shah about the Self as a Network, September 3, Viadrina

There is a growing concern that the sense of the private self is eroding. Many recommend that in order to keep it intact, we should safeguard our individual privacy. Nishant Shah defies the idea of the individual self and claiming that the self itself is a network.  Shah, who is a fellow at the CIHR, will present his research about the Self as a Network at Viadrina on September 3, 2015.

The self as a network: Examining the contours of privacy in database governance
September 3rd 2015, 16.30 to 18.00
Room: HG109 (Senatsaal), Main Building
European University Viadrina
Große Scharrnstraße 59, 15230 Frankfurt (Oder)

Dr. Nishant Shah is a Professor of Culture and Aesthetics of New Media, Leuphana University Lüneburg. He is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He has been committed to producing infrastructure, frameworks and collaborations in the global south to understand and analyse the ways in which emergence and growth of digital technologies have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural milieu.

Shah examines the Digital Subject and the Quantified Self, as two new configurations of the self that defy the idea of the individual self. He argues that within the nodal structure of the digital, the self as we understand it has been not just been reconfigured through networks, but is indeed, a network in itself, distributed, and dense.

Shah claims that the demands we make from database governance systems cannot be about restitution of the old self. Instead we need to begin with this newly configured self and understand what can be done to keep the new political subjectivity of the self as a network.

His research draws on the digital architecture of computational networks. He illustrates his arguments with the  ethnographic material from the building of the biometric identity and governance database – Aadhaar – in India.

The talk is open to the public. You can confirm your attendance by sending an email at ue.rhicnull@eciffo

There is also a press release by European University Viadrina in German about this event.