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
In this book review of the French translation of ‘Nightmarch: A Journey into India’s Naxal Heartlands’ I discuss Alpa Shah’s groundbreaking exploration of the contradictions of the naxalite movement in India’s tribal belt…where utopia and dystopia converge.
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 course will cover major political developments in the postcolonial period from the standpoint of those—elected or not—who claim to represent constituents. Thematic in scope, the course will aim at unravelling the mechanisms that legitimize power in so-called ‘distributive’ democracies.
In a paradoxical turn of events, the brutal invasion of the democratic state of Ukraine by Russia has, despite its many international condemnations, fostered a certain convergence of views in India between the government, opposition, and various sections of the intelligentsia.
The article proposes to explore populism diachronically as a political career. 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.
This guest lecture is part of Dr. Baris Ari’s class Social “Research Methods: Ethnography”, School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication, University of East Anglia. It discusses ethnographic inquiry in the context of a deepening divide between “positivist” and “interpretivist” research traditions.
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 essay uses a natural language processing model trained on a large database of speeches from Prime Ministers since 1946 to generate analytically intelligible answers to a much-debated question: what is the idea of India?
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.
You can find here a range of datasets of textual rendering of speeches, writings and pamphlets of Indian politicians, student activists, historical figures, administrators and religious gurus involved in the making of contemporary India.
Through engaging with everyday practices among student activists in contemporary Indian campus politics, this ethnographic study examines the breadcrumb trail between the left and self-fashioning. It focuses on a performative modality of political representation…
Scripts to batch process textual data for analysis in R, Python, TXM and IRaMuTeQ. The repo contains tools to extract text – and its metadata – from digital sources (PDFs, HTML, SRT), clean it (layout and OCR corrections) and format it in a CSV+TXT format for analysis.