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.
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.
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.
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.
This essay revisits the movement against the Constitution Amendment Act in India, exploring how it subverted the governement’s way to claim democratic representation through reappropriating its pervasive nationalist discourse.
This interdisciplinary project explores the effects of political language on democracy when it transitions to authoritarianism. By relying on digital social sciences and ethnographic evidence, I will retrace the lineages and impacts of populist, authoritarian and communal rhetoric in the world’s largest democracy: India.
Across India, an unprecedented student-led opposition has materialized, in particular in the aftermath of the violent police storming of two Muslim-dominated state-funded universities. We are questioning the relevance of campus spaces in leading…
This introduction questions the relevance of student politics as an object of inquiry by asking whether it truly constitutes a field that is autonomous from wider organized politics. Through interpreting student politics as political becoming…
Departing from essentialist approaches to student politics, this article outlines the processes by which campus spaces activate the formation of political attitudes among participants. I suggest that everyday political competition among student organizations…