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It
is a well-known cliché that today all of us deal with information
in much greater abundance and intensity than ever before. The
Internet, the sign of this new economy, is a huge repository of
information, with signs, images and stories flowing through its
ever-expanding networks. Any creative and critical engagement
today also means learning to deal with such enormous archives and
flows of information, and understanding how they are created.
While the world around us is increasingly mediated by new
technologies and media forms that shape our perceptions acutely,
most of us do not have access to these technologies, nor are we
encouraged to shape the mediated reality around us.
Any critical pedagogy today must address these questions, raised
by the advent of new media practices, and the increasing
importance of information and communication technologies to our
everyday lives, especially in cities in India. The response of
mainstream educational institutions has been primarily defensive,
to shore up their role against a weakening state and an aggressive
market – with the introduction of new diploma courses and degree
programmes catered for lucrative careers in the corporate media,
such as the Bachelors of Mass Media (BMM) courses in Mumbai. The
responses from individual teachers and scholars, media producers
and activists, and other groups and organisations are still being
debated.
The technical complexities of computing and media production –
or simple aversion to machines – have often negated the enhanced
role and importance of the imagination in a time of mass mediation
and increasing connectivity. With regard to education, this
paradox is reinforced by a generational divide, which is both
social and technical. Many school and college students today have
been socialised into the use, abuse and appropriation of
sophisticated technologies and media from a very young age, unlike
their teachers, parents, and mentors, who often find the learning
curve much steeper. We underestimate the enhanced cultural and
social literacy of a generation of kids raised on cable
television, e-mail and chat rooms, and cheap mobile
communications.
What we must recognise is that this conjuncture – of
technophobia and generational difference – represents a
significant reversal of standard pedagogic approaches.
Vocationalisation has been one response to this dilemma,
reflective of the weak institutional conditions prevailing in many
colleges. Narrow technical instruction, by simply satisfying the
desires of the job market, cannot substitute for the work of the
imagination, which makes technical skills and tools useful and
exciting outside both the classroom and the workplace, in the
public sphere of citizenship and civic action. The decline of the
traditional arts and humanities courses, and their replacement by
career-centric education, while a complex phenomenon, also
presents new opportunities for pedagogic experiments outside the
space of the curriculum and classroom. In the next two sections, I
describe one such extra-curricular experiment, the PUKAR Monsoon
DOC-SHOP, which attempted to recognise and build on some of the
paradoxes and insights outlined above.
PUKAR
Monsoon 2003: “On Cities, On Water”
PUKAR
(Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research), a cross-sectoral
collective of researchers and professionals based in Mumbai, has
been deeply concerned with various concepts and practices of
documenting urban spaces and environments since its inception two
years ago. PUKAR views documentation not simply as a passive act
of recording reality, but an active, imaginative process that
allows us to participate in the construction of the reality around
us. Similarly, our view of the city is not one of static forms or
stable structures, but of constantly
changing urban processes in which the city is better understood as
a nodal point in mobile flows of people, money, images, and
resources.
We annually organise the PUKAR Monsoon – a series of
lectures, workshops, presentations and activities from May to
August every year, in which some undergraduate college students in
Mumbai address a specific urban theme through a variety of
approaches. The theme chosen for this year’s PUKAR Monsoon was
“On Cities, On Water”. Water as substance and as medium has
been central to the urban experience throughout human history,
particularly in coastal and port cities like Mumbai. In the
context of globalisation, other dimensions of water, and of the
relationship between cities and water are becoming increasingly
visible and contested in the public arena – notably through the
privatisation of water resources and infrastructure.
Our aim in the PUKAR Monsoon has been to enable young
people to develop a critical understanding of these and other
relationships between cities and water, and the cultural and
political implications of these connections. The theme of water
becomes a useful pedagogic device to explore new understandings of
cities and urban life in the context of globalisation. Traditional
approaches to understanding cities have often treated the urban
environment as a static object of inquiry, with fixed boundaries
and a coherent set of technical and social indicators related to
infrastructure, population, and employment. The flip side of this
technocratic understanding of the city has been sentimental
imagery of the heritage conservationists, of beautiful colonial
buildings and monuments, which objectifies the contemporary city
as an irretrievable picture postcard.
As opposed to these geographies and imageries, which are based on
fixed and static conceptions, a more mobile and process-oriented
pedagogy recognises that neither cities nor water bodies are
characterised by constant motion and flows. The attempt at
documenting these flows of water, which spill out and extend
across regions beyond the city and even the nation, reminds us
that the formation of contemporary mega-cities like Mumbai is as
much a local as a global process, linking the city in complex and
unequal relationships with its hinterland, regional and global
environments.
The PUKAR Monsoon 2003, timed at the beginning of the
college year in Mumbai, thus provides the context to explore some
of our related concerns with new forms of pedagogy, documentation,
and understandings of cities, in relation to the theme of water.
The first event in the PUKAR Monsoon 2003 was the DOC-SHOP,
in which we attempted to connect these concerns with new media
technologies and practices to create new knowledge about the city.
DOC-SHOP, shorthand for “documentation workshop”, was a
week-long series of intensive sessions that fostered a critical
and intellectual engagement with the terms and practices of
documentation through reading, discussion, and lectures, while
also encouraging hands-on learning of technical skills in digital
and print media. Twenty-six undergraduate students from arts,
science, mass media, and architecture courses participated, almost
all of them from Mumbai.
The DOC-SHOP was conducted by some PUKAR associates along with
resource persons ranging from video editors, sound recordists and
new media artists to engineers, anthropologists and community
activists. Resource persons included Rahul Srivastava, Abhay
Sardesai, Paromita Vora, Gauri Patwardhan, Sadaf Siddique, Neeraj
Goralia, Rajesh Vora, Vickram Crishna, Indu Agarwal, Hansa
Thapliyal, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Qusai Kathawala, Mukul Deora,
Shahid Khan, Beatrice Gibson and Shekhar Krishnan. The structure
of the DOC-SHOP was to combine a morning of lectures and
interactions with practitioners, followed by an afternoon of
shooting, recording, photography or other documentation of water
in the city, and evenings spent in editing or reviewing the
documentaries produced by the students. Five separate days were
devoted to distinct media forms – video, photography, text,
sound, and the web – followed by four days of production work on
small multi-media documentary projects.
DOC-SHOP activities ranged from scripting of short films, writing
poetry and short expressive essays, recording sounds of water
captured from city streets and markets, to photographing the
city’s waterfronts and public fountains, and developing
web-based presentations to link different elements of video, text,
sound and images about water and the city. The discussions in the
DOC-SHOP included reflections on the digitalisation of still and
moving images and the changing role of video and photo
documentation, the history of State and market control of the FM
airwaves and the idea of low-cost community radio, and
understanding the changing nature of the archive and artistic and
expressive practices in the age of the Internet. The emphasis
throughout the DOC-SHOP was on combining practices of
documentation in various media forms – through the use of
digital cameras, recording devices, and computers – with a
creative approach to the urban environment, using the city’s
constantly changing and mobile landscapes as a medium for a new
kind of engaged pedagogy outside the classroom.
The eight days of DOC-SHOP activities culminated in the DOC-SHOP
Review on 27 May 2003, a public exhibition of short videos, photo
essays, edited sound recordings, web art, and other small
documentary projects produced by the students (a web archive of
these projects, designed and built by one of the DOC-SHOP
students, can be seen at www.pukar.org.in/doc-shop/). The DOC-SHOP
Review concluded with a two-hour public discussion featuring film
encyclopaedist and cultural studies scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha of
the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore,
oral historian and feminist scholar CS Lakshmi, of SPARROW (Sound
and Picture Archives for Research on Women), Mumbai, and
documentary film-maker Madhusree Dutta of Majlis, Mumbai.
A
New Pedagogy?
Pedagogic
interventions are important to a new generation of urban youth,
whose critical understanding of society is mainly formed in the
space of colleges, and through the world of the mass media. The PUKAR
Monsoon – now in its second year – was conceived in a
spirit of engagement with younger voices, which are often
neglected as sources of serious reflection on our city and
society.
While we are used to according to young people the role of
creative social agents, and address both their imaginations and
aspirations as future citizens, we are still unused to regarding
them either as technical experts, or real producers of knowledge.
How often have we heard the lament that post-liberalisation
generation have shorter attention spans and are more apathetic
than ever before? Everything from lack of political awareness, to
mindless consumerism, to disinterest in reading long books, has
been blamed on the alienation of today’s youth.
What these comments reflect is our inability to recognise the
potential of new media practices to unleash new ways of learning
from our information and media-saturated environments,
particularly in cities. This technological shift necessarily
disrupts the institutional moorings of mainstream education,
creating new spaces outside the classroom for innovative pedagogic
practice. Vocationalisation and other forms of “dumbing down”
in the media and public culture, are only one, rather weak,
response to this new conjuncture. As opposed to vocationalisation,
recently many pedagogic initiatives have intervened directly
through the curriculum, taking advantage of the weak institutional
conditions prevailing in many universities to introduce new
courses and means of certification.
The PUKAR Monsoon, while only in its second year, has based
itself on a different kind of extra-curricular practice, which
uses the city as a pedagogic device for the creation of new
knowledge. Through the DOC-SHOP, we realised that digital
technologies are lowering the barriers of access to the means of
producing new social imaginations, and more than ever before young
people have the tools to build new and imaginative forms of
creative reflection and civic engagement. What is left is to
articulate a new pedagogy – and institutional forms appropriate
to this practice – which gives young people the space and the
equipment to create these new worlds and act on them, not just as
good students or workers, but as confident citizens.
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