Political Science Colloquium Lecture Series on Governance and Politics in South Asia Summer Semester 2025
The Department of Political Science, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University holds its Colloquium every Monday from 14:15 to 15:45 in CATS Lecture Hall 010.01.05. This course not only brings together scholars from different countries but also provides an opportunity to students to present their work.
This is a very good opportunity for all students who want to undertake any research work in the discipline of Political Science as they can receive suggestions from faculty and doctoral candidates. The Colloquium is open to both presenters and participants who wish to draw inspiration from the research of renowned scholars in the field.
12.05.2025: “Searching for India – How Search Engines Mediate Political Knowledge” by Vihang Jumle
What role do search engines play in constructing national knowledge hierarchies? For instance, in China, state actors use domestic platforms to implicitly nurture and reproduce an idea of Chineseness that is compliant with the state discourse. But to what degree do search engines offer channels for such knowledgeinterventions, and to whom are such interventions beneficial in non-authoritarian countries? This talk will address these questions through a mixed-method analysis of visual representation on Google Images of the Indian elections of 2024. In the backdrop of intertwined socio-technical contexts, Mr. Jumle will argue that commercial search engines in non-authoritarian societies partly meet the same fate as they do in authoritarian regimes. By assuming the role of covert homogenizers, search engines autonomously strengthen the political status quo by imposing the mainstream dominant knowledge assumptions and hierarchies onto all and silencing minority interpretations of social reality, thus creating a uniform information ecosystem. In societies witnessing majoritarian national transformations, search engines potentially turn information catalysts, speeding up national homogenization processes.
About the Speaker
Vihang Jumle is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bern. He researches digital technologies and their societal implications using mixed methods. Find his work here..
