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.
19.05.2025: “Audacious Hope – An Archive of How Democracy is Being Defended in India” by Prof. Indrajit Roy
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
Indrajit Roy (DPhil, Oxford) is Professor of Global Development Politics at the University of York. He specializes on the global politics of hope, at the core of which lies an appreciation of the contentious connections between democracy and development. He investigates the social foundations of democratic deepening, erosion and renewal; the demands for development as a democratic practice; and the circulation of ideas about democracy and development between national and global contexts. Indrajit is a Trustee of the Political Studies Association (PSA) and the British Association of South Asian Studies (BASAS), Executive Member of the International Political Studies Association (IPSA), and Councillor of the Development Studies Association (DSA).
