Darfurnica: Art must offend, shock and disturb
Rajashri Dasgupta visits Nadia Plesner’s Darfurnica exhibition in Copenhagen and reports on the Danish artist’s victory over accessories giant Louis Vuitton, which sued her for using a Louis Vuitton lookalike bag in T-shirts and paintings of a naked African boy to highlight the situation in Darfur and to condemn media’s obsession with celebrity coverage
Assam: A minefield for journalists
Following the killing of J Dey in Mumbai, the safety of working journalists has been in the news. But Assam has seen the killing of over 20 journalists in the last two decades. And not a single conviction has taken place
Copyright, copyleft and everything in between
Filmmaker Paromita Vohra talks about her new film Partners in Crime, which explores issues around copyright, copyleft, culture and markets, and suggests that we might need a hybrid notion of copyright in which many forms coexist, just as we may need many markets based on many different ideas of exchange
Turning journalism on its head
Citizen journalism initiatives such as Global Voices, Open File and Media Co-operative get readers to tell editors what should be covered and how. They talk to the people affected first, and to the decision-makers later. A second report from the recent Citizen Media Conference in Montreal
Marginalised voices get a new life on the Net
From Vozmob, which helps Latin American immigrant workers in Los Angeles create and distribute stories about their lives using cell phones to an interactive network for Inuit and other indigenous communities, there is a growing universe of marginalised voices populating the Web. A report from a recent Citizen Media conference in Montreal
Kashmir's e-protest
There is a rising tide of e-protest in Kashmir as the children of the Kashmir conflict make themselves heard through street graffiti, Facebook and YouTube
A totem pole for a brave new virtual world
‘10 Tactics for Turning Information into Action’ is a smart, nifty resource package, loaded with valuable information and links that unlock the doorway to a world where hard data, software technology, creativity and sheer human ingenuity frisson to tell tales of human resilience and struggles for social justice
TB champions
It’s easy to blame the media for its disinterest in covering issues such as tuberculosis, which kills 1,000 in India every day. But the problem could be the way organisations working with TB communicate their information. Trainings in effective communication and media advocacy clearly help
Quiet death of a language
Boa Senior, the last speaker of a language called Bo -- one of the ten Great Andamanese languages -- died last week in Port Blair. She was aged around 85. With her death, the language that may have constituted the sixth language family in India has become extinct
War of the videos
Films and videos that chronicle the peaceful resistance of people to powerful industrial and political interests that seek to dispossess them are extremely important at a time when all such dissent is criminalised. But they are often lost in the long list of films that seek to do just the opposite