Interview with Nishant Shah

Interview and editing by Fieke Jansen en Josine Stremmelaar

Tags: India , Digital Natives
Additional tags: Nishant Shah , Digital Natives , Knowledge and Change

 

Bio: Nishant Shah is the Research Director at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), Bangalore. Prior to CIS Nishant worked as an information architect with Yahoo, Partecs and Khoj Studios, was a Research Analyst for Comat Technologies and designed and taught several courses and workshops on the aesthetics and Politics of New Digital Media, for undergraduate and graduate level students in different universities around the world.

Nishant has done his Ph.D. doctoral work from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. At CIS Nishant manages a portfolio of multi-disciplinary projects on Histories of the Internet, Wikipedia and the Critical Point of View, Technology mediated education, Digital Archives and Memories, and e-Governance. Nishant’s currently collaborates with the Hivos to explore Digital Natives and the potentials for social transformation and political participation in developing countries in the Global South.

How do you define knowledge?

 

“This is an important but loaded question. Knowledge seems an abstract concept, but it is in itself a practice and part of everyday life. Knowledge is consciously produced and consumed. It is a multistakeholder construction of the consumer and producer. An example: the notion of time. We are born into time, we are informed of what we are in time. We internalise it as such that we don’t realise the notion of time consciously. But even though time permeates our lives, it is very difficult to say what time is. Who defines what time is, how you experience it and how time can regulate your practice? If you ask someone what time is, they will look at their watch and say it’s 18.00. The same holds for knowledge.”

How do you see the gap between academics and practitioners and can the gap be bridged?

 

“Actually I don’t think there’s an inherent gap between academics and practitioners. Stating that there is per se a discrepancy between practice and theory is an easy way out for people who want to stay in their comfort zone. If there is a gap, this is on the level of intentions, not, for instance, in the object of deliverables. I experience lots of dialogue between theory and practice. We just haven’t found a mechanism to capture the dialogue effectively and so it looks non-existent. Taking as an example deliverables, here the perceived gap lies more in the limitation of the product than by what it is informed.”

 

So how can we foster such dialogues?

 

“A fight is the most efficient form of dialogue. It’s time to open up more (verbal) spaces of fights instead of continuing impolite dialogues that do not change anything.”

 

Can you give an example?

 

“Gender politics is a good example. The strength of feminists is that they have the same goal and language, but at the same time they are able to critically discuss and fight with each other about strategies.”

 

How does knowledge trigger change?

 

“Knowledge is change.”

 

How does knowledge trigger transformation?

 

“In itself knowledge doesn’t transform anything. Knowledge can be mobilised/translated into an action of transformation. Knowledge and agency can lead to empowerment, knowledge without agency can lead to disempowerment, even entrenchment.”

 

How do you relate your work on local realities to global problems?

 

“That’s a difficult question. Because how do you define the local, are the borders in the geography, ideology or in the platform? The local does not get produced out of a vacuum. You only realise the local in contrast to the non-local.”

 

And how do you realise the global?

 

“The global does not exist in a material way in itself. The local is the only point where the global can be realised in the material way.”

 

What does that mean?

 

“Well, sitting as an Indian in a Taipei Starbucks talking to Dutch colleagues is an example. The experience is global but only because it plays out locally, in this case Taipei. Another interesting example is how new local-global interaction plays out in Second Life.” (Second Life is a free 3D virtual world where users can socialise, connect and create using free voice and text chat.)

 

Do you work with specific methodologies?

 

“We focus on multidisciplinary inquiry. Multidisciplinarity is a non-integrative mixture of disciplines in that each discipline retains its methodologies and assumptions without change or development from other disciplines within the multidisciplinary relationship. Basically, we can all learn the most from people approaching a common object but from different perspectives and strengths.”

 

To what part of your programme do you want dialogue participants to pay particular attention?

 

“Our approach to knowledge. Our programme is about decentralisation of knowledge, not on becoming ‘the experts’. We focus on amplifying existing voices and joint sense-making rather than on producing a new voice. Collaboration is key. So, we look forward to sharing these experiences of knowledge decentralisation.”