Sanglap 12:1 Guest Edited Issue CFP (December 2025) : Representing Truths: Digital Governmentality and the New World Order (Guest Editors: Dr. Samrat Sengupta and Dr. Samata Biswas)
Sanglap 12:1 Guest-Edited Issue CFP (December 2025) :
Representing Truths: Digital Governmentality and the New World Order
(Guest Editors: Dr. Samrat Sengupta and Dr. Samata Biswas)
Technology is always claimed to have been a major factor behind historical and political transformations of the world order. Technologies of representations and transmission of ideas/knowledge have been a key factor behind the construction of identities and regimes of power. Anxieties regarding the control and appropriation of technologies of mediation by different forms of power such as speech (rhetoric), writing or the audio-visual modes of representation have been a major concern of political and social theorists of both the Frankfurt school as well as the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. Scholars such as Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin have been concerned about a totalitarian appropriation of technologies to shape and control the world order. With digital technologies the focus of control and governance is not only on the modes of representation, but also upon the technologies of transmission, which scholars like Jacques Derrida or Bernard Stiegler have termed as teletechnologies. Coterminous with the growth of corporate capitalism, such technologies are ontologically tied to the way the market or the nation-states wield power, and have proved to be fertile playing fields of fundamentalist and xenophobic ideologies to produce their own form of knowledge/power, manufacturing truth. Artificial Intelligence, quantifying, mapping and generating data based on people’s activities, creates a murky field of control, desire and reality, trained on real information, enhanced by ideological considerations. . Corporates use such data for marketing and shaping of the consumerist choices. The authoritarian governments and ideologues use such data to spread their propaganda through production of fake news and pseudo-histories suitable to their agenda. Big data becomes a threat to the realities of the marginalized and the minorities all over the world and we have witnessed such polarized views of politics in the rise of the far right in countries like the USA, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. While social media has been a space for articulating the voices of the marginalized and for launching political movements against state power, in recent times there have been heavy censorship, manipulation and control of data in the social media by authoritarian regimes. More recently, the immediate aftermath of the “Operation Sindoor” launched by India, created a perfect ecosystem of post-truth, fuelled by digitally available or created images and an ideologically vulnerable population.
The proposed issue of Sanglap hopes to take into account such consideration. We invite papers that critically engage with concrete instances of representation and creation of truths and fact, rewriting and augmenting histories, the digital and the haptic turn, including, but not limited to case studies.
Papers (with a 350 word abstract, 100 word bio and 4-5 keywords, formatted in MLA 7th edition, author-date system and in Ariel, font size 11) related to the broad theme and connected but not limited to the following sub-themes within 5000-7000 words can be mailed at representingtruths.sanglap@gmail.com by 15th August 2025:
Post-truth and the crisis of epistemology
Digital governmentality
AI and the regimes of power
Fake news and the politics of representation
Precarity in the digital age
Social media and activism
Information society and the manufacturing of history
Digitization of epistemes and the future of universities
For article formatting style, see https://www.sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/style_guide
Full Article Deadline: August 15, 2025
Decisions to be communicated by October 1, 2025
Issue Publication: December, 2025
