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Masterclass with Parmesh Shahani: Connecting Dots and Breaking Silos
This year's Impakt festival is about to start on October 24th. Together with Impakt Festival and the Centre for Humanities, the New Media & Digital Culture programme hosts a prestigious fellowship. Parmesh Shahani is this year's CfH-Impakt Festival Fellow. During his fellowship, Parmesh will participate in the Impakt Festival, give public lectures and he will work with a selected group of students in a master class.
Connecting Dots and Breaking Silos: Unexpected Sources of Knowledge
In this masterclass, 2012 Impakt Fellow Parmesh Shahani will talk about how different organizational formats, like the conference, the collective and the collaborative workspace can generate different forms of knowledge and networks to create an impact on the world. He will illustrate his talk with several case studies, mostly from India.
Participating students will actively engage with Impakt Fesival and use lectures, exhibited works and screenings as source material for their research projects. With reference to the festival's topic 'No More Westerns' students will trace and eventually constitute cultural engagement between the Netherlands and India. Results of this explorative research can range from data visualization projects, reports or interviews, over mapping of participants and works, to conceptual writing including history and current media narratives. Students will catalyse the connections between India and Netherlands and present them in media project, a talk or a written text that will be published on newmediastudies.nl
The master class intends to shed light on unexpected sources of knowledge. Looking for innovation, tracing tacit knowledge, mapping epistemic cultures in places that to not resemble the institutional temples of knowledge creation is a key feature of this master class. This might be knowledge developed in intercontinental trade among salesmen, innovation born out of mere necessity in migrant communities, or it might trace knowledge creation and mediation among subcultures.
As an experienced writer, a TED fellow, and editor for Verve India, Parmesh will introduce to writing and presentation techniques and work with them on popularizing scholarly work. But foremost Parmesh will use his rich knowledge on technology, innovation and subcultures to embark with the students on a quest for unexpected sources of knowledge.
The master class is limited to 10 students. Students can apply by sending a brief motivational letter to Mirko Tobias Schaefer (m.t.schaefer at uu.nl) no later than 14 October. Master class students are required to participate in the activities as outlined by Parmesh Shahani. Students are required to attend the Symposium 'News in a Multipolar World".
Master class participants will have free access to the Impakt Festival activities from 24-28 October. Working language is English.