Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication Releases PARGC Paper 4 by Arjun Appadurai
"The Academic Digital Divide and Uneven Global Development" warns against the dangers of “knowledge-based imperialism and scholarly apartheid.”
The Annenberg School for Communication’s Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication Press (PARGC Press) has published PARGC Paper 4, “The Academic Digital Divide and Uneven Global Development,” by the 2015 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Global Communication, Arjun Appadurai.
“The Academic Digital Divide and Uneven Global Development,” began as Appadurai’s October 2015 Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication delivered at the Annenberg School for Communication. In it, Appadurai warns against the dangers of “knowledge-based imperialism and scholarly apartheid” and offers possible ways to avoid them. (Video of the lecture is available here.)
“Arjun Appadurai epitomizes everything PARGC is about,” notes Marwan M. Kraidy the Anthony Shadid Professor of Communication and Director of PARGC. “Boldly imaginative, his work is grounded in real places, often but not always India, which he beseeches us to see as an optic, not as an object, of research. His work transcends divisions within and between disciplines and area studies, to advance truly trans-disciplinary conversations. His writing is deeply felt, meticulously researched, rigorously conceptualized, and gracefully crafted.”
Appadurai is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. In addition to numerous distinguished lectures, awards, prizes and fellowships, he is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India). During his academic career, he has also held professorial chairs at Yale University, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles, including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006) and Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996).
