Dalit-Bahujan Voices Online: Talking about Caste in the Digital World
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Dalit-Bahujan socio-political activism in India emerged as a reaction to hundreds of years of caste inequality and discrimination in social, political, economic, and religious interactions in society. Access to digital technologies amplified the voice of the communities and enabled them to forge new relations, surpass geographical and cultural barriers and to share and archive their knowledge, opinions, and history. With these changes, new questions arose: how is their activism influenced by online media and what obstacles do authors face in the digital environment? This paper focuses on analysis of texts from some of the widely used Dalit-Bahujan informational and news platforms based in English. Through computational text analysis, I explore the published texts and look at which general discursive patterns dominate the current debate in Ambedkarite communities, how they evolve through time, and the role of religion in them – specifically Buddhism, which has been at the center of one of the largest Dalit socio-political protests in history since the 1960s. |
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