Transdisciplinary exploration of Bangalore

The conference Mediating Modernity in the 21st Century: Rethinking & Remembering, held on 24–25 January 2013 at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India, is the core event of an ongoing experimental project of artistic and academic collaboration between Srishti and K3, Malmö University. The Memories of Modernity project, involving students and faculty at the two institutions, aims at exploring the dynamic city of Bangalore (which in the last decade has doubled its population from 5 to 10 million) by means of transdisciplinary interventions.

The two-day conference, with presentations of both academic papers and artistic work, is organized along three parallel subtheme tracks: ”Gendering Modernities”, ”Memories of Modernities” and ”Modernities, Cities and Public Spheres”. Keynote speakers are Indian American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, New York University, cultural sociologist Asu Aksoy, Istanbul Bilgi University, and artist and philosopher Jyoti Sahi, Srishti.

Four K3 students (from the ComDev and KMP master programmes) are currently in India to do their degree projects as part of this collaboration. The keynote addresses and one of the parallel panels will be streamed on orecomm.net. For the full programme, see the conference website here.