Media functions as an ideological apparatus or a cultural agent of power for the dominant and helps in maintaining its hegemony over the public psyche. The representations in media, therefore, connote the ideological hegemony of the culturally dominant. These mediated cultural constructions have received fairly good consumption in the heightened political sites of cultural nationalism. However, the mediated dominant discourse is contested at various cultural spaces of critical engagement, which in turn evokes new ways of redefining the modalities of production. The critical political categories such as caste, community, religion, gender and sexuality redefine the ways in which the production and consumption of media takes place in Indian society. This book is a collection of published and unpublished essays, written over a period of time, on various social, political and cultural issues that reflect the constructed mediated realities in contemporary political culture. It ranges from addressing the critical questions on social justice, media bias, scientific temperament, culture and sexuality to that of the political dimensions of cricket cultures.
Contents: Foreword. I. Media and society. 1. Justice for Jessica: seeking social justice in media activism. 2. Reporting Imrana: fortunes of being a Muslim woman. 3. Ambedkar and the secular press. 4. Politics of obituaries. 5. Gaddafi, the death gaze of television. II. Caste, gender and science. 6. The invisible: caste exclusion and Dalits. 7. Debating pre-marital sex: gendering the cultural debate. 8. Reclaiming science and technology. 9. Casting the Indian. 10. Re-thinking media education. III. Media, cricket culture. 11. Mapping twenty-20 cricket culture. 12. Media spectacle and the new ‘other’. 13. Vinod Kambli: experiments with caste and willow. Bibliography. Index.
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