http://arjunshankar.com/new-index daily 0.75 2018-01-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1426013849664-2EARV6LO0346487P2L7N/DSC00523.JPG New Index - Surya: A Meditation on Ambika's Photograph For a second Venu stares at the photograph, admiring it before stacking it on top of three others, and tells me in Tamil, nodding towards the photograph, “No one can say that they don’t like this.” It's a universalizing sentiment, expressed in the negative; harkening to Barthes’ idea that the images “power of authentication exceeds the power of representation” but reminding me somehow of the phrasing used in the Tao-se-Ching, the holiest text of Taoism, in which one could come into harmony with the great Tao through a kind of nonaction, in the act of negation itself. The opening lines of the great text begin (though the exact English translation is still very much still under contestation): "The name that can be named is not the eternal name." And it’s this kind of logic that seems to undergird Venu’s statement. That somehow the photograph’s beauty, its character, is in its irreducibility to any one sentiment except in the negation of any negative sentiment and in the kind of affective entanglement that this negation produces. See: Surya: A Meditation on Ambika's Photograph, for more https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1516289981054-OQZA16RBZJROAVM1ZRXB/DSC01597.JPG New Index https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1379853712813-BW4849N7M991TH90ZRAN/DSC00477.JPG New Index https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1384483701142-4QY14LNSCQASIK4IX53U/DSCN7895.JPG New Index http://arjunshankar.com/pit-bulls-light daily 0.75 2013-09-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1380122603491-K2V40JMHQUJ93PKLY3EZ/Arjun+at+Board.png The Other Work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1380122603491-K2V40JMHQUJ93PKLY3EZ/Arjun+at+Board.png The Other Work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1380122816125-2V9SF2WNINZ4G26TWHQ4/DSC01440.JPG The Other Work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1380123308594-AMRAYO314ED25GJ92WW6/Pic+1.JPG The Other Work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1380620699587-B5EBFL6DCS9V7YW7Q38Z/DSCN0510.JPG The Other Work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1379853885657-9B88G3OTRT96LMVGKVLX/DSC00060.JPG The Other Work https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1379853942013-JVE54GVYQNGQWSVCFAZN/DSC00524.JPG The Other Work - Schoolroom from stairs Taken by Muthuraj, Sikshana Foundation at Kadajakasandra Government School https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1379854581338-ZQY2YQ10LJIKS4U13GK0/DSC01158.JPG The Other Work - Our Feet Shot Taken in Kadajakasandra village, Karnataka, India, August 2013 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1386163462021-14FX4QKEV91HJ48LVF2Y/DSC00801.JPG The Other Work http://arjunshankar.com/multimodality daily 0.75 2016-07-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1380123655590-DJ79RTTV76OEJGXVYUCW/DSC00799.JPG Multimodality - The Affects of Development: Value in India’s Global-Digital Age In my current book project,, I argue that what it means to “develop” in India must be re-theorized given emergent digitally-mediated circulations and transnational diasporic networks that influence how social change is conceived. Funded by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship and a Zwicker Award, I conducted fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with personnel from Adhyaapaka Foundation, a Bangalore-based education NGO, as they interacted with teachers, students, and parents in villages outside the city. My work revitalizes the anthropology of value by fleshing out its affective dimensions (Fassin, 2012). Recently, anthropologists have been concerned with the global regimes of value that circulate and change what various populations believe “they ought to want” (Graeber, 2013). These types of changes do not work primarily within the realm of the intellectual, but instead through the prism of affect, directly influencing (or affecting) the potential for particular types of action in the future (Povinelli, 2011). In my fieldwork, affects were produced within a regime of development-based value, manifesting as dreams, aspirations, desires, and anxieties that together I term the affects of development. For example, in the Adhyaapaka organization praxis, the method of intervention was to “motivate” rather than provide skills, explicitly attempting to change how headmasters, teachers, and students felt about themselves and their capabilities and, in so doing, promoting a set of techno-managerial values in schools, including those of accountability and sustainability. The affective intensity of these encounters emplaced these values in students as “what they ought to want”, destabilizing competing values, and pushing them along a path dictated by the precepts of development. For more on my research go to my research page. For a list of projects go to: Research Projects http://arjunshankar.com/currentresearch daily 0.75 2018-01-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1383931188879-L2LMTZW1KT6M2OVQC5QU/IMG_8508.JPG How Development Feels: Value in India's Global-Digital Age In the Field w/ Lekha, Naveen, Kiran, Arun, and Chandan http://arjunshankar.com/about daily 1.0 2025-12-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/ce6ffe9e-5d67-4545-b645-6378e3dd44cc/WhatsApp+Image+2025-12-14+at+7.32.36+PM.png Arjun Shankar, Ph.D. - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. http://arjunshankar.com/writing daily 0.75 2019-09-16 http://arjunshankar.com/projects daily 0.75 2019-09-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1383917987014-9L1WOBT9C0DDB6ZNUYFZ/cropped-CAMRA_gradient.png Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1536248344102-HOUJUCJCZWX8QM2U1CNG/DSCN0497.JPG Projects Adavisandra Village, photograph taken my Kiran, 9th Standard, Adavisandra School https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1504636722317-4RJQKDFW09MDA1M4QPU5/AA-logo-1-05-1-300x300.jpg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5232a480e4b08e3092800a0f/1426033839684-CAEO631M66Z2LTIKRR0K/image-asset.png Projects http://arjunshankar.com/contact daily 0.75 2022-01-26 http://arjunshankar.com/teaching daily 0.75 2019-09-16 http://arjunshankar.com/menu daily 0.75 2018-09-06