Payal Arora

Karaoke for social and cultural change

This account demonstrates the key challenges faced in producing engaging educational content for information and communication technologies (ICT) deployed in rural India. The ‘Stills in Sync’ (SIS) project aims to enhance literacy through the revival and proliferation of popular regional folksongs with social awareness themes in rural India. This product entails the use of the Same Language Subtitling (SLS) karaoke feature that won the Worldbank Development Marketplace award in 2002 and the ‘Tech Laureate’ honor from the Technology Museum of Innovation in 2003. This case study highlights the struggles faced in the production process as we sought to negotiate localism with scalability. The paper is meant to stimulate discussion and further research on the process of digitalizing cultural and educational content in muliple languages for literacy gains and empowerment. I attempt to give three‐dimensionality to current buzzwords in education content creation using ICT: localism, relevance and engagement.

Instant-messaging Shiva, flying taxis, Bil Klinton and more: children's narratives from rural India

In this article, story (re)productions by children in rural India are seen as a potential tool for addressing current `participatory issues facing development practitioners. A project was implemented to involve children from a rural village in South India in e-literary storybook productions. The intention was to foster online representations of the rural voice through the lens of the child. Drawing on the material of childrens stories, multiple subjectivities are revealed that compel us to reconsider relations of the rural with technology and current social contexts. An analysis of these narratives highlights childrens appropriation capabilities as they weave the urbanness and global with the rural fabric, moving beyond the traditional discourse of the urban—rural dichotomy. This effort capitalizes on current theorizations of territory as scapes, making the case to harness childrens stories to enlighten the adult, well-intentioned development practitioner who seeks genuine understanding of territory and practice.

Perspectives of Schooling through Karaoke: A Metaphorical Analysis.

This paper plays with education through the analogy of karaoke to tease out the instructions of a situated educational practice. Here, Cremins conceptualization of education as a deliberate, systematic and sustained effort is employed as a starting point to enable an understanding of educational practice between members elicited by karaoke. Using Garfinkels ethnomethodological framework, the paper investigates modes of education through karaoke practice as part of the ‘live’ narrative, that of instructing and being instructed with the ‘curriculum’ of the event at hand.

E-Karaoke Learning for Gender Empowerment in Rural India

A folksongs karaoke product has been created to increase usage of subtitled media to enhance literacy and technology use, particularly among girls in rural India. This entails generating and proliferating popular local folksongs with social and cultural themes of interest to girls, accompanied by the award-winning Same Language Subtitling (SLS) feature. In this paper, the prime goal is to discuss possible implications of this novel technology content on girls socialization, education, and activism. Based on initial findings from a pilot test of this product in schools, private and public in rural India, I propose that this product has the potential to raise literacy among girls through musical enculturation and entertainment in rural India. By linking folksongs to computers, I argue that this association can shape, transform and/or (re)configure spaces for/by girls in rural India through interaction with technology in ways meaningful to them. Thereby, I problematize the transposition of western perspectives of gender and technology onto the rural terrain as understood within a development discourse