How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities? Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Investigating the theory and practice of 'cultural democracy', this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.

How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities? Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Investigating the theory and practice of 'cultural democracy', this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.

A new addition to the Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change series, this book sets the stage for subsequent books by identifying and analysing the current gaps in the field. It critically reviews the theory, practice and strategies of Communication for Social Change in relation to occurring structures, policies and discourses.

A new addition to the Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change series, this book sets the stage for subsequent books by identifying and analysing the current gaps in the field. It critically reviews the theory, practice and strategies of Communication for Social Change in relation to occurring structures, policies and discourses.

This book locates Digital India in context. It deals with the many ways in which Digital India is shaped by local pressures and political expediencies as much as by global pressures, namely from one of India's strongest allies, the USA. However, this relationship with the USA is by no means straightforward and this book illustrates the highs and lows of this relationship. As importantly, this book deals with the larger Indian reality in which the digital is but one sector, albeit an increasingly important one. There are other sectors including agriculture and the informal sectors on which many million Indians depend on their livelihoods. These sectors too are becoming exposed to the digital and this has resulted in the presence of multiple digital spheres in India. This book deals with the ambivalent Indian State that is on the one hand attempting to control its citizens through some of these digital spheres while also investing in public access projects such as Digital India and resisting the power of Big Brother, namely the USA. This is an important contribution to understanding Digital India precisely because it attempts to account for some of its complexities.

This book explores the past and present of information infrastructures in India. Grounded in infrastructure theory, it explores the historical continuities between information infrastructures in colonial and post-colonial India and the compulsions of information infrastructures in contemporary India. This volume highlights the roles played by private and public sector entities in shaping information infrastructures in India, the political economy of growth in this sector and the challenges faced by the State in regulating information platforms that are also information infrastructures. It includes separate chapters on oceanic cable infrastructures that account for more than 90 per cent of data traffic between India and the rest of the world and the political economy of India's satellite program. Taking the 'long view', it argues that the provisionings of information infrastructures are by no means straight forward, that they are always expressions that are shaped by internal and external contestations, by ideological ends and business imperatives, the needs of consumers/citizens and the State, that there is a politics of infrastructure that needs to be accounted for, and that there always are winners and losers in large infrastructural projects such as Digital India.

Over the last decade or two, a handful of powerful, monopolist platforms have embraced our lives worldwide. They intermediate our socialities and relationships, what we search for on the Internet, and our online purchases. We are living in a global economy that is fuelled by the monetization of affect. One is now only too aware that various platforms are very systematically using the advantages stemming from algorithmic power and platform externalities to mine and privatize personal data that is in turn sold to advertisers who target not just the present but also future economic behaviours of users. One now also hears of the complicity of some of these platforms in data breaches that have contributed to the making and unmaking of political fortunes of key political parties across geographies. This unprecedented power of platforms is, however, being challenged today. Data breaches, evidence of platform manipulations, platform complicities with state surveillance, and their monopolist behaviours and its consequences for competition and data privacy have become the basis for regulatory responses from governments throughout the world. National and regional courts of law have collected a lot of evidence on myriad forms of platform illegalities that discriminate against competitors and that point to the privatization of personal data on a global scale. The proposed volume provides an introduction to some of the issues and challenges related to platform regulation, the conundrums and paradoxes involved, and also to some of the well-conceived and manageable regulatory pathways currently being explored by national and regional governments. It highlights regulatory responses from four jurisdictions - the European Union, USA, India, and Australia.