Online Gods: A Podcast about Digital Cultures in India and Beyond to be Republished by EPW Engage

Online Gods is part of a theoretical exploration into some of the key concepts in the anthropology of media, and research into how increased online interaction is changing the public sphere. Taking India and the Indian diaspora as its focal point, the podcast continues in the great anthropological tradition of bringing the global and the specific into conversation with one another as it analyses what online discussions do to political participation, displays of faith, and feelings of national belonging. We are also intrigued as to whether a podcast can produce ethnographic theory. We believe it is possible to be both sophisticated and yet comprehensible, and that the spoken form can bring forth an accessibility that is sometimes missing from the written form. We even wonder whether academic podcasting might herald a technologically-enabled return to the centrality of oral traditions in intellectual exploration—can podcasting weaken reading’s hegemonic hold on the consumption of academic knowledge? 
 
Embedded within the digital networks, “Online Gods” is a podcast series about digital cultures and their socio-political ramifications. The podcast inhabits the digital to examine the digital.
 
For two years, we have published 16 episodes featuring conversations with scholars and activists. This new publishing arrangement with EPW Engage has brought our commitment to distribute knowledge and facilitate conversations using multimedia formats to yet another phase. These episodes will now be republished by EPW Engage, opening up new avenues for interactions and dialogue around the curated content. Both EPW Engage and the podcast share the concern to actively explore innovative ways of publishing academic knowledge, and new methodologies to address complex issues. 

The podcast is a key initiative of the five-year research study on digital politics www.fordigitaldignity.com funded by the European Research Council (grant agreement number 714285) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. To know more about the project, contact principal investigator Sahana Udupa: onlinerpol@ethnologie.lmu.de and for podcast related interactions, contact the co-host Ian M Cook: onlinegodspodcast@gmail.com.