Gen Z, Digital Media, and Transcultural Lives: At Home in the World 1666917419, 9781666917413

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Inhabiting Multiple Worlds
Communities of Belonging
Transcultural Solidarities
Navigating Markets
Transcultural Digital Imaginaries
References
Index
About the Authors

Citation preview

Gen Z, Digital Media, and Transcultural Lives

Gen Z, Digital Media, and Transcultural Lives At Home in the World Kiran Vinod Bhatia Manisha Pathak-Shelat

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bhatia, Kiran Vinod, 1992– author. | Pathak-Shelat, Manisha, author. Title: Gen Z, digital media, and transcultural lives : at home in the world / Kiran Vinod Bhatia, Manisha Pathak-Shelat. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book offers an analysis of how Gen Z in the global South engages with the digital, both globally, and locally. The authors demonstrate how youth in the global South build digital worlds for themselves and others through active and producer-level participation”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023033627 (print) | LCCN 2023033628 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666917413 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666917420 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Internet and youth—Developing countries. | Mass media and youth— Developing countries. | Digital media—Social aspects—Developing countries. | Youth—Developing countries—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HQ799.9.I58 B43 2024  (print) | LCC HQ799.9.I58  (ebook) | DDC 302.23083—dc23/eng/20230801 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033627 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033628 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Chapter 1: Inhabiting Multiple Worlds



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Chapter 2: Communities of Belonging



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Chapter 3: Transcultural Solidarities



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Chapter 4: Navigating Markets: Between Power and Precarity Chapter 5: Transcultural Digital Imaginaries References Index





73 101

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About the Authors



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Acknowledgments

This book was a challenging task. Our sincere effort is to translate years of training into ideas, stories, and provocations designed to invite our readers to reimagine young people’s transcultural engagements in the digitally mediated societies of the global South. Our deepest gratitude is reserved for our participants, who have nourished our understanding of society and the world. Though they appear as pseudonyms in the book for privacy concerns, they are the foundation guiding this book project. The ethnographic stories in this book are faithful representations of our experiences in the field. The support we received at our academic institutions was foundational to this massive task of unlearning through writing. Conversations with colleagues, scholars, and students at MICA, Ahmedabad (India), and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (USA) shaped the content of this book and our engagement with young people’s transcultural practices in a digital world. We thank MICA FPM scholars Suchentana Sinha, Tatsita Mishra, and Kanjshree Pathak for their help with the manuscript. We are very fortunate in the enthusiasm of Jessie Tepper, our editor at Lexington Books, who believed in our project and gave us much freedom to shape the text guided by our vision. Her comments and insights were instrumental in sharpening our initial ideas and tightening the final manuscript. Though this book is a collaborative endeavor between Manisha Pathak-Shelat and Kiran Vinod Bhatia, both drew immense support and love from their personal circles of family, friends, and colleagues at different stages of this project. *** I owe a profound debt to Julian Clark for his unwavering support and encouragement and his compassion and brilliance. He has been the cornerstone of my sanity as I plodded through scattered pages, hours of procrastination, vii

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and unfinished ideas. He made sure that my kitchen was stocked and my heart was full! My sister Payal has walked me through the most challenging phases of my life. Didi has provided me with a safe harbor in this ever-changing world. She has also given me another family in Oorja and Ravi. No matter where I go, I will always have a home with my sister. Finally, I owe an intellectual debt to my parents—Neelam Bhatia and Vinod Bhatia, for actively engaging in and supporting my values, aspirations, and experiences. They encourage me to identify discontinuities in my knowledge and reasoning, practice my beliefs, and always question authority—at home and outside. Most importantly, they taught me to accept my vulnerabilities. My parents have helped me find and build my place in the world and supported my dreams and ambitions. To them and them alone, I dedicate this book and all my happiness, success, and joy. —Kiran Vinod Bhatia *** A big shout-out to my spouse Uday for surrounding me with care, love, companionship, conversations, and tea—and for being proud of my work. He keeps me going with his faith and unconditional presence. Immense love and gratitude to my daughter Revati for constantly reminding me that she values and admires my work (and my humor!). This independent and lively young woman keeps me on my mental toes, challenging my every half-baked argument and bringing me fresh perspectives with fun. She also keeps my laptop glitch-free. I owe much gratitude to my parents—Prof. Yogini Pathak and Late Prof. Chandravdan Pathak—for an enriching childhood and youth where no topic was taboo during the dinner table conversations, for the love of books and travel, for encouraging me to dream big, and for being my constant support system. I have been blessed to have them as parents. A big thank you to my home help—Tara bahen and Usha bahen, for freeing the time I need to work on my various writing projects. A warm mention of my extended family and friends is a must for bringing me many joyful moments and stimulating conversations. —Manisha Pathak-Shelat

Chapter 1

Inhabiting Multiple Worlds

COLORFUL BUT NOT GAY In 2017, we met Lalit, an 18-year-old boy. He was a K-pop fan and had recently started experimenting with his clothes. His wardrobe had become more colorful since. He grew up in a traditional, middle-class family in Lajpatnagar, Delhi. His community socialized boys and men to suppress their emotions and dress conservatively—black, brown, blue, white, and beige. His family also discouraged him from taking an interest in fashion and design. They believed that fashion was a feminine pursuit. For Lalit, K-pop was a revolutionary experience. He saw that his favorite K-pop male idol, V (BTS), would wear and flaunt colors on the stage. He had always wanted to wear shirts with floral prints or color his hair. Lalit found it challenging to find inspiration in his locality and among his peer group. All his friends shared the same lived realities and had a similar patriarchal upbringing. Lalit felt represented when he started consuming K-pop through a Reliance Jio 4G mobile phone. He felt his desires and choices were not abnormal and that global stars in other countries were doing what he wanted to do all along: Dress in colors! He explained, That is why representation in the media is essential. The media my parents watch, all the K-serials (Ekta Kapoor serials), and other family shows still deal with age-old issues such as widow remarriage, marriage woes, or education for girls. Though these topics are essential, people’s lives in cities have changed immensely. Here, in Delhi, I am looking for ways to break free of these traditional restrictions placed on men: How we should dress, be the breadwinners for our families, or choose sciences as a career because arts and commerce are feminine and weak. No, we want more, and the women want more. We want media that represent our reality: relevant and progressive. That is why online media channels and shows from other more progressive countries are so vital to us. 1

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As he changed his wardrobe to include colors and floral prints, Lalit became anxious that his parents, family, and friends might think he was “gay.” In our conversations, he emphasized that he likes girls and has a girlfriend. Lalit mentioned that he could not understand why anyone would want to be gay. He did not explicitly articulate a dislike toward the community. The cultural norms dominant in Lalit’s family and community heavily influenced Lalit’s opinions on same-sex relationships. He was raised in a heteronormative household where gender binaries were articulated and practiced daily. His mother worked long hours in the kitchen and was the last to eat at the dinner table. In contrast, his father spent all his time watching television or scrolling through his phone after work. Lalit’s sister helped her mother in the kitchen every evening, and Lalit shared a couch with his father as they watched the evening news bulletin together. Our conversations on non-heteronormative relationships ranged from discussions on religion, politics, and science. Lalit consistently suggested that relations other than those sanctioned by the heteronormative society were abnormal and unacceptable in Indian culture. He explained that he had waited so long to experiment with clothes because “if boys wore colorful clothes, people either believed that the boys were gay or teased them for being feminine.” We observed that Lalit experienced global transformations through digitally mediated cultural texts, primarily through the South Korean popular music industry. Exposure to these global transformations through the consumption of digitally mediated texts did not always manifest as changes in his offline and local life. He consciously chose aspects of such culturally diverse media narratives to fulfill some of the values and desires that he prioritized. FROM THE INTERNET TO THE STREETS Aisha is a Dalit Rights activist in Mumbai. We met her at a rally she had helped organize on the birth anniversary of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar on April 14, 2017. One week before the rally, she posted Instagram stories about the march. The organizing committee had decided to use the #dalitlivesmatter to bring attention to anti-Dalit discrimination and violence in India. Aisha was excited about this hashtag and had posted ninety-eight Instagram stories and posts. She believed that the #dalitlivesmatter was critical because it allowed Dalits in India to be heard and recognized at the global level. When we asked her why global recognition of local movements was important, she explained, In a globally connected world, protest movements and activists worldwide can learn from each other. #dalitlivesmatter draws on the #blacklivesmatter. Why

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is this important? #blacklivesmatter movement has already generated radical conversations on racial inequities. When we use the same structure and modify it to highlight an issue relevant to India, we make it easier for others in different cultural contexts to understand our struggles. The race system in the U.S. is as discriminatory and evil as the caste system in India. If the world holds it accountable, the government might do something about our problems. So, making our movement relevant to the global audience effectively increases international rebuke and pressure on the government.

In this conversation, Aisha discussed the potential of social media and global digital networks to strengthen local movements. Digital platforms are essential in studying the protest movements in other countries and using those as case studies to strengthen indigenous strategies for mobilization, organizing, and change. With the proliferation of affordable mobile phones and internet connections, social media mobilization has surfaced as a powerful tool to reach the masses and create awareness. According to Aisha, social media tools were the most useful in documenting violence or injustice. These user-generated media stories helped sustain the momentum during protests, prioritize caste issues, and overcome the lack of Dalit stories and voices in mainstream media. Though Aisha acknowledged that increasing people’s access to the internet, especially social media, has created inclusive participation and safe spaces for deliberation, she also acknowledged the dark side of internet usage. Over the years, Aisha was abused, threatened, and harassed online. Though digital media and networks have enhanced global connection and exchange, Aisha’s experiences online were primarily based on the local cultures and norms she inhabited. A caste-based, patriarchal ideology was the dominant rationality in her locality. According to this ideology, challenging the traditional caste system was considered an amoral and a modern practice. She explained, You can look at #blacklivesmatter in the US and think you can pull off #dalitlivesmatter with the same intensity here in Mumbai, but you cannot. Though we want global audiences, especially Indian diasporas, and celebrities, to promote and support our movement, we mainly rely on local support. Online mobilization is productive only when it can generate a crowd on the streets. Also, the violence circulated through digital networks against us is very local and physical. I was verbally abused and physically threatened on the streets of Thane because of my activism online.

Our conversations with Aisha on modeling their movement after the global #blacklivesmatter activism through digital networks reveal a critical insight about global-local interactions. Even when digital media allows users to forge alliances across national boundaries and globally, ethnic identities and

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primordial loyalties will likely shape local lives, including the outcomes of protests, social movements, public deliberations, and policy decisions. ROMANCE IN THE DIGITAL AGE We met Sharique in November 2018. He wanted to move to Canada to be with his girlfriend. “My girlfriend and I started dating when we were 15 years old. I found her profile on Facebook and decided to send her a message. To my surprise, she replied. Since then, we have talked daily over video calls, Snapchat, and WhatsApp messenger. I want to move to Canada for her,” he said.  Sharique was from a middle-class family in Gujarat. His parents were clerks in a public bank, and his sister was a high school teacher. Sharique could not afford to enroll in a university in Canada. His social media pages, however, depicted a different story. He had created a profile reflecting his desire and intentions to migrate to Canada. He had befriended students studying at universities in Toronto. He was a member of many Facebook groups for international students in Canada. Furthermore, he attended online seminars and meetings where Indian students in Canada offered to mentor people like Sharique who wanted to migrate. His parents controlled his access to digital media because Sharique was simultaneously preparing for his All India Medical Entrance Exam. His parents would allow him to use his smartphone for two hours every weekday and three hours daily during the weekend. In this limited time, Sharique networked and gathered resources on how to prepare applications for universities in Canada and inquired about the process of acquiring an educational loan to fulfill his dream. All he wanted was to meet his girlfriend offline. Even when he earned a spot in a reputed medical college at a public university, Sharique decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree in marketing to move to Canada. He explained, On the one hand, I have a publicly-funded medical seat. My parents and family would have been thrilled if I had accepted that. On the other hand, I had a chance to move to Canada. Now, I have read about Canada online. I have seen Canada through my girlfriend’s stories and experiences. She video calls whenever she goes somewhere, and it feels like I am there with her. Now, I have a chance to do this. I have a loan and admission to a reputed university.

Before moving to Canada in 2021, Sharique had only seen Canada in digitally mediated photos, videos, sounds, and stories. Digital media were instrumental in shaping his desire to migrate. What was particularly interesting is

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that digital media had only amplified Sharique’s desire to leave India. His local realities and experiences of communal violence were at the root of his plan to migrate to a Western country that felt relatively safer than India. Sharique had experienced religious discrimination in his early years. He had witnessed communal violence between Hindus and Muslims and wanted to start afresh in a new place. Digitally mediated stories about Canada had convinced Sharique that it was a safe, inclusive, and peaceful country. Of course, Sharique’s impression of the Canadian lifestyle was based on selective social media images and stories and not any deep analysis. Digital media also played a pivotal role in introducing him to Jenny, his Canadian girlfriend. Sharique’s desire for intimacy, the memory of traumatic encounters in his past, and digital access to the culture and lifestyle in Canada were productive in generating a desire for cultural mobility. Digital media introduced Sharique to a new cultural possibility and alternative lifestyle (i.e., Canada). However, his past and local experiences in offline contexts significantly influenced how he interpreted the mediated perception of Canada and his future aspirations, and relationships within his local community. GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS AND LOCAL LIVES The three profiles shared above, drawn from our ethnographic work in India, demonstrate how digital media and networks have changed the scale of cultural, political, and economic transformations worldwide and how these are reflected in the lived realities of ordinary people. Digital media have created ever-widening webs of interconnection among societies and cultures. People’s lives in distinct locales are tied to these global transformations and advancements through which cultural meanings are mediated, consumed, and altered (Kennedy 2007, 268). What we are witnessing is a complex system of communication that serves as an anchor between the global transformations happening at the macro scale and the micro-forms of lives (Hannerz 2003, 69). The micro-forms of lives emerge from the relationships between internet users and their families, communities, and professional associations in distinct locales. These micro-forms are characterized by the quotidian lived realities of an individual social actor—that is, their social identities (caste, class, religion, and gender), social norms, and existing power relations in their societies. Internet users experience and engage with global transformations as digitally mediated cultural texts and experiences. Lalit’s experiences with the global phenomenon of South Korean popular culture were digitally mediated through songs, shows, movies, and online communication in social media groups and pages. While Lalit consumed K-pop to flirt with heteronormative

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gender boundaries, he also created a metrosexual social identity online. He used his social media to perform a gender identity at the intersection of fluidity in gender-related practices and dominance of heterosexual identity. Aisha developed her repertoire of protests through net-based stories and images of movements worldwide. She used the digital networks of popular social movements causing waves in political contexts of other countries to draw attention to local issues in India. In articulating the struggles of Dalits using the network-specific lexicon of the Black Lives Matter social media movement, she simultaneously reinforced and decentered conversations emerging from the West. At the same time, Sharique’s perception of an aspirational future constituted moving to a new country and continuing his romantic relationship with a partner he had only met online. Sharique’s experiences of discrimination in his local and offline contexts shaped his aspiration for cultural and physical mobility. Unlike Aisha, who created an online identity highlighting her marginalization, Sharique tried to conceal his past experiences of discrimination and curate an aspirational identity: modern, outgoing, and open to changes. The abstract and large-scale global transformations are circulated through digitally mediated cultural texts. Additionally, engagement with these global transformations happens from within the local lives. Hepp (2015) calls this the transculturalization of everyday lives. A significant body of scholarly literature explores the global-local interlinkages in different contexts and disciplines. Many studies theorize these interlinkages using strong theories (Stewart 2008), often examining the macro forces of power that shape these connections. For example, Appadurai’s scholarship (1996) analyzes the tension between cultural homogenization and heterogenization. For Appadurai, homogeneity is the increasing uniformity at the global level, but it is essential to acknowledge that this “uniformity” is not an empty category. Uniformity is established when the modernizing potential of global transformations such as communication technologies further the appeal of (a) standardized solutions to unique and local problems, (b) simplistic assumptions that access to modern technologies will reduce inequality, and (c) the myopic dismissal of how local norms, power relations, and community-level and interpersonal relationships and interactions shape the way people engage with the global. Like Appadurai, Marwan Kraidy’s concept of hybridity (2005) is also built on the premise that the macro process of globalization has increased contact between people and distinct cultures through communication. Kraidy drew on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of hybridity and proposed intentional hybridity as a conscious effort to bring together elements from different cultures. He explains that distant cultures interact, fuse, and create hybrid cultures within global communication networks. Aligned with discussions on the coming

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together of cultures, Tomlinson (1999) also theorized the role of the macro forces of power (i.e., globalization-generated proximity) in increasing the time-space compression. He argued that due to the time-space compression, people perceive the world as more intimate than before, thus making global transformations a part of their daily reckoning. The theoretical idea of proximity also conveys immediacy and implications for the relationships people share with others across cultures and contexts. Roudometof (2019) explains that a modernist bias is evident in global studies fueled by the neoliberal logic of the post-1989 New World Order. In such theories on globalization, the global forces are perceived as progressive and technologically advanced, and local lives are viewed as counter-modern practices and systems that stand in the way of global modernization and development. The local is an under-theorized term examined in a binary relationship with the global. While some studies championed the dominance of a single economic system as a legitimate method of modernizing all societies, scholars such as Caldwell and Lozada (2007) and Ritzer (2003) argued that the local could not survive under the effects of globalization. Latour notes (2016) that the global as modernization narrative is constructed on the false assumption that the whole world and all societies are predisposed to evolve into a modern, monolithic, and convergent reality. In this myth of global modernity, people’s local lives, primordial affiliations, ethnic ties, close relationships, and everyday routines or traditions hinder modernization. Also, the social theories on globalization and modernity argue that the global constitutes macro processes (e.g., the global is theorized as the large-scale economic integration process, possible due to international agreements and systems). On the other hand, these theories define the local as a reactionary and oppositional movement to counter the spread of global modernization. These theories do not examine how the macro processes of transformation dovetail into people’s local lives and require them to cope with the interconnections between the global and local. For example, when global capital shapes the organization of macroeconomic systems in a country (such as foreign exchange, international banking, trade agreements, and business policies), individual social actors such as workers, students, business owners, and civil servants negotiate within the limits of local infrastructures, norms, and power relations to allow for global-local interconnections to thrive. De Blij (2009) contends that using binary logic in unpacking the global-local linkages fails to account for the comforts and constraints of local lives—places, identities, norms, and relationships, within a globally connected world. In all these theories on global-local interconnections, scholars focus on the role of macro forces of power, such as abstracted capital and culture. They pay little attention to “the existence and likely impact of the increasing number of micro-interconnectivities constructed by individual social actors

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through their immediate and interpersonal lives” (Kennedy 2007, 271). This argument is aligned with Ferguson (2006, 195) proposition that global transformations cannot have a totalizing effect on humans and cultures because people are bound, to some degree, by their immediate relations, primordial ties, and ethnic loyalties. Though digital media have increased the significance of de-spatialized relationships and experiences, people remain tied to their locale, families, workplaces, and immediate communities. Hepp (2015) touches upon global-local linkages and the dominant role of mediatization in creating these interactions. He recognizes the salience of the local when he advances a more comprehensive notion of media appropriation, calling it the process of making media one’s own. He argues that media appropriation “involves the allocation of meaning in which translocal medial discourses are related to locally anchored discourses” (180). Our work goes deeper into the process of meaning-making and discourse generation at the quotidian level. Our central argument is that people—digital media users—experience global transformations through quotidian digital practices that also include creation and expression. Digital media allow ordinary young people to be prosumers—consumers and producers simultaneously. In the field of global studies, this book attempts to carve out a unique space to explore the local lives of digital media users based on ethnographic work in one of the world’s largest emerging digital markets (i.e., India), and drawing from contemporary research from other parts of the global South. We propose decentering the boundaries of the global-local binary relationship and paying attention to the coming together of myriad local cultural flows in the globalized digital spaces. We ask a difficult question: How can we prioritize people—their narratives and unique lives—in examining the cyclical influence of local cultures on the global flow of ideas and communication? We do not suggest centering the local, because such an approach would inevitably reinforce the local-global binary relationship. Instead, we suggest an approach that pays attention to the interactions between different locals as they contribute to global transformations. For example, South Korean pop culture, Japanese Manga, and Anime have found a fan base among Gen Z in India. However, these local cultural texts are mediated through the dominant business models based on globally pervasive capitalist systems. This book narrates how macro structures of power, such as cultures and capital, dovetail into the local lives of young people—the Gen Z digital media users—and influence their locales, immediate relations, and everyday interactions. We also examine how digital media users’ local lives and primordial affiliations inform their engagement with global and digitally mediated texts and experiences and shape global flows. This book addresses three research questions: (1) How do global and digitally mediated texts shape the local lives of digital media users in the locations of the global South? (2) How do

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digital media users communicate their local lives through digitally mediated texts and experiences? (3) What can we learn about the productive associations between global digitally mediated texts and the local lives of users in emerging digital markets? Findings in this book arise from an examination of research conducted in the global South and an ethnographic framework designed to study the connections between macro structures of power and the everyday world of lived realities, including social identities and immediate relations, which shape users’ localized engagement with digitally mediated and global cultural texts. People’s engagement with culture as digitally mediated texts and experiences happens at the quotidian level of meaning-making—how people receive, modify, inhabit, and translate cultural experiences at an individual level. The increased access to data, technology, and social media engenders new ways of meaning-making as multidirectional cultural flows become a daily reality for most young people. This book defines local as the “where” dimension of digital media users’ everyday lives. As Jiro´n (2008) argues, the where is not simply the physical territory occupied by the place or the geographical coordinates on the map. The where is often not static or rooted in the corporeal realities of the body. Local is where the young people are situated—their neighborhoods, workplaces, families, friend groups, cities, and nation. Their situatedness may take various forms, from mobile to transient, permanent to liminal, concrete to affect-based, and offline to online. The local can be a moving train, music festivals, markets, schools, discord channels, Facebook pages, or WhatsApp groups. The local almost always has a material reality and is familiar. The material reality situates young people in an assemblage of power relations and social norms. For example, online groups such as a discord channel or Facebook page are local if other members in the group also have similar primordial loyalties to ethnic identities and social norms. Online pages are local if they are used as a site to enact norms and power relations dominant in young people’s offline and immediate lives. As Kennedy (2007) and Perkins and Thorns (2011, 2) argue, most people’s everyday lives are influenced by their local affiliations, obligations, and social commitments. Also, networks and expressions of social identities such as class, caste, religion, and gender in their local lives shape their digital practices and online experiences. The local lives of internet users are thus largely dependent on co-presence with other people in the contexts and surroundings they frequently inhabit. Their local experiences are familiar encounters and based on interpersonal sociability with others. Young people’s local experiences and affiliations with social identities, norms, and power relationships intersect with their global exposure to inform their aspirations and how they communicate their presence online. Their local experiences also impact the meanings they draw from the digitally mediated global cultural texts.

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On the other hand, we define global flows as digitally mediated cultural texts that are new or unfamiliar to the young people’s local experiences. K-pop, for instance, is a digitally mediated cultural text that was far removed from Lalit’s local experiences in a heteronormative, middle-class neighborhood in Delhi. In this book, cultural texts are classified as global if they are digitally mediated and represent an experience, social norms, and power relations that have negligible overlaps with the local lives (social identities, norms, and power relations) of the young digital media users. For young people in the centers of the global South, global cultural texts and experiences are increasingly digitally mediated. These mediations influence how young people engage with and construct their local lives and shape the global cultural landscape through their quotidian communication practices. It is imperative to study the interlinkages between global flows and people’s local lives for three main reasons. First, centering experiences of digital users in our study of global flows can help scholars provide more grounded accounts of the impact of digitally mediated texts and experiences on people’s local lives and their immediate networks, connections, and interactions. This approach can also demonstrate the impact of selective expression of lived local realities through cultural texts in the globalized digital space. Second, such an analysis will also help scholars identify and theorize the strategies people use to negotiate between the attraction of global transformations and their multiple and local primordial affiliations, which include their attachments to existing power relations and social identities. Building on Butler’s argument (2003, 2474) that people continue to live local and socially exclusive lives, we propose that Gen Z users encounter transcultural texts by choice and default. They may engage with these texts out of curiosity or aspirations. However, they require exceptional resilience and motivation to price themselves out of their local lives and appropriate global and digitally mediated texts and experiences as part of their lived realities. Third, privileging the perspective of digital media users to examine the process of negotiation with global transformations helps us avoid large-scale generalizations that often limit our understanding of people, cultures, and practices to monolithic representations and singular meanings (Gibson-Graham 2006; Kuhn 1962). Overarching generalizations have merit when the goal is to govern or study the population. Accordingly, such generalizations lead to strong theories wherein scholars prioritize the overlaps in their analysis, and nuances are discarded as irrelevant particulars. In this book, we center the nuances in our understanding of global-local connections. We document how users design distinct communication strategies to negotiate with their local lives as they engage with global and digitally mediated texts and experiences. This book offers narratives of the young digital media users from cities in India and other regions of the global South. It challenges the dominance of

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strong and all-encompassing theories in the field of global studies. The Indian stories in this book are based on a six-year-long ethnography conducted in six cities of India: Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, and Vadodara. We worked with sixty-eight digital media users aged 15 to 24 from 2016 to 2021. We used participant observations and ethnographic interviews to observe the interconnections between young people’s local lives and their engagements with global and digitally mediated cultural texts. We also conducted social media ethnography and followed young people on social media. We hung out with the sixty-eight digital media users in this study when they used digital media such as social media accounts and over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms. Young people shared stories of how they interpret global cultural texts and assimilate or enact these global experiences into their local lives. They discussed the strategies they used to express aspects of their local lives to global audiences selectively. They also discussed how they negotiate the norms and power relations dominant in their families, neighborhoods, communities, and locales to access and participate in global and digitally mediated cultural experiences. These stories guided our thinking about the digital practices and cultures of young people in urban centers of India. As we build our analysis of ethnographic narratives, cultural anecdotes, and the influence of local lives, primordial affiliations, and ethnic identities, our book presents the story of digital and global media from the perspectives of young digital media users. All the participants appear as pseudonyms in the book for privacy concerns, and we have carefully removed all possible identifiers. We have used a grounded approach to theory building and acknowledged the situatedness of global digital ecosystems within local networks of power and identities. This book highlights the multitude of primordial loyalties, subjective experiences, and materiality of local lives that shape how young people engage with and make sense of global cultural texts. While our ethnographic data are from our fieldwork in India, we can see parallels in the lives of young people in many countries of the global South. We have drawn from research conducted in other countries of the global South. We have also included our conversations with the youth from Sudan, India, and diaspora youth in the United States to understand how quotidian resilience operates in the transcultural lives of these young people. DIGITAL YOUTH AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH Gen Z are people born between 1997 and 2012 (Dimock 2019). This generation came of age in a digitally connected and media-saturated world. For the internet users in this generation, the boundaries between the online and offline worlds continue to blur (Madden 2017) as they “seamlessly integrate

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technology into almost all areas of their lives, thereby being known as digital integrators” (McCrindle and Wolfinger 2010, 15). Gen Z in the global South will profoundly influence media, markets, and global cultures (Arora 2019). Generation Z, of course, is made up of immensely diverse youth groups. If we look at India, every user is positioned at a unique intersection of class, caste, religion, gender, and location. From this singular location, they experience life—that is, they experience their local realities unfolding in a world rapidly transforming under changing market forces, political ethos, and social fabric, and a constant influx of global cultural flows. Moreover, it is from these unique positions that they design their aspirations and carve out their life paths. The Indian youth today are living their lives in a country that is at the cusp of a new ethos. As one approaches the Mumbai International Airport, one encounters the bold proclamation of the people who are “Indian at heart, global in spirit!” The signs and symbols of this new India are visible everywhere. The Government of India (GOI) proudly claimed that India ranked third globally in start-up ecology and second in innovation. India’s top scientist and policy advisor, Raghunath Mashelkar, has popularized the term Indovation, or Made in India for the World. The GOI’s premier policy think tank, Niti Ayog, has launched a global people’s movement of social change called LiFE: Lifestyle for Environment. It encourages people to take individual actions in their local contexts to support global climate action. For a country whose only outward-bound cultural flows were to their diaspora, and for whom global was limited to the United States and the United Kingdom, there are little signs of change that point elsewhere. In 2022, people in India celebrated the Grammy award–winning recognition of its song “Natu Natu” from the top-grossing film RRR. “Cold/mess,” a song by Prateek Kuhad, was included in the Best of 2019 playlist by former US president Barack Obama. Furthermore, in 2023, Broadway launched a premier show, Come Fall in Love, celebrating Bollywood and presenting it to an international audience. From remixes of the viral video of “Kacha Badam,” a Bengali folk song, to Instagram reels based on Bollywood numbers like “Kala Chashma,” local cultural texts have reached unexpected corners of the world. Another case is the Norwegian-Pakistani group Quick Style, which is winning dance competitions globally. The number of Indian youth following K-pop, eating Korean food with chopsticks in their middle-class Indian homes, and following Japanese Manga is steadily rising. Youth coming to age under this new ethos view globalization with a vastly different perspective. Vamsee Juluri (2003) pointed to the emergence of this perspective some years ago. He observed that the preferred meaning of globalization in Indian music television reverses the widespread assumption of globalization as a process of foreign (particularly Western) incursion.

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According to him, although the “invasion” metaphor and the phrase “cultural imperialism” had some public currency in the 1990s (before the Indianization phase of satellite television), these ideas have since declined, if not altogether disappeared, in mainstream media discourses. In Juluri’s study of audiences of Indian music television, most middle-class participants characterized globalization as “India—Indian people, Indian culture, Indian media, Indian products, Indian services—going out into the world, and the world stage, as it were” (Juluri 2003, 94). Nevertheless, the global hierarchies are difficult to dismantle. The global cultural and media flows are still heavily dominated by multinationals led by the global North. As McMillin (2009) observed, to global multinationals, the Indian youth is visible in only two ways: as a trained and inexpensive workforce and as an attractive market. There are struggles and challenges for youth from the global South to find their proper place in the world. There are compromises, negotiations, and strategic choices to be constantly made. What is different now is that these choices are often made as a project of the self, as individual repertoires, and not as an act of political or ideological resistance. Like many previously colonized countries, India has lived in the shadow of colonization for decades, simultaneously hating and aspiring to be like the colonizers. The youth today are taking a different route. They aspire for Western comforts and appropriate eclectic global trends, then cleverly adapt them to not disrupt their local power dynamics and to become more confident in participating in global conversations. This is where resilience is born and quotidian resilience practices emerge. As part of the practice of resilience, young people tell their own stories to the world. As more and more youth from India and other countries of the global South become prosumers instead of mere consumers of cultural content on digital media, their uniquely local lives become part of the globally circulating content—one YouTube video, one discord stream, one meme, one Wattpad story, one blog, one post, or one reel at a time. Instead of long-form serious deliberation, their stories are told in a playful manner using multimedia and visual tools and the user-friendly fun features offered by various platforms. Tracing the influence of the internet on young people’s profoundly diverse and dynamic lives is not easy. Let us continue to examine the case of India. India’s 825.30 million internet users constitute the second-largest digital user market in the world (TRAI 2021). The state-led digitization plan has been conducive to the growth of digital media markets in India. The entry of global media corporations into the Indian markets has expanded the digital media cultures of young people in the country. The uptake of these global social media platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter,

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and Zoom, has provided an impetus for national media corporations to launch home-grown social media tools like Moj, ShareChat, and Koo. Similarly, the internet has led to a surge in entertainment and leisure opportunities with the growth of over-the-top (OTT) audio and video platforms. The value of the Indian OTT market in 2021 was estimated at USD 1.8 billion and will grow substantially in the next five years. India’s telecom industry is rife with global and national service providers, ensuring competitive pricing and a consumer-friendly environment. The intense competition has compelled technology corporations to offer products and services at affordable prices, even for people from low-income backgrounds. Jio, India’s largest telecom network, has expanded telecommunications infrastructure, low-cost phones, and affordable internet to make digital engagement possible for people who cannot afford smartphones and data packages. With only 48.7 percent of people digitally connected, the country’s internet user base is emerging as a lucrative technology product and service market (Kemp, 2023). The expansion of digital media has profound implications for young people and their everyday lives. Gen Z is one of India’s most active digital media user groups, constituting 34.33 percent of the population. Gen Z has catalyzed the flow of information, ideas, commodities, and practices across territories and local contexts, especially in the cities of the global South. There is a growing scholarship on young people’s digitally mediated participation across digital platforms, formats, and cultural contexts (e.g., Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik 2018; Literat et al. 2019; Boyd 2014; Jenkins et al. 2016; Velasquez and LaRose 2015; Vromen, Xenos, and Loader 2015). Gen Z has effectively deployed digital media and the internet for a variety of purposes, such as civic activism (Hamblin and Totten 2020; Zeng and Abidin 2021); self-expression, identity, agency formation, and brand development (Asthana 2012; Fisherkeller 2011; McMillin 2009; Viţelar 2019), and sociability and communication (Bakardjieva and Gaden 2012; Fu and Cook 2020; Gangneux 2021; Rivera and Walton 2013). Inhabiting evolved technological ecosystems has also enabled Gen Z to mobilize itself for political and civic causes and demand accountability from the state and those in power (Francis and Hoefel 2018; Parker and Igielnik 2020; Seemiller and Grace 2018). Gen Z is also known as the protest generation (Hamblin and Totten 2020). Our research emphasizes that the users are situated in local assemblages of power relations and social norms as they consume and communicate cultural experiences. Our work foregrounds the subjective and situated experiences of Gen Z internet users in understanding the new and emerging forms of digital and cultural practices. Another departure stems from the profiles of the young people that are the focus of this book. Much previous literature on transcultural communication is based on studies carried out with immigrant

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or minority youth. It develops transcultural communication theories drawing from such youth experiences. This book considers the Gen Z population born and living in urban centers, who may never have traveled to another country, and yet whose lives and localities are increasingly shaped by transcultural texts. The analysis in this book foregrounds the need to reframe Gen Z internet users as a legitimate category of digital media users. Gen Zers in the urban centers of the global South identify themselves as content creators, influencers, designers, opinion leaders, micro-celebrities, and entrepreneurs. Access to digital media has significantly enlarged the cultural repertoire of Gen Z. Young people like Lalit, Aisha, and Sharique are experiencing remote and novel cultural texts relayed through digital media networks. Such digital encounters inform how they organize their routines, relationships, and aspirations. Gen Zers often assimilate aspects of the new or unexplored cultural texts they encounter into their lived realities and local contexts. However, they negotiate with digitally mediated cultural experiences before translating them into quotidian practices. Operating from within the local power relationships and social norms they inhabit, Gen Z customizes the content of cultural texts to make them compatible with their lifeworlds. Rather than think about young people’s experiences in binary terms of fixity versus fluidity or homogenization versus hybridity, we adopt Monceri’s recent philosophical rendition of transcultural. Monceri (2019) argues that the term transcultural offers new ways of rethinking the boundaries of what is deemed culture. She explains that the trans prefix “can also be understood in the meaning of ‘going beyond,’ . . . that it is able at least to evoke the possibility to trespass or better transgress, the borders of the very notion of culture” (87–88). We argue that Gen Z develops several strategies to negotiate access to digital technologies, mainly for entertainment and socialization. Unpacking the desires and aspirations guiding their digital engagements provides insights into users’ novel negotiation strategies to access aspired networks and communities. Understanding their everyday digital practices also helps demystify the academic and popular argument that access to digital technologies will help overcome poverty and social inequities. Our analysis of the transcultural experiences of Gen Z addresses the need to explore young users’ digital engagements as more than acts of resistance or subversion. Our book develops a more critical and conscious approach to understanding how young users inhabit multiple conflicting identities and experiences as they engage with digitally mediated global texts or communicate their local experiences on global platforms. We offer nuanced and complicated narratives on the transcultural experiences of Gen Z to challenge assumptions that the affinity space of digital platforms (Gee 2004) and transnational and

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global interconnections online are extensively used by people to subvert the dominant social boundaries and expectations (Kumar 2014). We make a case for prioritizing children’s explanations describing their practices, desires, and routines concerning digitally mediated global-local interlinkages and media texts. Disrupting simplifications in the academic literature on young people’s digital engagements requires paying attention to the influence of sociocultural norms, the systems of power in their communities, and their social identities, such as gender, caste, class, and religion. In the following section, we problematize the concept of agency as a theoretical intervention guiding our argument that Gen Z often uses negotiation strategies to expand the scope and possibilities of their digitally mediated cultural experiences without explicitly dismantling the sociocultural systems and practices dominant in their communities. REIMAGINING AGENCY AND RESILIENCE The term agency is enveloped in the liberal notions of independent will, selfhood, and self-directed action and assumes universal applicability. In his essay, “On Agency,” Johnson (2003) explains that this conceptualization of agency centers on a normalized condition of free will and living that is denied to those enslaved. Johnson encourages historians to avoid conflating agency with humanness in order to open the discussion on agency and examine the lived experiences of enslaved people beyond the dominant frames of resistance, struggle, subjugation, and self-determination. Mahmood’s (2006) problematization of the neo-liberal discourse on agency resonates with Johnson’s arguments. She tries to draw the agency’s definition away from the logic of subordination and the resignification of hegemonic norms and detach it from the trope of resistance. In her study of the women’s piety movement in Egypt, she borrows from Foucault (1997) and Butler (1993, 1997, 1999) to argue that debates on agency related to women and modesty should focus less on elaborating how it is subverted or resisted and more on identifying the different ways in which the norm of modesty is lived and experienced. She suggests a move away from “agnostic and dualistic framework—one in which norms are conceptualized on the model of doing and undoing . . . and instead think about the variety of ways in which norms are lived and inhabited.” According to her, scholars have deployed the concept of agency based on the assumption of universality—people with varied lived experiences and from different sociocultural and political contexts share the universal desire to be free from all forms and relations of subordination. Universalizing this desire as the norm authorizes the centrality of resistive practices. She contends that agency is often used as a framing technique to

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merge the diverse acts of existence and negotiations with the norms into a neat universal—the manifestation of a larger and more general human capacity for progress and freedom. Actions that do not align with the dominant frameworks of the agency are ignored or dismissed as mundanity or the ignorance and vulnerability of the people involved. Limiting our understanding of actions to the neo-liberal definitions of agency also prevents scholars from appreciating systems that are not inherently resistive. A case in point is the African American cultural forms that were not intrinsically resistant to the system of slavery but played a critical role in helping the enslaved experience solidarity with others and thus flourish even in their slavery (Johnson 2003). In this book, we claim that young people in Indian cities do not always resist global flows, western influences, or consumeristic practices. Gen Z often wants to be part of the global-local interlinkages; their aspiration to participate in global digital platforms informs their media consumption and expression. What is critical is that they prioritize their aspirations and lived realities as they negotiate with digitally mediated global texts and platforms. Anthropologists such as Marilyn Strathern (2020), Talal Assad (2003), Julie Livingstone (2012), and James Ferguson (2006), among others, have proposed similar arguments and conceptualized new meanings of the term agency. These scholars propose that, in most cases, the agency depends on and originates from lived realities, circumstances, and identities conferred on individuals who might practice existing norms and dominant rationality instead of functioning as autonomous individuals working of their own volition. We expand on this argument further and provide empirical evidence to suggest that the enactment of agency lies at the intersection of the limits and comforts of lived realities and globally influenced aspirations for greater autonomy and independence. Both these theoretical categories are mutually influential in determining how young people enact their identities, aspirations, and lived realities through the consumption and creation of digitally mediated texts. We draw on alternative definitions of agency to offer complex narratives on the transcultural lives of Gen Z in a digitally mediated world. Young people’s agency is quotidian and fluid. It operates as a spectrum as they choose whether to obey norms dominant in their communities, seek permission to transcend social expectations and restrictions, or delight in breaking the rules for personal goals and aspirations. We document several possibilities between binary categories of subversive and non-subversive agentic modalities as Gen Z engages or creates transcultural experiences on global digital platforms from within the class, caste, religion, and gender realities they inhabit. We document these unidentified theoretical possibilities between subversion and compliance as young people’s quotidian playful resilience.

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Let us look at Lalit’s experience. He felt represented as he explored the world of K-pop on his smartphone. He was more confident wearing colorful clothes and challenging binary gender norms. Even then, it was difficult for him to challenge and subvert the heteronormative society and cultural norms he inhabited. He did not show any desire to engage in such a subversion. Analyzing his Facebook and Instagram posts revealed that he portrayed himself as a progressive, urban, and educated man. In our conversations about non-heteronormative relationships, he often argued that he was progressive and respected his traditions and culture. His explanation is testimony to one of the core arguments in this book. Young people negotiate with the new and foreign cultural texts they encounter on digital media and often choose only those meanings from the text that are not always antithetical to the local cultures and social norms they inhabit. However, engaging with global cultural texts sometimes encourages Gen Z to explicitly challenge and subvert the limitations imposed on them by the sociocultural norms and power relations dominant in their local lives, as we saw in the case of Aisha. Their decision to reinforce, modify, or challenge their primordial affiliations, social identities, and norms in their local lives are subjective and informed by the young people’s class, gender, religion, and caste positions. This practice of negotiating the meaning of a digitally mediated cultural text before it is appropriated into their everyday lives is what we call quotidian playful resilience (QPR). The QPR of Gen Z thus lies at the intersection of the globalizing potential of digital technologies, young people’s motivations to localize their engagements with digitally mediated cultural texts, and their efforts to mediate selected local realities to global audiences. In this book, we document their QPR as a list of novel negotiation strategies designed to expand the scope and possibilities of their digitally mediated cultural experiences without explicitly dismantling the sociocultural systems and practices dominant in their communities. We have defined these negotiation strategies as transcultural communication practices (TCP) for two primary reasons. First, these negotiation strategies emerge from the continuous interaction of global and local influences in a digitally connected world. They are called transcultural communication practices because young people use them to understand the multiple forces informing their everyday lives and practices. TCP enable young people to interweave different cultural influences without losing sight of their local realities. This book offers ethnographic accounts of the processes through which the local and global overlap, often bleeding into each other. Accordingly, young people also use negotiation strategies to decide which aspects of their local lives they want to present on digital platforms with a global audience. This practice was most noticeable in the online participation of Sharique. His social media profiles on Instagram and Facebook reflected his cultural and class mobility aspirations. He posted

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photos of cities in Canada on his timeline to initiate conversations about those cities with people in Canada. He joined Facebook groups of students who aspired to study in Canada. Furthermore, he befriended international students in Canadian universities and socialized with them online for approximately three hours daily. Sharique chose not to post photos of his home or family members online. When we asked him about it, he explained, I do not want my online friends from Canada to know that I come from a middle-class family. They will quickly assume that I cannot study in Canada and will stop interacting with me. I only post photos that indicate that I have the spending power to afford education abroad. So, all my posts are about traveling, eating at restaurants, visiting high-end clubs/pubs, and attending concerts. Posting photos about families and my home may also reveal that I still live with my parents and will not be an excellent cultural fit with them [students in Canada].

Sharique was selective of what he posted on his social media because he was trying to create a well-thought-out global image: an upper-middle-class, progressive, and education-oriented young man from an urban background. At the same time, several YouTubers and DIY artists and influencers choose to make public the details of their everyday local realities to bring authenticity to their self-presentation. It is a highly deliberate curation. Young people choose aspects of their local lives they want to reveal and publish on global communication platforms. That is because young people use digital media, especially social media channels, to enact their desires and construct an aspirational (global) identity. The identities they create and practice on digital media platforms do not always reflect the entirety of their local lives. They produce these online identities as partial approximations of their local lives. They construct these identities because it allows them to easily access global and unfamiliar cultural texts, networks, and experiences. We are not suggesting that the local and global, territorial and de-territorial, are isolated and oppositional experiences. Instead, we argue that they are codependent, and the process of quotidian playful resilience shapes the relationship between young people’s local realities and the global cultural texts they engage with and create on digital media. They design transcultural communication practices to assimilate the local with the global without causing explicit or dramatic changes and ruptures in their societies and the existing power relations in their localities. At the heart of these transcultural communication practices is the motivation to avoid explicitly disrupting or subverting social norms dominant in their local lives. As we will illustrate, TCP are not expressly subversive of the status quo or

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progressive. Gen Z appreciates the perceived material and social advantages of inhabiting the social norms dominant in their local lives and, at the same time, tries to fit in with the norms observed in respective online communities. They also benefit from complying with or celebrating certain norms as local cultural traditions. We define quotidian playful resilience as their choice to reinforce the importance of some aspects of their local lives. QPR emphasizes that even when Gen Z reinforces certain social norms and local cultural texts and practices, they continue to test the threshold of the societal expectations imposed on them. Their negotiations with ethnicity, gender, caste, class, race, and religious norms are playful and purposive. This brings us to the second reason we define negotiation strategies as transcultural communication practices. As young people are situated at the intersection of digital media and local lives, their cultural experiences are not unitary and composite. Instead, their cultural experiences are fluid and iteratively generated through everyday engagements with digital media and their local lives. Their negotiation strategies are transcultural because Gen Z actively adopts, modifies, and customizes their experiences to create a distinct and personal repertoire of cultural norms. The meanings they ascribe to digitally mediated cultural texts embed their local lives—social identities, dominant norms, and existing power relations in their societies. Thus, TCP reflect the history (lived and shared), current sociopolitical conditions, community interaction, and social identities of digitally active young people as they navigate a globally connected world. We characterize their negotiation strategies as transcultural because young people “move through and across, rather than in-between, cultural and linguistic boundaries” (Baker and Sangiamchit 2019, 472). Our point of departure from this interpretation of transcultural transgression comes from our emphasis on young people’s motivations to comply with and sometimes reinforce the local cultural norms. To make sense of their digitally mediated and global cultural experiences, Gen Z continues to use their local lives as the primary reference frame. Young people’s communication practices presuppose a process of “going beyond culture” (Monceri 2019, 11), but they do not want to transgress certain cultural boundaries. Monceri suggests that the process of trans-culturing may deeply affect people’s cultural identity and encourage them to search for alternative options to interpret and articulate individual differences. Our ethnographic research makes a case for upholding the significance of local identities and power relations for how young people engage with cultural texts. Gen Zers transgress given contextual boundaries as long as they can continue drawing support from the interpersonal relationships they have in their local lives. Their transgressions, therefore, are seldom explicit or radically loud. To negotiate the coming together of global and local, Gen Z devises transcultural communication

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practices that acknowledge different and alternative cultures and select those compatible with their local lives or aspirations. This strategic engagement with global cultural texts is motivated by the desire to reinforce, modify, or challenge the dominant norms in their local lives. Young people in our book cautiously push against local norms, identities, and power relations in a not glaringly visible way. They want to experience different cultures and introduce small and non-radical changes in their local lives so they can return to those familiar and local lives without difficulties. Due to their engagements with global cultural texts, they do not intend to topple the apple cart. Young people constantly modify their local lives and global enactments due to the digitally enabled overlaps in their cultural experiences. Transcultural communication practices generated through QPR are playful and dynamic because they are based on the process of “bending the rules without breaking them.” Some young people in our ethnographic study come from families and communities where exposure to global cultural texts was often considered a distraction or pollution. As we interviewed their parents, neighbors, and community members, we realized that many adults believed young people were exposed to harmful foreign influences through online cultural texts. For example, Aisha’s mother blamed “her god-forsaken mobile phone and those firangis she talks to” (personal communication, 2017) for polluting Aisha’s mind with controversial and political ideas. Her parents and community members were also concerned that excessive use of mobile phones and the internet could lead Aisha to do something problematic. In the course, she would lose respectability in society. Because Aisha was a girl, her participation on social media platforms and engagement with global networks on civic and political issues were criticized and regulated. Though Aisha disagreed with gender-based restrictions on her social media participation, she did not want to challenge her community explicitly. So, she created anonymous social media accounts to continue working with other global activists and sustain local movements using the potential of digitally mediated global communication networks. By anonymizing her online presence, she could use her social media accounts to communicate with “foreign people in strange lands” (Aisha, personal conversation, 2018). She was able to adapt aspects of their protest movement strategies and also invite attention from global audiences to local protests and struggles. Transcultural communication practices are also young people’s playful improvisation to circumvent the limitations imposed on them by their local lives. The process of playfully improvising their local lives has two primary characteristics: First, young people identified themselves as cultural hackers. They tried to acquire hidden access to unauthorized cultural texts. The limited features of these global texts that they assimilate into their local lives are minimalistic, causing no explicit changes to their immediate surroundings

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and interactions. Even when there were drastic and visible ruptures in their local lives due to their engagement with global cultural texts, these disruptions were often short-lived. For example, when Lalit started wearing floral and light-colored clothes after his meaningful digital engagement with the K-pop icons and South Korean culture through the internet, the only change he introduced in his local life was a change in his wardrobe. He could easily dismiss this wardrobe change as an outcome of his poor styling choices within the patriarchal culture he inhabited. Lalit tried to ensure that his change in clothes was not perceived as the fluidity in gender identities or as his aspiration to transcend the gender-based restrictions imposed on him. Though such hacking practices allowed them to circumvent barriers to engagement with global cultural texts, the practices did not always involve structural changes in their local lives. Also, young people seldom attributed the gratification they derived from these practices to their engagement with global texts. In other words, young people did not openly acknowledge the influence of global cultural texts on their local lives in front of people from their immediate locales who were skeptical of global-local overlaps through digitally mediated technologies. Second, young people’s transcultural communication practices were highly personalized and quotidian. As the emergence of these practices was contingent on the restrictions or limitations that young people experienced at a personal and subjective level, the strategies they designed were motivated by the desire to fulfill individual needs and goals. We do not deny that certain religious-gendered-caste-class-ethnicity social norms were commonly practiced in the local lives of most of the young people who participated in this study. What was distinct was how these norms were articulated and enacted in different families and how these norms influenced young people’s access to and engagement with global cultural texts. It leads us to argue that playful improvisations are quotidian and subjective, so they cannot be generalized as constituting a shared repertoire of negotiation strategies. It begs the question of the significance of examining and understanding these negotiation strategies as TCP. We contend that these customized and subjective negotiation strategies have antecedents in young people’s local governance systems, community ethos, primordial affiliations, and inter-community relationships and interactions. Even as these strategies embed their primordial associations and immediate-material realities, they also allow Gen Z to circumvent the overarching influence of their local lives as they engage with global cultural texts. These negotiation strategies are truly transcultural as Gen Z uses them to communicate with the global from within the felt contours of their local surroundings, relationships, norms, and identities. Our goal in revealing young people’s TCP serves a dual purpose: one, to document the different modes of practicing negotiation between local lives

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and global cultural texts as representative of a young person’s subjective agency, and two, to provide a framework for analyzing quotidian playful resilience as a weak theory (Stewart 2008) on young people’s agentic potential. According to this weak theory, young people’s agency is implicit and concealed. Their agency is situated in everyday negotiation with their local lives as they engage with global cultural texts. The transcultural communication practices stand witness to young people’s situated and distributed agentic potential. Gen Zers conceal their agency because they do not want to acknowledge their desire to consume, adapt, and engage with global cultural texts that may challenge their local cultural practices. The main reason for anonymizing their desire to engage with global cultural texts is that their communities often consider local or primordial affiliations and global texts opposites. In such situations, expressing their desire to partake in global experiences or cultures through digitally mediated texts puts young people in conflict with their immediate localities, relationships, and communities. Young people, therefore, conceal their agency in enabling the overlaps between their local lives and engagement with global cultural texts. Their decision to practice their agency in implicit ways has two consequences: one, young people inhabit norms and transcend them simultaneously, and two, their agentic enactments are situation-specific as Gen Z chooses to negotiate between resistance and performative compliance. The negotiation between compliance and resistance is based on the intensity of their desire to create or sustain the local-global overlaps and evaluation of risks associated with creating friction in their local lives to access the global. In the following chapters, we will develop the QPR framework and identify TCP that young people design and use to negotiate the coming together of their local lives and global cultures through digitally mediated communication channels and texts. Our ethnographic narratives at the core of the QPR framework, backed by insights from secondary research, explain the negotiation process through which young people navigate their local lives while engaging with global and digitally mediated texts. These narratives will also help unravel how young people negotiate to communicate certain aspects of their local lives online and what kinds of local-global interlinkages emerge from these negotiations. As we present these narratives describing young people’s transcultural communication practices in the following chapters, we also provide insights into local conceptualizations of social identities, norms, primordial attachments, and complicated everyday experiences of Gen Z in Indian cities and other regions of the global South.

Chapter 2

Communities of Belonging

HALLYU: THE KOREAN WAVE “It is slowly gaining momentum, but the K-pop fan community is still small and niche in India. Most of our lives as K-pop fans happen online. There are very few things we can do outside the online groups and pages we frequent,” Rakhi, a 19-year-old K-pop fan from Juhu in Mumbai, told us. It was 2017, and we were sitting in a small resto-bar in Juhu. She continued, “I have many friends online . . . I have a bias for BTS and am part of the BTS Army. We can create noise online.” We had heard other K-pop fans use the word bias to reference their favorite idol, but Rakhi used it to refer to her favorite band— the BTS. Rakhi believed that the BTS Army was one large and united group and that choosing one member over the others could weaken the army. She explained, “There is no offline army . . . we are an Army when we are online. I do not feel like I am a part of the Army with my offline friends because they do not share the same passion for BTS.” We followed Rakhi on her social media accounts and observed her as she interacted with others on the BTS Army fan pages on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. She was the most active on a private Facebook page founded and managed by three BTS fans. “It is a closed group, so you must answer a few questions before being granted access. Those questions help the admins decide if you are a true BTS fan and if you can be a part of the Army,” she explained. On a typical weekday, Rakhi spent two hours online talking to other BTS fans, listening to K-pop songs, and watching K-dramas. But even though she enjoyed talking to BTS fans online from across the world, she experienced a sense of disconnect. “I do not know many people in my offline peer groups who are K-pop fans. Expressing my craze for BTS offline is difficult because not many understand. . . . Moreover, in online groups, everyone 25

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has a different culture and background, so even when we bond over our love for BTS, we are very different.” Rakhi’s participation in online communities enabled her to express her love for BTS. Rakhi did not have access to an active offline network where members could bond over their shared interest in K-pop. As a result, she felt she could not enact her identity as a member of the BTS Army offline. Rakhi believed that because the K-pop fan base was almost nonexistent in her locality, she found it increasingly difficult to explain her wardrobe choices to others, especially her parents. Her parents failed to appreciate her K-pop-inspired fashion sense—matching sets, color-blocked outfits, fishnets, and hair dyed in bright orange, red, and purple colors. Her neighbors and friends were not familiar with K-pop culture. People in her neighborhood, family networks, and peer groups had just started using over-the-top (OTT) channels like Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime, and Amazon Fire TV. On the other hand, Rakhi spent all her limited data packages consuming K-pop and participating in fan communities online. Her bold attire and hair color often created “Hallyu waves,” as she called it, in her local surroundings and made her a target of criticism. She sometimes had to downplay her love for the BTS to avoid being mischaracterized as a rebel. She explained, I spend so much time online that I feel I belong there. My online friends support me, we discuss things we are interested in, and I learn something new daily. The older people in my neighborhood and family do not always understand why young people spend so much time online. They constantly judge me because I wear neon-colored clothes and color my hair. To avoid uninvited comments and suggestions, I do not add them to my social media accounts.

In 2019, Rakhi introduced us to three 21-year-old K-pop fans she had met online. All three of them—Shweta, Noor, and Yasmin—lived in Mumbai and were a part of the private global BTS fan page on Facebook. Our conversations with these four young BTS fans encouraged us to reflect on how people from different cultural contexts translate the global media content they consume. We hung out with these K-pop fans in different contexts to understand their engagement with K-pop from within the felt contours of their local lives. Our goal was to unpack the interlinkages between their online participation and the norms dominant in their local lives. We asked Shweta, Noor, and Yasmin about the significance of conversing with members of the BTS Army online. In these conversations, Yasmin often emphasized that online communities allowed fans like her to explore a sense of connection with those who had a shared interest and lifestyle. Yasmin explained,

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K-pop is a lifestyle . . . I rely on my online connections and friends to experience a K-pop lifestyle online. Some aspects of this lifestyle trickle down to my local life, and things get messy. Everyone in the BTS Army appreciates my K-popinspired choices online, from our language to the photos we post. We also experience a sense of belonging when we collectively dislike another K-pop band. It is so collective and affirming.

On the other hand, Shweta had a different experience. She spent time in these online communities to understand how K-pop fans in other countries were popularizing K-pop-related media, merchandise, and events. She sought investors and partners to start a K-pop store in Juhu. She used to participate in these online communities to understand the process of “translating global media content into products, events, and services that people in India will pay for.” She explained, Our online experiences can never be isolated from our local lives. When people in India consume K-dramas, they like it because there are many cultural similarities between Bollywood and Korean media. Just look at the shows such as Crash Landing on You. It is a Shahrukh Khan movie, replete with songs and romance. Members in online communities use a common language and leave out the cultural nuances of their local lives. They want to create a collective identity, and there is no time for particulars in these online situations. So, we know so little about how they translate these experiences and introduce them to their local lives. For instance, Rakhi’s fashion sense is K-pop, my sense of romance is K-pop, and Noor and Yasmin are learning the Korean language online and cooking Korean dishes at home.

All four young women engaged in a complex process of translating global media content into practices or choices they could enact in their local lives. They filtered media content from different cultures to establish affinities between their online experiences/consumption and their local lives. As they digitally consumed K-pop and participated in the BTS Army groups online, they searched for ways to translate aspects of the online fandom into offline practices. Online communities were effective in helping them establish meaningful relationships with K-pop stars and fans, thus giving them a sense of belonging to a larger and global community. However, their engagement with digital media and online communities continued beyond digital platforms. Their online experiences often percolated into their local lives—at times in seemingly mundane daily routines like cooking Korean food and eating it using chopsticks during family meals, pestering their parents to buy expensive Korean beauty products, or compiling Korean song playlists over American pop music because the songs reflected a tender side of romance and love—other times in a more profound and significant manner. The

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dominant norms in their local lives, in turn, facilitated or restricted particular affinities between the young digital media users and the global media content they consumed. The central thesis of our ethnographic study is that dominant social norms in young people’s local lives and their primordial affiliations either limit or facilitate their engagement with global media content. Young people, therefore, design transcultural communication practices (TCP) to negotiate the influence of their local lives and engage meaningfully with global media content. Young people sometimes reject and challenge the authority of the dominant social norms in their localities while engaging with global media. Rakhi’s insistence on wearing K-pop-inspired clothes and dyeing her hair purple despite the rebuke and criticism she received from her neighbors and family members indicates her decision to reject the expectations imposed on her. Simultaneously, she concealed her online participation from her neighbors and family members. She refused to add them to her social media networks because she believed she could “create an online space that was global and removed from my offline life and social expectations.” She purposely curated her social media networks to include members who would appreciate the K-pop photos she shared, the BTS fan posts she created, and her participation as a member of the BTS Army. Rakhi did not desire to subvert or change the norms in her local life, yet she wanted to belong to the global fan community. Interestingly, she often empathized with her parents’ apprehensions about her lifestyle choices. On the other hand, Shweta wanted to reinterpret K-pop media and practices to assimilate them into people’s local lives and create a market for K-pop products, events, and services. A common thread connecting Shweta, Rakhi, Noor, and Yasmin’s engagements with K-pop is the subjective and contextual TCP that the women designed to negotiate the meaning of a digitally mediated cultural text before they assimilated the text into their everyday lives. The negotiation process includes young digital media users challenging, reinforcing, or subverting the social norms dominant in their local lives. Scholars of audience and reception studies have explored different concepts and theories to examine how audiences from different cultural contexts appropriate unfamiliar and global media content. Most of these studies adopt a text-centered approach. Accordingly, these studies identify the appealing features of global media content to explain its uptake across different geocultural contexts such as Latin America (Choi 2015; Madrid-Morales and Lovric 2015), the Middle East (Otmazgin and Lyan 2014), and the United States (Jung 2013). Additionally, other studies use the cultural proximity theory to argue that users prefer a global media text if it is culturally or linguistically proximal to their local realities (Iwabuchi 2002; Straubhaar 1991, 2014).

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Only some studies focus on the users to elaborate on the processes they design to translate and appropriate global media content and render it conducive to their local lives. K-pop, for example, may have a sliver of cultural proximity with the local realities of fans in India but lacks linguistic proximity. Even so, K-pop fans in India design creative strategies to translate their online engagement with K-pop media and communities into lifestyle choices they can practice in their local offline lives. While they are negotiating with the global media content, they constantly reference the social norms in their local lives to make sense of their online experiences. Our ethnographic study foregrounds users’ agency, subjective experiences, and situatedness in their local lives to narrate the interplay between the global and local. This chapter examines why young users inhabit online communities and how they bridge the chasm between their online experiences and local lives. We argue that the young users’ intentions to localize and assimilate global media and online experiences with their local contexts are motivated by the desire to transcend physical territories and forge connections and relationships. They desire to be a part of things novel, larger, aspirational, and global. In a digitally mediated world, young people belong to communities not limited to localities and offline networks. As young people continue to rely on social rewards emerging from their primordial affiliations, they are also enthusiastic about the potential of global networks and connections. Their participation in these online communities has not led to the rise of a global community, but we have witnessed a softening of the rigid connection between culture and territory. Previous research on cultural proximity (Iwabuchi 2002; Straubhaar, 2014), for instance, presupposes the nation-state as a reference point for all investigations of cultures. As Robins (2006, 31) explains, What is ultimately problematic is the conception of culture that is being mobilized with this agenda, in which the apparently neutral term “culture” actually turns out to be culture in the national image. Thus, a culture is conceived as a unitary and bounded entity; as the property of a particular ethnic or national group; as distinct from the cultures of other groups; and as fixed and constant through time.

In this chapter, we problematize the conception of culture as tied to nation-states or fixed boundaries. Instead, we argue that cultural experiences are not composite. Young people customize them to generate a personal repertoire. Accordingly, we provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that young users depend on virtual friendships and online communities to experience a sense of belonging. Young people use social media to transcend their offline

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networks and local connections to forge emotional and meaningful bonds. We draw on Lambert et al.’s (2013) definition of a sense of belonging when we propose that young people use digital media to develop a life in concert with those who help them harness their skills and interests, regardless of cultural, territorial, or linguistic proximity. Although a wide range of interest- and identity-based online communities exist, including those devoted to civic and political interests, friending, romance, and entertainment are the three key motivations that prompt young people to seek global connections (Arora 2019). Young people are also prompted by their desire to access soft cultural experiences of food, clothing, and travel through their participation in communities online. We explore this sense of belonging among young people who are part of three types of online communities: learning communities, gaming communities, and fan communities. (UN)LEARNING ONLINE In 2016, Anjana spent two hours on Udemy every day for three months and completed two courses in graphic design. She was a 21-year-old preschool teacher in Ahmedabad and worked from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on weekdays. She called herself an aspiring photographer and digital artist. “I am from a middle-class family, and we cannot afford to spend money to learn photography and design. I rely on online courses and social media to learn how to use design software and other photography-related skills,” she explained. She actively participated in Facebook and WhatsApp groups created for aspiring graphic designers from around the world while completing her online courses. She emphasized that these online groups were an essential learning resource for problem-solving, networking, and seeking opportunities and collaborations. For Anjana, the online groups she frequented served two primary purposes. First, these online communities enabled her to network globally and collaborate on ongoing projects with other photographers, models, and make-up artists. She relied on her online community to acquire experience and affordable learning opportunities. Second, participating in these online communities reinforced Anjana’s belief that digital media had decentralized learning and made it more accessible to people from different income backgrounds. She emphasized that students in her local networks who previously could not afford to establish their small businesses were now using the power of online communities, networks, and learning opportunities to earn money and pursue their dreams. “It is simple: Digital media has evened out the playing field.

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The internet is cheap, especially in India. The bottom line is you must work hard to succeed,” she explained. Anjana’s belief that digital media and technologies foster social prosperity and individual empowerment has antecedents in the macro discourse on adopting digital technologies in India. The Government of India (GOI) launched the Digital India program in June 2015, focusing on increasing digital infrastructure, access, and literacy nationwide to enable the electronic delivery of government and financial services. According to Singh (2021), a neoliberal logic underscores the program, as the Digital India initiative establishes “a direct relationship between the adoption of digital technologies, social prosperity, and individual empowerment” (169). Over the years, digital technologies have become synonymous with progress, growth, and modernity. For example, studies based on the development paradigm often argued that digital technologies were essential to establish countries on a linear path to progress. Accordingly, when individuals gained access to digital technologies, they were burdened with the responsibility to empower themselves. In this context, young people who participated in online learning communities reinforced this neoliberal logic when they assumed that access to digital technologies evened out the playing field and helped users overcome social, systemic, and generational barriers to success. Participating in these online communities for learning and skill development helped Anjana circumvent the material and resource constraints in her lived reality without introducing any significant changes in her routine and local cultural practices and relationships. Online learning communities offered material benefits such as collaboration opportunities and free software subscriptions as group rewards and gifts. Such participation also romanticized the notions of free mentoring and unpaid internships. At the same time, it encouraged young people to enact an online persona conducive to accepted norms of online participation. Anjana defined this online persona as an “empowered person, ready to give it her all and go that extra mile.” Even when online learning communities offered material and social rewards to young people, the main appeal for the members was the promise it held out—of thriving in precarious economic and social conditions. However, there was always a possibility that this promise would remain unfulfilled. Young people who participated in these online communities offered their services and time for free—mentoring others, providing feedback on projects, and creating open-access resources—to sustain the sense of belongingness these online communities generated. Young people had to create a cosmopolitan-neoliberal online persona to participate in these online learning communities. Sunjay, a 19-year-old aspiring UX designer from Kolkata, explained,

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Sometimes, these online networks can land you your first job, so you cannot be very personal. My online persona is very different from my offline personality. I am a middle-class, English-speaking, modern young designer in these communities. These online communities are more welcoming of a city-type personality. Members who get the most help and feedback live abroad, have fancy-looking profile photos, and use Western aesthetics in their design work. So, I mimic that style when I communicate in these groups.

We used to hang out with Sunjay in his house, on the streets, and during different religious and community functions. He preferred to converse in Bengali with his neighbors, friends, and family. His mannerisms and everyday practices reflected deep embeddedness in the quintessential Bengali culture, including his food habits and home decor. When we observed his online participation—photos, conversations, and posts—we realized it differed from his offline conversations and experiences. He participated in a Facebook group created to connect aspiring designers with established professionals in the field. Sunjay had to work especially hard on his English-language skills so that he could request feedback on his designs and ideas. He also paid attention to his Facebook profile photo and description. He described the guidelines he used to create a cosmopolitan persona online: “Speak in perfect English. There is a tendency on these Facebook pages to ignore poorly articulated posts. I cannot post a photo of a crowded street outside my neighborhood. I will post a photo of me working on a computer in a nicely designed office for tax.1” Sunjay had created a cosmopolitan online persona to fit with this online community of UX designers from around the world. He enjoyed connecting with his online friends and acquaintances in this group because such interactions offered material rewards and professional opportunities. His online friends could empathize with his passion for seeking fulfillment through work. His family and friends in his offline life did not understand his work or commitment to it. His parents were unfamiliar with UX design, and his friends had different interests. Digital media and online communities enabled him to forge relationships that would help him become what Nikolas Rose calls an enterprising individual (1996)—that is, an individual who “will make an enterprise of its life, seek to maximize its own human capital, project itself a future, and . . . shape itself in order to become what it wishes to be.” According to Sunjay, the central role of these online groups for learning was to provide the members with global professional openings and transcend the physical boundaries of nation-states. He collaborated with designer teams in the United States, Germany, and Dubai through his membership in the online community. He appreciated the significance of these alternative learning sites but was also cognizant of the drawbacks. As most work he secured through

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online communities was contractual, Sunjay had to trade job security and a regular monthly salary for the promise of a sense of belonging to a global professional community and autonomy in work. His cosmopolitan online persona reinforces our observation that participation in online communities helped members experience a sense of belonging and alienation simultaneously. Sunjay had curated an online persona different from his offline experiences and lived realities. Creating a cosmopolitan identity is a TCP Sunjay deployed to generate an alternative reality suited to his online experiences without disrupting his local realities and primordial affiliations. He argued, I am happy as a cosmopolitan professional and respect my traditional roots. I do not need to inject the traditional aspects of my life into my online interactions and bring my cosmopolitan outlook to my local ties. Each person can be different: I am involved with my community and neighborhood offline, and even if there are things I want to change, I do not want to become Western. Also, I do not want to stir any controversy online by introducing my traditions and cultural and religious beliefs in these learning communities online.

Here, he curated an online identity to conceal his local realities. This connects back to our discussion of Sharique’s efforts to curate an online identity of a modern and urban person. Young people who participated in online communities and cultivated virtual friendships and working relationships had to learn how to negotiate with their offline cultural identities and practices and their online persona. We define this negotiation strategy as posturing—that is, creating an alternative persona online to impress diverse groups of people. The online persona thus created is different, with selective elements showcased from the offline experiences or, in some instances, completely detached from the offline experiences of young people. We argue that posturing is a TCP because it enables young people to create new relationships and experiences online without compromising their offline and local identities and practices. At the heart of the posturing strategy is their intention to immerse themselves in a global community that requires flattening nuances and particularities while still staying embedded in their local cultures. Posturing is also a testimony to the QPR of young people because its usage reflects that inhabiting transcultural lives in a globally connected world means being comfortable with multiple identities and forms of sociality. While offline networks and primordial affiliations continue to inform young people’s everyday realities significantly, we will be remiss if we ignore how their online experiences and community interactions give rise to varied forms of connection, a sense of belonging, and different styles of communication. When young people engage in quotidian playful resilience, they transcend a binary system of understanding and engaging

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with the world around them. Their communication and engagements are no longer within the purview of the “either/or” method of interpretation. Instead, they start operating from the margins, constantly bridging two different worlds or experiences. As a TCP, posturing reflects young people’s agency to inhabit the dominant social norms in their lived realities and offline spaces and challenge these norms in liminal online communities. Also, young people shape their online practices to suit the unique shared guidelines within these online communities. Posturing is a transcultural communication practice that young people designed to negotiate with the demands of navigating globally connected communities through digital media. At the surface level, creating an online persona disconnected from their offline and local lives might give the impression that such experiences are fake and inauthentic. Such an interpretation is problematic because it assumes that young people should have a monolithic identity that is constant and fixed. On the contrary, identities are understood as cultural constructs that are fluid and changing (Hall 1993, 237) and are shaped “within the discourse of history and culture. Not an essence, but a positioning.” Drawing theoretical force from Hall’s conceptualization of identities, we argue that posturing is a TCP because it supports simultaneously occurring identities and experiences as young people create personas open to dynamic change and alterations. In this sense, young people’s cosmopolitan personas in online learning communities and offline communities that welcome and embrace changes can be conceived as their efforts to grasp the potential dynamism of identities and expressions. Young people used posturing to expand on the different possible identities and enlarge their repertoire of experiences, learning resources, collaboration opportunities, and sociality. They expanded and inhabited different identities because posturing allowed them to soften the influence of their offline and local realities per their choice or online audience expectations. As a result, when young people postured as cosmopolitan learners in online learning communities, they connected with other members from different contexts, cultures, and localities based on their collective interests and an organically generated shared identity that is as much authentic as their chosen identity in an offline context. Posturing effectively created commonalities across different locally embedded identities in global learning communities. Unlike Friedman (2005), we do not propose that flattening identity nuances through posturing engenders equality and overcomes differences. Instead, we argue that posturing temporarily allows young people to overlook their primordial affiliations and local attachments to traditions for the promise of material rewards and new forms of sociality. In this condition of simultaneous coexistence, their local identities do not necessarily overlap with their online personas. Young people can, therefore, continue to nourish their primordial affiliations and online connections simultaneously.

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GAMING LEAGUES In 2018, Suraj was a 19-year-old university student who had just started playing League of Legends (LOL), a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game. His friends at the Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi had created a Discord channel to communicate while playing the LOL matches. Social media platforms such as Discord, WhatsApp, and Telegram allow gamers to create online communities to communicate with each other about their positions, strategies, threats, and other details during matches. Suraj was a member of a Discord channel called PathFinder. His batchmates—people he met every day—initially created this channel. Gradually, this community grew to include friends of friends and other distant contacts. In 2018, the PathFinder community consisted of 149 members, many of whom were strangers from different cities across India and other countries of South Asia, namely Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. Though this channel was initially started to support gamers as they searched for teammates, gaming resources, and advice, the PathFinder community soon included discussions and experiences far exceeding the gaming interests of the members. Suraj often hung out on the HotSoupKitchen channel—exchanging memes, posts, and messages with other members. He described his experience as “a break from reality,” where he could choose different characters, positions, and teams to play. Suraj explained, For me, gaming is like taking a break. . . . When gaming, I can forget my surroundings and all my study-related stress and problems. Also, the entire multiplayer experience is intense. The associations often extend beyond the limited time we game. We become friends.

For Suraj, Discord channels and online communities expanded the social dimensions of gaming as a recreational activity. These communities would also serve as support or advice groups on topics unrelated to gaming, such as university education, employment opportunities, and questions related to personal relationships. We interviewed three other gamers who hung out on PathFinder to understand how they described their engagement within online gaming communities. According to Karthik, a 23-year-old student pursuing his graduate degree in marketing from Ahmedabad, members of online gaming communities had helped him secure job referrals at big media and technology companies in India. Karthik enjoyed engaging with his online gaming community for more than just material rewards. However, his engagements with members of online communities were not always pleasant or enriching. Some of these online associations and interactions challenged his cultural sensibilities and were an affront to the social norms dominant in his offline

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life. “They talk about a lot of sexual stuff. Most of the online gaming groups I visit are all-boys channels. Offline I have much more control over the conversations I participate in, and I can avoid vulgar talks, but online, it is almost difficult,” he explained. Karthik described an online bois locker room scenario where the members of a Discord channel for LOL would constantly share photos of women and post lewd comments about them. Some of the members in this channel complained about the discomfort they experienced when reading the lewd comments on photos of women but did not challenge the member sharing such posts. Srinivas, another 23-year-old gamer on the PathFinder channel on Discord, explained that it was difficult for “the few decent boys in the group to raise objections because doing so could lead them to be expelled from the community.” The young people we interviewed mentioned a disconnect between their offline and online lives, especially regarding the extent to which sexually charged material was circulated in these online communities. According to the social and cultural norms in the local lives of Srinivas, Suraj, and Karthik, discussions of sexuality or sex-related issues were taboo topics and never encouraged. Their local communities were also apprehensive about romantic relationships between young people before marriage. As a result, young people had to find cloaked channels of expressing and experiencing their sexuality. Online communities and communication channels can provide an effective avenue to explore sexuality, romantic partnerships, and dating possibilities. However, the communities we observed included gamers from different backgrounds who were raised in sexually suppressed and misogynistic cultures. These strange men copied photos of girls from their personal social media pages and posted them without their permission on the Discord channel as provocations to initiate discussions. Srinivas described these members as incels: an abbreviation for “involuntarily celibate.” He explained, These men think they are the nice guys and blame the girls for not choosing them. They are frustrated, so they post photos of girls beyond their league and then slut-shame or trash talk about them. I cannot think of one instance when any boy has done that in an offline space. They know they will be accountable for their actions if they do not have the veil of anonymity that the internet provides them.

Srinivas believed this kind of sexually perverse behavior was characteristic of online communities, but other young gamers argued otherwise. According to Karthik, men who indulge in slut-shaming, cyberbullying, and online harassment often were raised in patriarchal families and cultures of repressed sexuality. Karthik and Suraj shared stories of members who were a part of their

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online and offline networks and posted lewd photos and comments in the online gaming communities. These young men, they explained, are encouraged to reinforce patriarchal norms in their local communities and surveil women and their sexuality. When women express their sexuality and challenge the conduct normalized in these patriarchal societies, they are shamed and disciplined. Young men socialized in cultures of patriarchy in their local communities deploy the potential of digital communication networks to reinforce their social norms and find new forms of practicing these online. Practicing patriarchal social norms online and using the affordances of online communities to amplify their implications is the underside of quotidian playful resilience. When young people use playful digital engagement strategies to enact these norms, they sometimes reinforce discriminatory values and practices. Young gamers in these online communities who are uncomfortable with discrimination peddled as fun or comedy seldom challenge other members or disband them from the communities. In doing so, they enable discrimination through compliance or indifference. Karthik, Srinivas, and Suraj did not challenge or subvert the overtones of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. They were uncomfortable underscoring their local values and beliefs in a transcultural online community of people from across India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The young gamers prioritized the social advantages of supporting the status quo in the online space. Suraj explained, When you are in an online community that hosts people from different cultures, social etiquettes demand that members not promote their personal values or impose them on others. Communicating in diverse online communities requires members to learn to let go—if you do not like something, do not engage with it. You may think we are cowards, but that is not the case. You cannot ruin a gaming connection because of politics or some values. Many of these boys are great people when you talk to them one-on-one. We need people who do not see the world in black and white to sustain online communities.

Suraj and other gamers argued that they chose to disconnect their local lives and primordial values from the online gaming communities’ diverse and multifaceted cultures and values, some of which were unacceptable to them. They negotiated the chasm between their local lives and online participation through deliberate disengagement. We identify deliberate disengagement as a TCP young people used to negotiate the authority of dominant cultural values and norms of communication in online communities. To do this, they feigned disinterest in conversations beyond the purview of gaming and purposely distanced themselves from members who challenged their cultural and belief systems. When young gamers we interviewed came across discussions, ideas, and conversations

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in the online communities that challenged the values they upheld in offline spaces, they chose to demote the significance of these unacceptable thoughts and practices. Some temporarily left the channel and started a new and smaller channel of like-minded gamers. They would use the second niche channel whenever they felt uncomfortable in the larger online community of PathFinder. The practice of deliberate disengagement challenges the common understanding that transcultural communication is a method of assimilating local realities and global experiences. We argue that deliberate disengagement demonstrates that young people sometimes choose to maintain the boundaries between local and global, even when they know how to assimilate their local cultures while engaging with the world. It does not mean that young people do not have the required competencies and skills to operate within the boundaries of their local cultures in transcultural online communities. Young people practice agency and resilience when they refuse to shoulder the responsibility of initiating conversations or dialogues dismantling the status quo and discriminatory practices in online communities. Deliberate disengagement allows young people to choose when and where they want to practice their local cultures and values, express their primordial affiliations, or posture as a member only interested in the gaming aspects of the online communities they inhabit. There are two primary features of deliberate disengagement in online communities. First, young people consider large online communities with members from different cultures and countries as a networking opportunity. For young gamers such as Suraj, Srinivas, and Karthik, online gaming communities with a large multi-country membership base were an effective channel for developing smaller and more intimate communities based on shared local lives and cultural experiences. The young gamers regularly participated in the larger transcultural online communities but did not aspire to develop friendships with other members. As a result, they did not feel obligated to invest their time and efforts in challenging or questioning the discriminatory practices and dehumanizing dialogues in these communities. For example, Karthik and Srinivas shared instances where the gaming community members in the PathFinder channel would use discriminatory and transphobic language. They also used sexually violent phrases such as “get raped” to describe their losses. Karthik and Srinivas understood the harmful implications of normalizing transphobic and violent language. However, they remained silent because they wanted a team to participate in the League of Legends championship. Second, deliberate disengagement is a strategy that stems from the acknowledgment that changing, challenging, and questioning existing structures of power is a labor-intensive effort. Many young gamers we interviewed

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did not have the mental and emotional capacity or will to create a space for inclusive dialogues in online transcultural communities. Karthik said, Discussing sensitive topics in online communities where few people are politically inclined is a recipe for disaster. Furthermore, why should I feel it is my responsibility to have these conversations or to change others? We all have access to the internet. There is no excuse for ignorance or prejudice in today’s world.

Srinivas and Suraj also mentioned that they did not want to spend their limited leisure time educating others about gender equality or transphobia. They said creating awareness was an increasingly labor-intensive and unpaid civic activity, and they did not want to “ruin our fun-filled mental space with such heavy topics” (Srinivas 2018). Deliberate disengagement is an effective TCP that allows young gamers to superficially inhabit transcultural networks online without cultivating meaningful relationships with other community members. Deliberate disengagement is a QPR because the young people exercise their agency and decide which aspects of their online experiences and local lives will interact. It is a strategy in quotidian resilience because young people demonstrate remarkable skills in resisting the influence of discriminatory practices and language in online communities while continuing to practice their primordial affiliations in their local lives. We are not proposing that their local lives and online experiences never permeate into each other. Instead, we highlight the possibility of purposive non-assimilation because young people acknowledge the value of online labor and the constraints (time and resources) imposed on their leisure activities. They are also highly aware of their primary motive for wanting to belong to a specific network. When young gamers had limited data packages and time, most avoided fringe discussions in online communities. They spent as much time as possible actively playing the games. The young gamers played regardless of their teammates’ cultural practices and values. Though the dominant culture in these online communities was sexist, the young gamers had cultivated great friends with members from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. They had also created a personal Discord channel, LABRATS, where they invited only a few gamers they connected with over more than just gaming. In the channel LABRATS, most members identified as progressives and belonged to middle- and higher-income families. They were interested in “nerdy things like comic books, computers, technologies, and science” (Karthik 2018). We met three more gamers on the LABRATS Discord channel: Tarika, Kunal, and Zeira. These three gamers described online communities as “a possible way of developing deep and meaningful relationships if the community

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is closely monitored and regulated.” Zeira, for example, never participated in any Discord channel where members were strangers or played anonymously using a fake username. She explained that all the members in the LABRATS channel had gaming usernames, but she knew all of them: She was friends with them on Facebook, had been introduced through mutual friends, or had talked to the members one-on-one on many occasions. She explained, LABRATS is a niche channel because the moderator vets each member closely before adding them. We are a small community and have people from five different countries. Sometimes we do not have enough people to form teams, but it is worth it. In LABRATS, we share a bond of care and friendship. We are not just gaming because we like the game. We game because we dig each other’s company, which is rare.

Zeira and Tarika were the only girls in the LABRATS channel and expressed security concerns regarding large and loosely moderated channels. Tarika explained that anonymity in these online communities encouraged men to send them lewd requests, vulgar messages, and indecent propositions. They felt safer participating in smaller channels where they knew the other members well enough to hold them accountable if the members sent untoward requests or messages. Interestingly, Tarika even called the LABRATS channel a “safer form of Tinder.” She argued that online dating involves a certain amount of risk because people go on dates with strangers based on a couple of online conversations. Describing her thought process, she said, On this channel, I hang out with boys my age all day for days together. When you game so much, you know the other team members’ entire lives: their daily schedule, family members, culture, and beliefs. While playing games, we discuss political values, religious beliefs, personality traits, and likes/dislikes. These conversations happen in a group where everyone has a lot of mutual friends with others. People cannot lie a lot in such closely knit situations. I go on a date only after I am sure the person is safe and we have the same values and beliefs.

For Tarika, closely moderated online gaming communities provided a safe and secure environment to cultivate meaningful transcultural relationships. Similarly, Zeira used online gaming communities for online dating. She belonged to a conservative family and was not allowed to socialize with men in offline spaces. Zeira relied on her online connections in the LABRATS channel to meet new people and date them online. Though some of the female core members moderating the channel had met Zeira offline and knew her well enough to add her to the channel, she had requested them to keep her identity concealed. She used a gaming username and profile photo in the

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channel where she met others. She had gone on an online date with three members she had met on the channel and was in an online relationship with one of them in 2019. She knew that the online relationship was temporary and could not become an offline affair. For Zeira, online dating through the gaming community was a way of forming platonic and meaningful relationships that were “temporary and based on shared interests in sciency stuff” (Zeira 2019). Creating a private, safe community within a larger global community is another TCP practice that allows young people to assert their agency in expressing their core values and life choices. Young people had varied experiences participating in transcultural gaming communities online and had developed strategies for negotiating the cultural and linguistic barriers they encountered. Some gamers ignored the disconnect between their global online experiences and their local lives or primordial affiliations. Others reinforced this disconnect to create an alternative site where they could do things impermissible in their local realities. Yet others tried to create and sustain close-knit online communities based on cultural similarities and sometimes offline ties, and forge meaningful friendships with other community members. Different motivations encouraged young people to participate in gaming communities online: social rewards, leisure opportunities, the need for intimacy, and a sense of belonging to a community of shared interests. They also wanted a taste of the global that was not available to them outside of these networks. As they navigated through transcultural networks online, they constantly (re)interpreted their local experiences. Sometimes, these (re)interpretations encouraged young people to reinforce their primordial affiliations and offline values in online communities, as in the case of Karthik, Srinivas, and Suraj. On the other hand, we also witnessed that young people used online communities to escape the limitations imposed on them in their localities, as in the case of Zeira. OTAKUS ONLINE I am obsessed with anime and Japan. I have participated in programs that train English teachers to visit Japan for a few months and teach. Japan is so different from India, from my life in Baroda. And I know just a little about Japan through anime. It will surely be much more when I visit it (Shanaya 2018).

Shanaya, a 22-year-old bisexual woman from Gujarat, India, called herself an Otaku—a Japanese term referring to a person obsessed with computers, technologies, or aspects of Japanese culture to the detriment of social skills. Shanaya’s obsession with anime translated into lifestyle choices she made in her local life. Inspired by her favorite anime character Sara from Samurai

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Champloo, she had blinding bangs as her hairstyle and would design unique costumes for online cosplay gatherings. Shanaya complained about not feeling accepted as a bisexual woman in her locality. Her family and friends tried to dissuade her from expressing her gender identity publicly. Interestingly, her parents supported her ambition to teach English in Japan even when they were uncomfortable with her fascination for anime and her bisexual identity. They had even enrolled her in English-speaking classes, encouraged her to pursue an undergraduate degree in English literature, and paid for her TOEFL and IELTS exams. Whenever Shanaya felt underrepresented as an anime fan in her local and offline community, she engaged with members of online anime communities on Facebook and WhatsApp. This online community organized virtual cosplay events, weekly meet-ups, and online competitions to indulge their obsession with anime and Japan. In this online community, Shanaya found people who were cool with her gender identity. Describing her experience participating in the online community, she said, It is refreshing to talk about how you feel as a bisexual woman with someone who can understand and sympathize with you. All my friends are straight; even if they were in the closet, they would never come out. Our local community is conservative, and there is no acceptance of homosexuals, bisexuals, or transgender people. Because of anime and online groups, I have found friends from different countries—the U.S., Canada, Costa Rica, Taiwan, and the U.K. The culture and laws in these countries are different—same-sex marriage is legal, and there is a rising acceptance of different gender identities.

In Baroda, Shanaya lived in a middle-income residential society and belonged to a conservative Christian family. Her parents and church community organized special sessions for LGBTQ youth to help them “get rid of their evil desires” (Shanaya 2019). For a long time, her parents compelled her to attend these church sessions designed to cure bisexual, transgender, and homosexual young people. Shanaya attended these sessions until she turned nineteen and then started questioning her parents and refusing to oblige. The only place where Shanaya felt accepted was the online anime community and her virtual friends, who held a space for her to share her feelings and experiences. According to Shanaya, anime was a counterculture. Many people in the online community she visited were open-minded and had a progressive outlook toward gender identities and life. The members were likelier to question the status quo in society and negotiate the dominant power relationships to create space for suppressed voices, identities, and experiences. Shanaya was confident that the members would actively challenge any discrimination in the online community. However, she was unsure if they showed the same

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enthusiasm for anti-discrimination work in their offline networks and local lives. Elaborating on her confusion, she offered an example from her life. As a bisexual woman, Shanaya had encountered incredible discrimination in her local experiences: Girls from her university would refuse to hang out with her alone. They were afraid that if someone saw them with Shanaya, people would assume that they were lesbians. Shanaya’s parents had tried to cure her of the “illness,” and her church community posted anti-LGBTQ messages on their Facebook and WhatsApp groups. Shanaya could never challenge her friends, family, or church community members offline. Everyone knew that she was Mr. and Mrs. Parmar’s daughter. If she questioned or rebutted the criticism from her local connections, they would complain about her behavior to her parents. Shanaya has started withdrawing from these offline and local networks to avoid confrontation. Shanaya decided to circumvent the social norms (primarily related to gender) imposed on her and found refuge in her online transcultural communities. The anime Facebook page she frequented was based on the principles of creating an inclusive space for everyone who identified as an Otaku. To harness the social rewards of membership in this transcultural fan group, Shanaya had to express her support for anti-discrimination work online explicitly. She liked and shared posts about anime that promoted gender equity and represented the queer community. Enabling diversity is a transcultural communication practice (TCP) that Shanaya used to maintain her relationships in the online community, providing her with the much-needed support lacking in her local community and offline life. We argue that enabling diversity is an effective TCP for two reasons: First, the strategy sustained participation from members of different cultural backgrounds worldwide. Second, it helped create an alternative community for social bonding and experiencing a sense of belonging, especially when offline communities and primordial affiliations were limiting and deficient. Enabling diversity in online fan communities and strengthening it through care and inclusive dialogues was also instrumental in encouraging Shanaya to reduce her dependence on local networks. As Shanaya grew closer to her virtual friends, she gained confidence in herself, her gender identity, and her passion for anime and Japan. She questioned the status quo in her locality, if ever so slightly. Instead of explicitly challenging the authority of the local norms, Shanaya found implicit ways of negotiating the gender norms and identities normalized in her offline community. She stopped attending church, did not spend time with her neighborhood friends, and refused to have deep conversations with her parents. Instead, Shanaya spent increasing amounts of time online—talking with her virtual friends, preparing for cosplay events and competitions, and planning a future in Japan motivated by the inclusive nature of the anime-based online community. Enabling diversity online

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helped Shanaya find friends who supported her ambitions and struggles, thus making it possible for her to be resilient in her pursuit of the life she wanted to experience and the gender identity she wanted to embrace. Shanaya introduced us to two of her friends who were huge anime fans and were part of an online community for anime lovers. Shivani was a 20-year-old girl from Ahmedabad. She was planning to start an online store selling “all things manga” in India. She was a budding entrepreneur and had spent a summer in Japan, immersing herself in the anime culture. Shivani was also a moderator on one of the online anime groups and was recruiting potential clients for her store through this group. “When it comes to a niche interest such as anime, it is all about the details. I should know which manga stuff is authentic to Japanese society and then design a strategy to establish the significance of those products for people in India,” she explained. Shivani used the online community as a bridge between Indian society and the popular culture of Japan. The online community allowed Shivani to examine the current user needs, create a market for interesting anime-related merchandise in India, and find ways of procuring licenses to release Japanese anime over internet networks in India for group viewing. The online anime community was crucial in ideating ways to make space for Japanese popular culture in the local and offline lives of the fan community in India. Though the norms dominant in the local lives of the diverse community members were markedly different from the cultural practices promoted through anime and commonly observed in Japan, the fans used online communities to create a bridge and balance the differences. Sometimes, the differences in the local lives and the representation of Japanese culture through anime led to an obsessive fascination for Japan. This was evident in our conversations with Ritukumar, a 24-year-old boy from Delhi who was Shanaya’s online friend in the Facebook anime fan group. Ritukumar believed his passion for anime would be genuinely appreciated only in Japan, so he wanted to migrate there. He watched anime, read Murakami novels, and befriended many young people from Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka through online fan communities for anime lovers. He was so excited to move to Japan that he had grown highly dissatisfied with his local life, offline networks, and local connections. His engagements with members of transcultural fan communities were espoused with a desire to leave India and his local middle-class life in the overcrowded streets of Lajpatnagar in Delhi. Ritukumar’s desire to move to Japan had roots in his obsession with anime. He had grown up watching anime and was introduced to Japanese culture and society through the anime he watched. His interactions with anime lovers amplified a sanitized vision of Japan as a haven for counterculture and extraordinary nerdy groups. In these online groups, anime was

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the lens through which the followers viewed Japanese culture and society. These representations and their conversations in online groups often glorified Japan, thus intensifying fans’ obsession with the culture. In our conversations, Ritukumar described Japan and India as opposites. He said, India is full of people who have no civic sense. Japan is different. People are hardworking and artistic. They are technologically advanced and culturally rich. Japan has a certain kind of calmness to it. You cannot experience that in India.

The representation of Japan in the anime he watched and his conversations in online fan groups fueled Ritukumar’s aspiration for Japan and his understanding of a foreign culture and society. Even with exceptions to the rule, most anime foreground Japanese aesthetics in storytelling in ways that create a sense of awe for a foreign culture. Japan, in these representations, is a distant and aspirational reality that can be experienced through anime and the online community of anime fans. When fans love a distant virtual reality, it has implications for their local lives and experiences. For Ritukumar, those implications included a strained relationship with his parents. He had compelled his parents to spend their provident fund account savings to sponsor his education in Japan so that he could start a life there. Ritukumar refused to enroll in university education in Delhi because he was convinced that the education system in India was broken and deficient and could not match the supposed excellence of Japanese universities. Ritukumar’s engagement with anime and the online community, and the implications of such encounters for his local life and offline relationships, is another example of the dark side of resilience. We demonstrate cases that reveal the different facets of quotidian resilience and its implications. Shanaya designed subtle ways to challenge the dominant gender norms in her local community and relied on the support of her online networks and friendships to experience a sense of belonging. That was quotidian and playful resilience. Shivani tried to introduce anime to the local communities in India through her online store idea. She wanted to use her online connections to enable a translation of cultural products from online engagements to local experiences. On the other hand, Ritukumar tried to translate his online experience into a completely different lived reality as he procured financial resources to move to Japan. In the process, he refused to engage with his local community and networks, fearing that such engagements might dilute his artistic fervor and passions. Resilience manifests in various forms, and each act of resilience has a sliver of agentic potential at its core. We must broaden the resilience framework to include the underside of decision-making in situations that require critical negotiation with local norms and community expectations.

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Sometimes, young people use their agency to enable transcultural and inclusive experiences. At other times, young people choose to operate within a binary system of thinking where one culture is pitted against the other. CONCLUSION In this chapter, we center young people’s negotiation practices to elaborate on the processes they design to create opportunities for belonging to global communities and networks. The chapter contributes another dimension to our central thesis that young people design transcultural practices and use quotidian playful resistance to engage meaningfully with global cultural influences. Young people from the global South use internet affordances to belong to transnational online communities, as these communities offer them experiences that are larger, global, and aspirational. Their desire to belong takes them to various communities—learning communities, gaming communities, co-working communities, fan communities, business and brand communities, or civic communities. Young people’s motives to belong to global communities are diverse based on their lifeworlds. In our ethnographic work, several different motives for transnational belonging were observed. Some of these motivations are transcending the limitations and constraints of local lives, finding safe spaces for exploration and experimentation, expanding leisure and entertainment options, garnering a larger audience for one’s talent, finding intimacy and friendship not available in local communities, expanding identities, experiencing cultural practices that are foreign and fascinating, and purely material aspirations like finding a lucrative job or business contacts that their limited local networks could not offer. Belonging to global communities, however, is a complex process, often generating tension between the online experiences and local lives and between the newly acquired connections and primordial relationships. In the process, many young people simultaneously experience a sense of belonging and alienation. TCP practices are the negotiation practices that reflect young people’s agentic potential. This chapter identifies four practices our participants have designed to playfully transcend the dominance of a binary system of understanding and engaging with the world around them. These practices are posturing, deliberate disengagement, creating safe private communities within larger global communities, and actively enabling diversity. Posturing involves deliberately crafting an audience-centric online persona with selective elements showcased from offline experiences and local lives. The practice of deliberate disengagement allows young people to pick and choose only those aspects of global belonging that do not upset the relationships they want to maintain in their local networks. At times, young people

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make stronger connections with a group of participants within a larger community and decide to create a private and safe tribe where they feel free to express varied shades of their identities and lived experiences. Finally, by actively enabling diversity in the global online communities where they desire to belong, young people ensure that they nurture a sustained alternative community available to help reduce the dependence on their restrictive local networks. The TCP and QPR discussed in the present chapter reinforce our argument that young people are engaged in critical negotiations with local norms and cultural expectations. At the same time, they strive to belong to global communities online. These negotiations engender many shades of resilience where we can identify the agentic potential of young people and challenge the common understanding that transcultural communication is a method of assimilating local realities and global experiences. Several of our young participants chose to maintain a strict boundary between the local and the global while strategically deciding when to rebel, playfully resist, or accept the dominant norms in both local and global communities. NOTES 1. Tax is a slang word. Posting something for tax means posting something to get attention.

Chapter 3

Transcultural Solidarities

FORGING TRANSCULTURAL SOLIDARITIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE Yashna, a 19-year-old climate activist from Bangalore, India, spends all her weekends organizing online forums, workshops, and advocacy sessions to spearhead global campaigns to combat the climate crisis. According to her, the climate crisis is an issue with a universal appeal that transcends cultural, social, and national differences. Her advocacy involves ensuring that the climate crisis is identified as a global crisis: “Countries in the west are contributing the most to the climate crisis with their oil, automobile, and other industries. And, you know who will suffer the most? People here, in the east.” Over the years, Yashna had identified and forged connections with Gen Z climate activists in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, and Egypt. As she organized local events on the streets of Bangalore, she also helped create “[t]witterstorms against anti-climate policies and authorities across the world.” Yashna and other Gen Z climate activists we interviewed often referred to social media and digital networks when they described their activism. Their identity as climate activists drew power from the social approval and support they received from their online communities. They sought advice, help, guidance, and feedback from their online friends and climate comrades. Gen Z activists valued their digital networks because these connections helped them develop interpersonal bonds based on a collective identity. In our conversation with Vinay, an 18-year-old climate activist from Ahmedabad, we realized that online networks played an important role in establishing meaningful relationships among Gen Zers with a shared cause. Vinay had consciously designed his social media profiles and interactions so that his online community of climate activists would appreciate his contributions and 49

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consider him an in-group member. Similarly, Yashna volunteered six hours on the weekends to create online content and engage more people with the cause. She spent time drafting petitions, organizing live chats, and submitting presentation proposals at strategic conferences on climate change. These young activists, however, did not have any romanticized or essentializing notions about the role of social media and digital technologies. They were critical of the scope of their online activism and connections, and had designed ways to harness its potential to promote their cause. When they defined the role of digital networks, online communities, and social media in their advocacy around the climate crisis, they emphasized that digital networks had the latent power to transform crowds into communities. These online communities had access to learning resources, shared their experiences, and mobilized around a collective goal. The diverse membership in the online communities rallied around the common cause to build consensus and unity. Yashna explained that the members of the online climate justice groups did not seek to overcome their differences in religion, nationality, gender, or other life experiences. Instead, they relied on these differences to harness multiple perspectives and solutions to the climate crisis. The members appreciated the differences as an initiation into self-reflexivity—critically analyzing the discontinuities in their understanding of the climate crisis through transcultural solidarities. We define transcultural solidarities as a practice of self-reflexivity. Young climate activists with different life experiences use digital media and networks to forge a collective identity around a shared cause. Building this collective identity relies on accepting differences stemming from the multiple social identities people enact in their everyday lives. As a result, though the aim is to build a collective identity, young climate activists learn to harness the knowledge emerging from differences to develop a more nuanced understanding of a universal problem. Many feminist scholars such as Mohanty (2003), Dean (1996), and Hemmings (2012, 147–61) have explored a definition of solidarity rooted in dissonance. Our conversations with Sudeshna, a 19-year-old climate activist from Mumbai, highlight this definition of transcultural solidarities that appreciate how people’s distinct lived experiences can enhance our understanding of issues concerning all of humanity. Transcultural solidarities, therefore, emerge from a unique sense of shared humanity that embraces differences based on national and social identities. It is akin to Wilde’s (2013, 44) theory that differences are integral to forming multicultural societies shaped by globalizing forces. Transcultural solidarities are built on personal and collective sensibilities, extend beyond local lives and communities, and encompass the uncertainty inherent in digital connections and online communities. Zuber, a 21-year-old climate activist from Delhi, explained,

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When I talk to people from different countries online about climate justice, I never assume we are the same, even when I know we have a shared interest. It is foolish to think that people from different cultures, religions, genders, and societies will work together without friction just because they all believe in one cause. Social media is great because it brings all of us together from across borders. We all have faults, and no one is an ideal activist. With social media, we can create a collective that has the power to overcome individual weaknesses and promote a united narrative. I know it looks like a fabrication, but we need a single and robust narrative to mount pressure on global leaders worldwide.

Zuber’s experiences highlight the latent potential of digital networks to mobilize support for causes through decentralized and open communication. Digital networks bring together dissonant experiences such as local realities and global issues, private conversations and policy debates, and reinforce the role of individuals in sustaining civic actions in a digital world (Fenton 2008, 230–48). We build on this observation to explore how these online interactions and communities, inhabited by people with different identities and aspirations, make space for the local to surface as a strong propeller of transnational social movements and civic issues. Pousadela (2020), senior research specialist at CIVICUS and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report 2020, has narrated stories from Ghana, Sudan, and Colombia. Her research endorses our findings from India showing how youth in different locations are driven by “inspiration rather than imitation” to organize “their own local climate actions, feeding into the global climate movement.” At the same time, they use the global platform and digital networks to “draw attention to and infuse new energy into—long-standing, under-acknowledged Indigenous movements defending land, water, and air against extractive industries and agribusinesses.” Online networks gained importance when street action had to be suspended because of the pandemic. The youth activists that Pousadela interviewed acknowledge how their local work acquires a greater potential for change when supported by the right tools, capacity, and resources from their global networks, though all of them stress the importance of being sensitive to the local priorities, political climate, and risks in designing their paths for action. Terren and Marti (2021) also point out that several major movements in the last decade are influenced by the concurrent processes of economic globalization and technological change and have a deep generational dimension. They examine the local Barcelona-based youth activist organization affiliated with the global Youth Climate Movement organization, Fridays for Future, to observe how the activism led mainly by the school and college students is anchored in local struggles and realities, and privilege their local and national contexts even while remaining part of the larger global network.

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In 2017, we conducted in-depth interviewers with twenty young bloggers from seven countries in the global South: Guatemala, Cuba, Guyana, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, and Lebanon (Pathak-Shelat and Bhatia 2018). According to this study, young bloggers narrate their local experiences in ways that people from other countries can identify with the human-interest issues at the heart of the local communities. Global digital spaces welcome local narratives when they are relatable to people from different countries. We argued that the association between local and global realities helped young bloggers understand the worldviews of people from different nations. Such an approach to online interactions encourages collaboration among young people from different cultural backgrounds and in various countries. In that sense, transcultural solidarities emerge when young people reflexively harness the potential of social media to mobilize support for a shared cause across differences. At the heart of such an approach is situated knowledge (Haraway 2020; Harding 1991); that is, young people appreciate that their local lives, communities, and relationships influence the interpretive frames they adopt to articulate their engagement with issues. Bringing their local identities and lived realities to bear on their participation in online communities and toward global causes does not subtract from initiating change. For example, Yashna defined her activism to support the global community of climate activists as deeply rooted in her local community and her experiences volunteering at a climate justice not-for-profit organization in Bangalore. Yashna attributed her passion for climate justice to her work with tribal climate activists and groups in her home state of Jharkhand in India. Before moving to Bangalore, she had worked with different tribal communities and international organizations to understand the significance of indigenous foods and lifestyles for environmental sustainability and conservation. Yashna explained how her local experiences, community relationships, and identities informed her climate activism, When I examined the Adivasi food systems in these tribal communities, I realized that these discussions on diversifying our food cultures to make them more sustainable have been an integral part of my global online conversations with climate activists from other countries. We have members in climate justice groups from the U.S. who have discussed the need to prioritize local foods for sustainability. I have also interacted with young activists from Europe who have chosen a vegan lifestyle because it is environmentally friendly. Veganism is new to the world, but so many communities in India have adopted a vegetarian lifestyle due to religious, ethical, and environmental purposes.

A recurring sentiment in our conversations with Yashna and other activists was that digital media and networks were critical in creating a transcultural

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movement centered on local values and experiences. The young climate activists argued that the concept of global as an essential identity or experience was archaic. They identified with the term global for strategic purposes– that is, to create solidarity worldwide and build international pressure on the governments of countries. The term global is used in their virtual communities and digital networks to think beyond the international tension or memory of historical conflicts between countries such as India and Pakistan, Australia and China, or Japan and South Korea. Global is a category that serves as a signpost for strategic essentialism; that is, young people use it to ignore the existing geopolitical tensions between different nations, cultures, and communities. As a result, the climate activists in the online groups and social media communities we observed did not identify as global citizens with weak ties to their nation-states and local cultures and identities. Instead, they identified with their local experiences and personal motivations to advocate for climate justice and equity as a global issue influencing humanity. They experienced and enacted transcultural solidarity to forge global connections and support transcultural and international causes around the world. In the following section, we explore how young people articulated their local experiences, social identities, and transcultural connections as they mobilized for different humanitarian causes online and on the streets in their cities and neighborhoods. LOCALIZING GLOBAL MOVEMENTS We met Pushpa in October 2020 at Jantar Mantar—a famous public site in Delhi that the civil society frequently uses to stage protests, including candlelight vigils, dharnas, and peaceful demonstrations. She had arrived at the site to protest the Hathras atrocity where four savarna caste men had brutally raped a 19-year-old woman in Uttar Pradesh. Protests were organized to challenge the lack of police oversight and accountability in handling the case: The police had not made any arrests for the first ten days after the victim’s family reported the crime and had forcibly cremated the victim’s body without the family’s consent. Pushpa and many other young Gen Zers we met at Jantar Mantar were present on the site with phones in their hands. They recorded their participation: creating online archives of discussions on atrocities against Dalits and Bahujans in India, documenting their presence on the protest sites to build momentum, and deploying their social media networks to draw attention to the systemic discrimination and violence perpetuated through the caste system in India. The participants at Jantar Mantar used #dalitlivesmatter in their social media posts documenting their protest. When we probed why Pushpa and her

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other friends were using #dalitlivesmatter, they explained that the civil society in India promoting Dalit rights and well-being had modified the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to represent a local system of discrimination that was as grave and violent as racism in the United States and other countries. The participants explained why modifying a powerful hashtag to build momentum toward local causes, such as caste-based discrimination, is effective in a networked society. Drawing on their understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement on social media, the Gen Z activists argued that using a similar hashtag helps people from different countries and beyond the Indian context identify that race and caste are two socially compelled identities that enable an artificial hierarchy in societies. While more people understand that race is a violent system, caste predates race and has created society-wide infrastructures determining people’s standing—that is, how much respect, how many opportunities, and resources they deserve and can access. Gen Z activists and protestors strengthened the #dalitlivesmatter because they wanted to draw the attention of social justice and human rights advocates to the inimical presence and practice of the caste system and the everyday violence and discrimination that Dalits face in India. Drawing global support for their movement was critical in holding the government accountable and compelling political leaders to take action against the institutional and individual perpetrators of caste-based violence. Pushpa explained that a digitally connected world demands that governments from different countries collaborate and work together for social, economic, and other benefits. The government can ignore our protests, even suppress them, if the protests are territorially contained. Modifying the #blacklivesmatter to discuss local and national issues helped us communicate the similarities between caste and race-based discrimination. This made it possible for more people and countries to empathize with the conditions of Dalits in India and support our cause. Also, we want other countries to support this movement, including multinational companies with trade relations with India that can influence the government. In that case, we must create a narrative that people from different cultures and backgrounds can understand. (Pushpa, 2020)

The #dalitlivesmatter movement and the attendant offline protests are great examples of Gen Z localizing global movements using the capacity of digital media to “speed up and increase the circulation of the struggle” (Fenton 2008) beyond national territorial boundaries and citizenry. Black Lives Matter (BLM) was hybridized in different ways to give voice to local struggles for social justice in Brazil, India, and Japan. BLM’s hybridization stirred right-wing backlash within these countries that targeted not only local movements but BLM as well (Shahin, Nakahara, and Sánchez 2021). Brazil

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also has seen political movements in the last few years, such as the libertarian Movimento Brasil Livre, known as the Brazilian version of America’s tea party. We also know about the leftist Bancada Ativista in Brazil, whose focus on social justice mirrors that of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In these cases, Gen Z activists have taken cues from their counterparts in other countries. They have made social media their primary tool for mobilizing local protests and garnering global attention (Brazil Institute 2018). The #dalitlivesmatter movement operated at the intersection of “the street and media” (Butler 2015). It allowed the movement’s leaders and participants to harness the power of global digital communities and networks. A remarkable characteristic of such movements is that protestors and civil society can mobilize support from transnational and global contexts if the issues of the minority community are suppressed by the majority in a national context. Dalits are a minority community, and their grievances often go unaddressed. A case in point: Though caste-based discrimination was officially banned in India in 1955, Dalits and Bahujans continue to experience violence, prejudice, biases, and untouchability due to their caste identities. In this context, the Gen Z protestors and activists discussed the importance of building and harnessing transnational and global networks online to create momentum around issues concerning marginalized communities that lacked support from the majority public. The Me Too movement is another example where a marginalized and small community of sexual abuse survivors rallied against the dominant patriarchal system to create a sense of urgency. Tarana Burke initiated this movement in 2006 to empower young and vulnerable women of color and create a space to share their trauma, build solidarity, and receive support. In India, the Me Too movement gained momentum in 2018. Many women, including actors and film directors, advertising agents, artists, writers, politicians, and other women professionals, shared their stories of sexual abuse and harassment. Seira, a 25-year-old creative executive from Delhi, used social media to share her story of sexual harassment and initiated a women’s rights group at her workplace. She explained how she had to use different strategies to localize discussions related to the Me Too movement so that people in her workplace could understand and empathize with her cause. “India has a different culture; single girls and women experience extreme social derision when discussing sexual harassment. Things are changing, yes, but we cannot be blind to the dominant norms in our society,” she explained. She was careful not to bash Indian society or culture in her efforts to create awareness about sexual harassment. She believed that many people on social media were extremely sensitive to the critique of Indian culture and society. She also recognized that all cultures demonstrate some form of gender discrimination and misogyny, and that this was not a uniquely “Indian” issue. In

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fact, there have always been powerful voices in support of Indian women’s movements. If her online content used a language of blame, it would draw the attention of many skeptical people who would be quick to label her activism as “pseudo-feminism.” For her, it was important to convince social media users and her colleagues that she was authentic and empathetic, and that she respected their values and cultural practices. Though her personal beliefs and conversations with friends and family centered on a critique of patriarchy and misogyny, she also appreciated that some of her women colleagues reinforced dominant gender norms because they did not see the need to change those norms or did not have the emotional, financial, or physical capacities to incur the sanctions and punishments that would be imposed on them for defiance. In our conversations with some of Seira’s colleagues, we discussed how they had localized the Me Too movement to create an empowering space for sexual abuse and harassment survivors online. Tanisha, a 21-year-old UX designer from Delhi, described that she had created two different social media accounts. Her personal account was not anonymous because she never used it to post anything political. On the other hand, she managed a second account for her online activism. It was designed to encourage her colleagues to identify ways to create safe workplaces for gender minorities in her company. The conversations on the latter account included comments and reactions from anonymous users. The strategic use of anonymity in spaces and conversations revealed that Gen Z women and other gender minorities did not always feel safe voicing their opinions. The most imminent threat to online activism was offline attacks and insults. In the case of Seira, for instance, some of her trolls had shared her phone number and residential address on Twitter and Instagram. They threatened her with physical harm if she did not reconsider her language about patriarchal cultures in the country. Conversely, Tanisha remained anonymous because she did not want her community and family members to think she was a revolutionary or a trailblazer. She repeatedly emphasized that she valued her culture and social norms and had relied on her community’s support several times. Explaining how she thought about her online activism, she said, I support women’s rights and advocate for their safety, but I am also practical. I do not expect everything to change overnight, and I also know that some people use different movements to build their personal brands as woke individuals. I am a community-oriented person, and I enjoy many rituals that are now labeled as patriarchal such as Karwachauth. Issues such as women’s rights are not a true or false equation. And, I do not want to rely on a foreign understanding of women’s empowerment.

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Tanisha advocated for a culturally sensitive approach to localize the Me Too movement. Bringing about changes and, more importantly, sustaining those changes require public support. She used her digital networks and social media profiles to define women’s empowerment and safety as a culturally grounded methodology that effectively drew upon community resources. Involving the community also meant obeying some dominant gender norms, rituals, and practices while actively introducing ideas for progress. Tanisha was convinced that using partisan, extreme, or rigid language on her social media to initiate discussions on the Me Too movement would antagonize people instead of encouraging them to join it. Her activism was based on the principle of supporting everyone, especially women, to have choices and be able to make their own decisions. Her goal was to support both women who wanted to “burn bras as a form of rebellion and those who choose to be stay-at-home mothers because they want to prioritize their families,” she said. The affordances of social media platforms had made it more urgent for Tanisha, Seira, and others to explore non-partisan approaches to building momentum for a cause and mobilizing masses to support their efforts to advocate for sexual harassment survivors. They realized that their online activism through social media had the potential to reach different audiences and collapse multiple boundaries, such as personal/professional or personal/ political. The co-presence of multiple audiences, different information, dynamic norms, and evolving relationships may influence users’ behaviors and practices online (Kini, Pathak-Shelat, and Jain 2022; Costa 2018; Pagh 2020; Szabla and Blommaert 2020). Gen Z activists, protestors, and civic actors acknowledged the difficulty of context collapse as the concerns around engaging in digital activism increased. They had to use negotiation strategies to avoid backlash, increase audience engagement, secure spaces and conversations, and produce culturally sensitive content. Localizing global movements to embed them in their cultural realities required a strategic balance between complying with the norms and challenging them, drawing on the support of the local community members and generating global awareness toward their causes, and holding the government accountable while appreciating community resources critical to building solidarity toward victims and survivors of sexual abuse and harassment. Their aspiration to use local and community resources to localize and ground global online movements also reflected a sense of discomfort with the dominance of West-imposed models of freedom, empowerment, and emancipation. Mihir, a 24-year-old YouTuber and social activist from Bangalore, worked with women who were survivors of domestic abuse in the low-income neighborhoods of Munnekollal. He had harnessed the momentum built around the Me Too movement to represent poor women who were illiterate or had limited access to digital technologies. He explained that

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documenting their struggles and experiences online did not aid those women survivors directly. He narrated their stories of abuse and survival as impact stories archiving the work and efforts of the not-for-profit organization he worked at and to seek more funding from sponsors and government agencies. In this case, digital media did not directly help the poor women survivors seek solidarity or support. Instead, narrated anonymously, their stories were instrumental in funding the infrastructures required to sustain the movement against domestic violence and abuse in low-income neighborhoods. In an interview, he explained why he had to anonymize these women and why none of them filed a legal case against their perpetrators, It is difficult for these women to abandon their communities, relationships, and families. Filing cases and reporting injustice or violence means going after their families and husbands. Sometimes, everyday violence is so common that they do not even mention it unless it is life-threatening. So, compelling them to challenge the male authority figures in their lives is not constructive. To build awareness against domestic violence, we try to rope in the entire family—husbands, in-laws, and other older members in their communities.

When Gen Z activists and social workers were representing members of vulnerable groups and mobilizing funds and support for their community development projects, they relied on digital media to tap into their transnational networks of funders and sponsors who could align with their organization’s mission and goals. Digital media networking and transcultural solidarity help local activists connect with transnational funding organizations and sponsors to acquire the funds for sustaining global movements at the local level. We met Vinita at a youth-led women’s rights organization in Bangalore. She was Mihir’s colleague and worked on fund-raising projects for organizations. She argued that local impact videos, archiving lived realities of poor and underrepresented women who had faced sexual abuse and harassment, were very effective in building digital networks for fund-raising. Global movements circulated through digital networks also pull in a lot of international and transnational funding/development agencies that offer financial support and other resources to grassroots organizations. As digital media is one of the primary channels the funding agency uses for oversight, such collaborations offer the local organizations an expansive scope to design resources and experiences suited to the local cultures and family norms of the women they want to help and empower. For example, Vinita had collected multiple online resources on counseling sexual abuse survivors, redesigned these resources to include culturally relevant elements, and translated them into regional languages. She had also trained a group of young social workers to reach out to women in their communities and initiate a more holistic

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change at the grassroots level. She emphasized that although the Me Too movement was a pivotal moment for many survivors of sexual abuse, the language and participation in digital media were sensitive to the realities of women in Western countries and the global North. In many countries of the global North, issues related to sex and intimacy are not taboo subjects. Also, online conversations on Me Too assumed that survivors were individuals who recognized that they were oppressed or violated. “The entire fabric of social media is built on the assumption that people want to confess, broadcast, or archive their trauma. There is an unspoken expectation that the vulnerable individual is motivated to seek justice at all costs. That is not the case for so many women who are also Me Too stories but do not wish to be remembered as such,” Vinita said. The form of allyship that the Gen Z activists and protestors proposed and practiced constituted enacting a strategic maneuver to identify the local needs and sensibilities of the contexts they inhabited, and adapt resources associated with global online movements to align with the local expectations. Localizing global movements was an act of quotidian resilience because Gen Z simultaneously reinforced and challenged the authority of gender, caste, religion, and class norms dominant in their cultures and communities. According to them, practicing a form of allyship relevant to the lived lives of those more intimately influenced by the systems of discrimination or inequities required appreciating the distinct needs of local communities. It also involved actively fostering transcultural relationships and networks to acquire resources, skills, training, media attention, and support. Transcultural practices of resilience challenged efforts that sought a quick assimilation of local identities and struggles into global movements. Instead, transcultural practices of resilience recognized the distinctiveness of local communities, unique norms and rituals in indigenous cultures, and the continuous/mutual reliance of local activism on global movements, digital networks and platforms, international media coverage, and transnational solidarities. As Gen Z localized global causes, they actively promoted and built transcultural movements, connecting activists, educators, and civil society across national boundaries. They strategically promoted and sustained global movements. GLOBALIZING LOCAL MOVEMENTS In 2018, Yash participated in an online campaign called #LahukaLagaan (blood tax) to challenge and criticize the 12 percent tax on feminine hygiene products. He created content for his social media, networked with feminists from different countries, and created awareness about the issue of menstrual equity. His goal was to document the work of a local, grassroots women’s

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organization that provided free sanitary napkins to girls and women in suburban and rural areas surrounding Delhi. While they were creating impact stories highlighting the significance of giving women and girls equal access to hygiene products and reproductive health care, SheSays, a local organization in Mumbai, started the campaign #LahukaLagaan. The goal of this online campaign was to enable women to have the resources to manage their period with dignity. Yash and his organization’s team members decided to use the #LahukaLagaan to document their impact stories on social media for various reasons. Varsha worked in the same organization as Yash. She explained that using a trending hashtag to globalize their vision and work was critical in fostering a truly expansive network of supporters and a transcultural community of resource persons. Resource persons were researchers, scholars, civil society workers, and funding organizations in other countries who wanted to connect with local organizations for development work. Cultivating such networks helped Varsha identify collaboration opportunities that could carve out a position for their organization within global digital spaces for activism and advocacy on women’s issues. Varsha explained, Many organizations are working locally to resolve menstrual health and hygiene issues, such as accessibility, affordability, and the associated sociocultural norms. Other countries have just started acknowledging this problem. Researchers, writers, filmmakers, and others want to appreciate the gravity of the situation in South Asia, African countries, and other economically disadvantaged sites in the global South. If we want this movement to be truly global, we must act as anchors between our local communities and the world.

Varsha believed that bringing awareness to an issue that had persisted for ages required expanding the group of supporters and resources accessible to the civil society working toward the cause. She had witnessed that using a trending hashtag such as #LahukaLagaan was instrumental for small, self-sustaining civil society organizations to become a part of a more resource-secure and supportive global community. Yash and Varsha had planned to share six impact stories documenting their organization’s journey of identifying women who experienced menstrual inequities and providing them access to services, products, and care. As they connected with other global organizations such as the UN Information Center for India and Bhutan, Global Citizen, and UNICEF India, they were able to represent their organization as a local hub for activism, action, and policy. Their organization served as a bridge between international organizations and government leaders, policymakers, and state actors. It then started supporting local groups and communities in other countries to replicate their organizational model, start local chapters to promote the cause of their parent organization in Delhi, and

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submit research proposals and development requests to prestigious institutions in different countries. For Sundari, a 25-year-old activist-cum-researcher working with a local, women-run pad manufacturing company in Bangalore, the locally grown social media movement demanding the government scrap the tax on menstrual hygiene products was instrumental in supplanting the global discourse on “period tax” or “pink tax” across countries and contexts. Using hashtags to globalize a local movement reveals the rich tapestry of connections and interdependence of women’s issues and gender inequities in societies worldwide. Digital media does not merely project a local movement into a global network for greater media coverage; it also situates the local movement in relation to how similar issues manifest themselves in different contexts. Varija, a 23-year-old social worker from Bangalore, for example, argued that the #LahukaLagaan online movement was an impetus for women’s rights activists in the United States, Germany, England, South Africa, and other countries to rethink the consequences of a “pink tax” and “tax on period” for women, mainly from under/less privileged backgrounds and communities. Along with collaborations and fund-raising efforts, Varija also participated in online symposiums where local organizations in India guided civil society actors in other countries to set up similar initiatives, campaigns, and chapters in their cities and countries. International media coverage of activism challenging the “tax on period” diligently mentioned the role of local organizations in countries of the global South in building global awareness, dialogue, and engagement with the issues of menstrual inequities and gendered discrimination against women and gender minorities. Transcultural resilience emerges in the types of collaborations the local organizations forged while promoting their vision and mission at a global level. Varija described such collaborations as strategic alliances. With a distinct distrust and sadness in her voice, she said, We [Indian women and girls] have been on this table for a long time; we have much say on menstrual inequity. Even today, 40 percent of women in India do not have access to menstrual products during their period. Additionally, the government levied a 12 percent GST [goods and services tax] on feminine hygiene products. We have found ways, indigenous methods, to persuade and enable women to access sanitary napkins. We do not publish their methods online because many compromises are involved, and the global woke community will identify faults even in our honest efforts to help them.

Varija described these indigenous methods as tactics they used to prioritize cultural and gender norms in the communities while designing their awareness campaigns. She worked with women in suburban and rural communities

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near Bangalore. Many women belonged to families that considered menstruation a delicate subject, so the women were uncomfortable participating in public conversations about menstrual hygiene. When visiting them for campaigns and product distribution, Varija followed all the religious and gendered protocols around menstruation, such as talking to women when the men were not around, staying at a distance from menstruating women to respect the family’s hygiene-related codes and norms, and using digital videos created in the local language to show them the benefits of using menstrual products. When she communicated her work to liberal funding organizations and on social media to promote her organization, she carefully created content that would resonate with a global community of activists, scholars, and feminists in modern, educated, and higher-income contexts. Some of the partners her organization worked with were global organizations and had local chapters in each country. Most of these chapters were run by leaders and managers who did not perform grassroots-level work and designed a digital communications plan primarily representing the aspirations and expectations of the West-centered global community. Grassroots workers who bridge the gap between the local community’s needs and the globally centered funding organizations started developing strategies to alter the digital media discourse about social movements. They understood the need to develop a shared language of care to connect the global movement activists with the local communities and build on the potential of international support, funding, and coverage. Simultaneously, they started nurturing interpersonal relationships with movement workers in neighboring countries, especially in South Asia, because they realized they had similar cultures—religious, gender, and class norms and realities. Sundari, for example, was actively engaging with activists and workers in Pakistan and Sri Lanka to strengthen the online networks of organizations supporting women’s rights in South Asian contexts. She explained, Because of the similarity in our cultures and shared history, it is easy for us to understand the different gender realities unique to communities in South Asia. Our digital media communication privileges in-group knowledge and practices. For example, we worked to identify and document why women in rural communities and conservative families were not using menstrual products when they were free and easily accessible. The reason is that they are afraid that using manufactured goods may make them infertile. We archive these insights through digital media and encourage other local organizations in Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan to dive deep and understand the culture before offering solutions.

The activists, social workers, and movement leaders we interviewed relied on digital media networks and platforms to redefine transcultural resilience

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as resisting the charm of conversations, people, and institutions in the West and investing their time and resources in discovering and communicating the potential of forging ties and relationships across countries in the global South. They realized that the canonical understandings of development and social movements authorized by the West were far removed from the realities in the global South. They also collaborated with international organizations to raise funds, access technological and knowledge resources, and build competencies. They strived to strike a balance by forging transnational networks with organizations and people in Africa and South Asia. Doing so allowed them to find support and challenge the canonical group of West-centered development institutions and produce methods, media, and archives for pursuing sustainable change in their local contexts. Digital media is powerful and can still exclude. The goal is to thoroughly understand this very complex nature of digital media and use the knowledge to create positive pathways for collaboration and inclusive representations. I have used social media, especially Twitter, to reach out to young activists in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Indonesia. Conversing with them about shared interests and passion has been instrumental in overcoming so many preconceived notions I had. (Varsha, 2018)

Varsha also explained how nurturing interpersonal relationships and unlearning biases or prejudices was vital to sustaining online support groups that aid grassroots workers in practicing shielded forms of activism. Unlike old and strong democracies, such as the United States, young activists in many other countries in the global South are highly vulnerable in the face of anti-democratic and violent state institutions and policies. For example, Iranian authorities arrested and detained tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the country’s morality police. These protestors are demanding women’s rights to govern their bodies. They have no recourse to fair trials or justice, so they have used social media to rally for their rights. The protestors hope that narrating local stories of discrimination and violence on social media will rouse people worldwide to mobilize for their cause and hold the Iranian government accountable for its violation of human rights. These stories from Iran have received support in various countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The global support and solidarity for the Iranian people’s protests against the moral policy and in support of women’s rights have manifested in online and offline spaces abroad. In Sudan—a democracy in transition—many pro-democracy movement activists have been arrested, killed, and tortured for their protests and online activism (Bhatia et al. 2023). Our conversations with Gen Z activists in

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Sudan reveal that they depend on transcultural collaborations with activists in the global South to focus on identifying shielded forms of engagement. One such project involved technology experts and activists from Sudan and India to identify ways to overcome state-sponsored internet shutdowns during protests or civil unrest. Both countries experience internet shutdowns, unlike contexts in the global North. During this project, activists from the two countries organized a knowledge-sharing conference. They shared the tactical and technological resources they developed to enable internet access during state-sponsored shutdowns and ensure that the movement could be broadcast on global platforms and gain support from the international community. For Gen Z activists in Sudan, globalizing a local movement meant drawing the international community’s attention toward a local issue that reinforced and sustained a set of values that the global community upheld and protected. Though the pro-democracy movement challenging the military rule in Sudan did not directly impact people in other countries, it promoted the ideology of democracy—a people-led government, and critical values such as equitable governance through fair representation, accountability mechanisms, and transparent institutions. For these activists, globalizing the local pro-democracy movement in Sudan included tapping into digital networks to access communities and resources sustaining democratic governments in countries such as the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, India, and other strong democracies. During the June 3 massacre of 2019, the military in Sudan shut down the internet to prevent the activists from documenting the military’s human rights violations, especially the killing of 126 civilians and protestors in Khartoum. The activists relied on their interpersonal relationships and collaborations with activists in neighboring countries, such as Egypt and Libya, to publish user-generated videos of the massacre through social media platforms, primarily Facebook and Twitter. The activists would send the documented videos to their partners in these countries, either physically by crossing the border or using technological turnarounds (applications developed to allow sharing of data without the internet). Their collaborators would upload these videos on social media. The Sudanese activists depended on their transcultural partners and digital networks to start an online movement, #blueforsudan, to compel other nation-states to intervene and hold the military accountable for the atrocities against civilians. Gen Z activists and civil society leaders in Khartoum, Sudan, relied on their international connections and transcultural friendships with young leaders beyond Sudan to broadcast the urgency of their pro-democracy movement on a global stage. Globalizing a local movement meant that the Gen Z activists were striving to build solidarity around their cause even when the pro-democracy movement only impacted those in Sudan. Their local movement was a humanitarian crisis. The movement was built on the shared ethos

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of equity, fairness, and the right to justice for everyone in the world. Also, it was a movement that encouraged individuals to use accessible methods for communicating and archiving the struggles of Sudanese people under military rule. The #blueforsudan campaign was designed to populate the Twitter space with discussions of Sudan, especially human rights violations by the military. The goal was to trend #blueforsudan on Twitter and draw the attention of global leaders, media, and international human rights organizations to hold the military accountable and enable the transfer of power to a civilian-led government. Our conversations with the Sudanese activists and civil society leaders reveal how and why they build transcultural solidarity for their pro-democracy movement. First, constant state-sponsored internet shutdowns and the dominance of state-controlled media made it difficult for people in Khartoum to raise awareness or create evidence against military control in their country (Bhatia et al. 2023). To overcome this barrier in communicating their struggles, the Sudanese activists created and participated in online communities to befriend people outside Sudan who were willing to lend their voice in times of information blackouts (Bhatia et al. 2023). Gen Z activists in Khartoum initiated regular discussions in these online communities on the state of affairs in their country. Gildun, a 24-year-old activist from Khartoum, said, If you are my friend and talk to me regularly, you will be more sympathetic to what is happening in my life. I have an account on Omegle, and I talk to so many different people worldwide. Smartphones have made it easy for us to cultivate meaningful conversations and relationships and develop solidarity even when we are from different cultures and have different life experiences.

Gildun did not use social media to participate in political discussions or voice his dissent. Even when he participated in street protests, he covered his face to hide his identity. Instead of engaging in overt political participation, Gildun used implicit and hidden ways to resist military rule in his country. He used Omegle, a free online chat website that can be used to socialize with strangers in different countries, to discuss the political crisis in Sudan. Regular online conversations allowed him to cultivate transcultural friendships with young human rights advocates in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Kenya, South Africa, and India. He believed that interpersonal relationships are at the core of any social movement. People must rely on their personal and intimate relationships with others to build or continue a protest at a large scale and against powerful institutions such as the military. It is easy for people to identify with our cause if they are emotionally invested in the Sudanese people. The more we put ourselves out there, the more outpouring of support and solidarity we can expect. (Gildun 2020)

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Gildun and his friends used hidden and subtle methods to protest the military rule, conceal their identities, and avoid identification and disciplinary action. Many scholars, such as Asef Bayat (1997), Michel de Certeau (1984), and Judith Butler (1995), have argued that protests, resistance, and counter-movements might be hidden, covert, and motivated by personal desires. Using social media and digital networks to develop one-on-one relationships was a strategy in transcultural quotidian resilience because it helped young protestors in Sudan register their dissent through encrypted communication channels. The primary consideration of these young activists was personal safety. Challenging the regime explicitly on the streets or on social media would draw the attention of the police and military. They could be identified, arrested, and disciplined. Therefore, the young activists in Khartoum decided to build hidden solidarities and enact transcultural quotidian resilience. They collaborated with human rights advocates in different countries and made friends who would sustain and support the pro-democracy movement from afar. Generating global support through transcultural friendships was crucial to the pro-democracy movement because the military used disciplinary techniques (internet shutdowns) to prevent the broadcast of their human rights violations on a global level. Ashraf, a 21-year-old software engineer from Khartoum, was Gildun’s best friend and used the same hidden strategies to voice his dissent. Along with befriending strangers on the internet, he also had spent years studying abroad in Kenya, South Africa, and the United Kingdom and had a strong network of friends in different countries. He vouched that his friends actively participated in the #blueforsudan online movement, especially when people from Sudan could not access Twitter and other social media platforms. During internet shutdowns, Ashraf sometimes traveled to places closer to the border to access the internet and share video evidence of the military’s human rights violations with his friends in other countries. He sent those videos and photos to his transcultural friends, who posted the content online. Ashraf did not use his social media to post anti-establishment content, but he continuously shared this content with other young people who were not vulnerable to state control. Relying on global interpersonal relationships to voice marginalized issues and protest oppression is a significant strategy in political contexts where the protestors experience constant threat and violence, have limited resources, and have a minimal stake in governance and politics. Hidden solidarities materialize in digital spaces and are carved out from transcultural resilience and friendships. Here we want to place the transcultural resilience of Sudanese Gen Z protestors, activists, and civil society actors in conversation with Bayat’s theory of resistance of the urban poor (1997, 2000). According to Bayat, the disenfranchised groups first resist power hierarchies and

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discrimination individually and quietly. Their activism straddles between the hidden acts of resistance and collective and organized forms of protest, and stems from the desire to create a dignified life. Gen Z in Sudan and other marginalized contexts practice transcultural resilience and a combination of everyday activism that is often hidden and subtle. Through their quotidian activism, they develop interpersonal relationships and transcultural networks of solidarity. These transcultural networks remain passive for a long time when the Gen Z activists are in the incubation phase—that is, creating online communities through dispersed digital connections and individual efforts. Young activists and civil society actors activate these passive networks in times of crisis when the power of the elite is all-consuming and requires organized and collective action to counter the threat. While in the incubation phase, Gen Z activists ideate new strategies to practice transcultural resilience, often motivated by concerns for personal safety and an awareness of the existing political conditions. These transcultural strategies of resilience are dynamic and continuously evolve based on the aspirations and power positions of the activists. Some of their strategies defy the existing status quo in their local communities and contexts, and other strategies reinforce, amplify, and support the dominant norms in their society. Transcultural resilience manifests as the strategic negotiation between reiteration/repetition and subversion/ resistance. To elaborate on this simultaneity, we build on Foucault’s understanding of power as productive instead of coercive (Foucault 1978). Power is produced when individuals conduct themselves in normative ways. When they reinforce the existing power hierarchies by repeating the norms, they also highlight the possibility for change (Bhatia and Pathak-Shelat 2019). Moreover, every time they conduct themselves differently or with a slight variation to the dominant norms, they deal with the potential to imagine change into practice (Butler 1995). Transcultural resilience, therefore, exists in the space of simultaneity. Gen Z activists use it both in a norm-conforming way and as a strategy to achieve some level of change and autonomy through subversive practices. NEGOTIATING DYNAMIC CONTEXT To understand the dynamism of transcultural resilience among Gen Z, we will discuss the negotiation strategies that Gen Z activists and civil society actors in Sudan used to communicate with the global community about military atrocities. The first strategy to practice transcultural resilience is consistent network building. Activists and civil society actors regularly communicated with their global connections—online friends and sympathizers—to sustain meaningful

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relationships. They believed nurturing meaningful relationships that transcend political aspirations was crucial for building momentum during a political crisis. Munim, a 25-year-old pro-democracy movement participant, spent time with his online friends discussing several personal issues, such as mental health, family, school/university work, and other everyday encounters, to create a strong bond. The more he invested in developing a one-to-one personal connection with others, the more they supported his politics and activism. The second strategy is practicing dispersed activism. Alaa, a 21-year-old woman activist in Khartoum, worked hard to create an online network and community of friends to globalize the local pro-democracy issue. She knew that her activism was dispersed and fragmented. She anonymously published vlogs documenting military atrocities against the protestors. Alaa shared these vlogs with social media influencers and international social media celebrities in the hopes that someone would share them, generate awareness, and create urgency. She covered her face and head on the streets and at protest sites to avoid identification. Alaa explained that the military in Sudan had not yet developed sophisticated surveillance technologies that would enable them to trace her to the anonymous videos posted on Twitter and Facebook. She was also aware that the security forces primarily used manual surveillance techniques. As a result, she paid more attention to concealing her identity, affiliations, and political interests in offline spaces. She supported the pro-democracy movement and was acutely aware of the cost of participation and resistance. Every time she stepped onto the street, she had to evaluate her risks, including arrests, corporeal violence, sexual molestation, and mental and emotional trauma. She explained, If you are a woman, rape threats, sexual molestation, and harassment is the most commonly used technique to suppress you. In our society, sexual intercourse or activity outside marriage brings shame to the family. Using rape threats was effective in deterring women from participating. It also prevents men from bringing the women in their families and friend groups to the protest site.

Alaa, Munim, and others were passive onlookers on social media accounts, groups, and communities to avoid being traced or identified. They frequented the communities and networks to obtain information about protest venues, precautionary measures, and the current status at the sites. They relied on their offline friends and communal relationships in their localities—people they trusted—to visit protest sites as a group. They simultaneously enacted individualistic and collective forms of dissent, treading the boundaries between subtle and overt activism. They used dispersed activism to chart unreliable, dynamic, inconsistent modes and sites for staging protests. Doing so made it difficult for security forces to obtain evidence or leads about the

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protestors and civil society actors. Given the level of vulnerability Gen Z activists experienced in Khartoum, they avoided publicity and overt and subversive forms of activism. Strategic essentialism (Spivak 2012) is the third most commonly used strategy among Gen Z activists to generate fleeting solidarities with potential long-term change. Many activists in Khartoum mobilized and came together to support the Sudanese coup d’état of 2019, and reassembled intermittently to support the pro-democracy movement. These activists belonged to groups with different values, practices, and objectives. Some of these groups were driven by religion and a conservative ideology. In contrast, other groups promoted far-ranging progressive programs and goals such as empowering women, providing educational opportunities, offering financial advice and support, and advocating for the LGBTQ community. Fleeting solidarities emerge when there is a major political crisis in our societies and the majority of the population is under the weight of an impending apocalypse. Take, for example, the Arab Spring uprisings against economic and political crises across the Arab world. Fleeting solidarities are also temporary because an acute crisis often leads to the drastic, incomplete subversion of existing power hierarchies and governance structures. The crisis is severe when it negatively impacts the everyday lives of most people in a society and forces them to fight for their survival. As the fight for survival overshadowed other political values and aspirations in Sudan, different groups coalesced around a shared goal and built bridges to enable cooperation and power through large numbers. Such fleeting solidarities may deeply rupture the political structures and set the stage for new forms of governance to rise; the very existence of these solidarities is liminal. Moreover, though the temporary nature of such solidarities makes some types of sociopolitical changes possible, they also alert the activists to the dangers of collaborating with groups who are anti- their identities, political values, and goals. Alaa, for example, identifies as a queer person and is a huge advocate for the LGBTQ community. During the pro-democracy movement, however, she intentionally concealed her queer identity and politics to continue her protest work with religiously conservative groups with a large follower base. These religious groups considered the queer and LGBTQ community haram and proposed stricter laws and policies to criminalize homosexuality. Alaa concealed her political ideals and sought the support of the volunteers working in these religious groups to obtain protest-related information, increase protest participation on the streets, and expand the distribution of the pro-democracy message. Some religious groups received funding and support from institutions in other conservative nations such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. These funding institutions pushed for a civilian-led government driven by Islamic doctrines

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and beliefs. Accordingly, the religious groups that received funding from institutions abroad, especially the Gulf countries, were also influenced by a conservative agenda that criminalized and punished Gen Z activists like Alaa. Explaining her dilemma, Alaa said, Should I first fight for democracy (i.e., the right to vote), or my right to be queer? My identity will not matter if we do not have a free country. Collaborating with such conservative organizations increases my risk levels. It is more probable that they will realize I am queer if I am closely working with them. And once this pro-democracy movement ends, they will seek a new target to establish their relevance in Khartoum.

Participating in these fleeting solidarities is a ripe site for practicing transcultural resilience. Still, it also constitutes greater risks to self, particularly concerning issues that may increase the possibility of social alienation, discrimination, and violence against the marginalized (Jaeggi 2001; Rai 2018). Alaa continued to ignore and overlook the anti-queer ideology of the religious groups because working with them offered her several benefits, especially a wider network for the circulation of content and mobilization efforts. Such strategic associations also proved effective in increasing the number of participants crowding the streets and resisting the security forces. Simultaneously, she had no respect or trust for these religious organizations and was extremely cautious about how she presented herself and articulated her politics. She explained, Does it make me less queer or a weaker advocate for queer and LGBT rights, no? It just shows that people like me know how to prioritize. We will collaborate with these organizations to create a place and country where we can choose our leaders and practice our values. Once that civilian-led system is in place, we will modify it to make it more inclusive. One step at a time.

Consistent network building, dispersed activism, and fleeting solidarities are negotiation strategies Gen Z activists and civil society actors used to negotiate the power of gender-religion-class norms in their societies. They also forged transcultural relationships. Such hidden scripts of resilience lie in the murky areas between complete submission and explicit resistance. Transcultural resilience in these situations encourages people to collectively imagine a shared goal and identify different personalized strategies to ensure its manifestation. These different strategies are distinct and resist classification into binary categories of right/wrong, black/white, passive/active. Instead, these negotiation strategies reflect people’s choices to prioritize the self (needs, values, and risks) in designing a participation map suited to their

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dynamic levels of commitment toward the cause. Transcultural resilience bears witness to the humanity at the heart of a social movement—it is never ideal and always fragmented, evolving, and conflicted.

Chapter 4

Navigating Markets Between Power and Precarity

On a cold Tuesday morning in February 2022, a group of young boys and girls aged 18 to 21 years gathered in front of a roadside tea stall on a narrow crossroad in Saket, Delhi. They all worked the night shift in a call center near the tea stall. After work, they often visited the tea stall for their morning tea and shared an occasional cigarette. Once they had smoked their cigarettes, the girls would pull a small plastic bottle from their bags and spray something on their faces. They would follow this up by chewing gum and applying some perfume to disperse the cigarette smell. The boys did not seem concerned about the smell of the cigarettes or getting caught smoking. We asked one of the girls at the tea stall what was in the small plastic bottle and why she sprayed it on her face. To this, Sandhya, an 18-year-old girl from the group, replied, “It is Vitamin C face mist. Like the one Ha-ri [a female protagonist from the K-drama Business Proposal] uses whenever she is flustered or stressed. It is anti-aging and soothes your skin.” Some of the young people’s evolving aspirations are associated with the transcultural consumption of lifestyle practices through digital media. These aspirations include experimenting with fusion food or trying different cuisines, traveling solo, learning foreign languages, and re-popularizing yoga as a fitness regime. While Sandhya identified her passion for K-dramas as a motivation to explore new products, especially items popular in the Korean market, other group members were equally enthusiastic about a foreign lifestyle. They worked at the call center part-time while pursuing their university degrees for reasons other than money. They wanted to experience what it meant to be free and independent at a young age. They also wanted to be a part of a culture that was for so long the preserve of the rich (i.e., nightlife in Delhi). Sandhya and her friends wanted to travel in the city at night, which is considered dangerous and sometimes unfit for good girls from middle-class families. Working the 73

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night shift at the call center and contributing to the family’s income offered them a reason to justify their night explorations. Young people from higher-income families have enjoyed the privilege of venturing out at night safely because they travel in personal or family cars. On the other hand, people from middle- and lower-income families have to rely on public transportation and roads to travel at night. Though Sandhya and her friends had been able to convince their parents to enjoy the privilege of staying out at night for work, they did not have the resources to reduce or mitigate the associated risks, especially for girls and women. Sandhya harbored an aspiration for social and cultural mobility. Even when she could transcend sociocultural boundaries to experience a transcultural and higher-class lifestyle, her material conditions made her vulnerable to several threats and dangers. Her family allowed her to work at night, and she continued using public transportation to commute. Talking with English-speaking customers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other European countries improved her English-speaking skills. She could switch between American and British accents depending on the clientele. Everyone in her neighborhood was impressed when she spoke English, and her parents advertised her English proficiency in the matrimonial advertisement they published to find a suitor for her. Even so, Sandhya and her friends could not afford a car for personal use. Walking from the metro station to their office at 9:00 p.m. in Delhi, through the narrow and sometimes dark lanes, always made many girls in the call center anxious for their safety. The girls and boys at the call center could transcend local norms and expectations because they were all tech-savvy and could speak fluently in English. As customer care specialists in the call center, they talked with people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other European countries. Employee development programs at their workplace included English-speaking and IT-related courses to help young people serve their customers more effectively. Arun was a junior manager at the call center at the age of 22 years. He spoke fluent English and had advanced technological gadgets: a Fitbit watch, iPhone, AirPods, a tablet, desktop monitor, and Macbook Pro. Arun explained over a cup of coffee, “Everyone in this center is a tech nerd. We can pick up any new program or application quickly. We can speak with an accent, so we sound American, and we are just curious young people who enjoy learning about foreign cultures and lifestyles.” He had started drinking coffee because he wanted to be modern. Arun said that the Indian chai (tea) was a traditional drink that did not resonate with modern countries where most people his age could not live without coffee. Even though coffee plantations are indigenous to cultures and communities

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across India, Arun still made the association that coffee was American and therefore modern and cool. Many young people in the tech industry define white-collar privilege as opportunities to access and consume the global lifestyle, and the possibility of immigrating to the global North (McMillin 2006; Roy 2021). Gen Z aspires to work in the IT industry, especially as digital gig workers because they believe that knowledge workers enjoy “white-collar” respectability, flexibility, and class status in a technologically sustained labor market. Young call center workers in India, for example, use their education, skills, and time to serve remote and Western bourgeoises in the hope that they will gain access to higher-class status and a globally approved modern lifestyle. Their aspirations for sociocultural mobility and modern and global identity compel them to embrace precarious labor conditions, withstand monotonous work, and accept globally substandard pay scales. Working night shifts in call centers to suit the working hours abroad also has repercussions for their sleep cycle, health, family, and social life (McMillin 2006). The Western vibe in these call centers and IT companies, with quaint coffee and snack bars, recreational spaces for entertainment, and contemporary English songs playing in the background, situates young people within workspaces constructed to reflect Gen Z aspirations for sociocultural mobility. Aspirations for sociocultural mobility among middle-income Gen Z tech workers are productively intertwined with their consumption behaviors. In other words, the emergence of digital technologies and the rise of transnational and global markets have strengthened the allure of Western countries’ sophisticated, middle-class life. “Even middle-class people in the U.S. have a more comfortable and luxurious lifestyle. I do not want to become rich. I want to be middle-class in the U.S.,” argued Urvashi as she swiped her debit card at a Starbucks in Connaught Place, Delhi. The young people we met in the urban centers of India define themselves as globally adept and modern individuals. Accordingly, to them, developing a modern and global identity meant acquiring skills, products, and a personality that could quickly adapt to the streets of both Mumbai and New York. As they consumed global and transnational media narratives from foreign countries—images, sounds, vibes, and language—they changed how they presented themselves in their local contexts. The ambience within a multinational technology company outsourcing labor to Indian workers shares cultural similarities with global tech centers worldwide. There is cultural continuity between the Meta headquarters in Menlo Park and the office of a technology start-up in Bangalore. The local lives, spaces, and experiences of Gen Z continuously interact with transnational and global forces and familiarize young people with what it means to live in the global North. The similarities between urban centers in India

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and the United States or Japan are fueled by the growth of affordable digital technologies, especially digital media accessed through smartphones. Since the launch of the Digital India campaign in 2015, the Indian cities of Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, and Ahmedabad, among others, have witnessed a surge in the internet user base. A 2020 report by Cisco predicted that the number of internet users in India would increase from 398 million in 2018 to 907 million in 2023. Accordingly, 64 percent of the country’s total population will have access to the internet and some digital technologies, especially smartphones, by 2023. Affordable and widespread access, even when fraught with some inequities, makes it convenient for young people in India to consume media narratives from different cultures and seek products or experiences that feed and sustain their curiosity for new or unfamiliar cultural contexts. The transcultural meanings and experiences they access through digital media and networks become the base for new consumption behaviors and practices. Transcultural media and networks—meanings, symbols, sounds, and visuals—are commodified, privatized, and marketed to Gen Z consumers as a rite of passage to identity development. The interweaving of cultural symbols and market capital has implications for local communities and spaces, creating new lifestyles, workplaces, and routines, blurring the traditional boundaries between culture and commodity, local and transnational or global, and aspirational and lived (Zukin 1996). In the tech industry, local employees are trained to embrace and develop global identities as tech workers based on the perception that people in the global North lead in tech development and use. Young tech workers in the call center in Delhi, for example, were trained to serve an English-speaking and largely Western clientele. While the workplaces and employers promoted Western ideas, practices, and lifestyles as aspirational and global, the tech workers’ cultural repositories were not limited to their workplace engagements. Urmila, a 19-year-old software development engineering student, was interning at a multinational technology company in Bangalore. She belonged to a middle-income urban family. Her father worked at a pharmaceutical company, and her mother was a former schoolteacher. She had one career ambition: to pursue a graduate degree from the California Institute of Technology in the United States. She heard about this university for the first time when she was watching the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory in 2018. She fell in love with the idea that nerds like her could find lifelong friends, live independently in California, and geek over books, theories, and food. More than going to Caltech, she wanted to meet people like her. The American sitcom introduced her to a foreign lifestyle—a setting where nerds were awesome and popular. After completing her undergraduate degree in software

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engineering, she joined the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Company in Bangalore. She hired an image consultant coach to crack the interview rounds and worked with a senior software development engineer to polish her resume, build networks, and participate in mock interviews. She chose to work in Bangalore because she believed her hometown, Bhopal, lacked personal growth opportunities. She wanted a major tech company job but was equally interested in cultivating a transcultural and Western identity. She wanted a working environment that allowed her to re-create experiences portrayed in The Big Bang Theory. The office space and work etiquette at HP represented global and mostly Western trends in workplaces in the tech industry. Urmila mirrored these trends in how she spoke, dressed, and presented herself at work and in other informal settings beyond the HP office premises. Instead of using public transportation for her daily commute, she preferred hiring a cab and carpooling because doing so was more classy and akin to her professional status. She was excited that her work in an international tech company afforded her the possibility of sociocultural mobility. Even as the global and transcultural influences seeped into how she identified and presented herself, she purposely retained aspects of her local realities. Her mannerisms and demeanor strongly reflected her middle-class Indian upbringing. During formal events and gatherings, or in her virtual meetings with managers abroad, Urmila always wore beautiful sarees to represent her Indian heritage. “Saree or a salwar suit is formal in India. It is the most professional and elegant attire for any business. They may think I am overdressed, but I do not care,” she explained. Scholars have often explored topics such as digital labor (Bisht 2010; McMillin 2006; Roy 2021) and the gig/informal economy (Bhattacharya and Kesar 2020; Bricka and Schroeder 2019) using a postcolonial and critical framework. These studies play a significant role in de-romanticizing popular notions about tech work as flexible, autonomous, and modern. Many of these studies highlight the complexities of tech work that increase the precarity of workers, making them more vulnerable and dependent on the tech industry. While we endorse these insights, we also argue that Gen Z tech workers from middle-income contexts in Indian cities are not deluded or unaware that the privileges of a white-collar job are intricately tied to precarious working conditions. In acknowledging their aspirations for sociocultural mobility, we also document young tech workers’ complex micro negotiations as they strive to manifest their mediated transcultural and global experiences and identities within their local spaces and realities. As Sandhya, Arun, and their friends at the call center and in the tech industry tried to transcend the material limitations in their lives to create a transcultural identity and experience, they also consciously retained and even promoted parts and rituals of their local identities in the global or

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transcultural spaces they inhabited. It is easy to assume that the young people working at the call centers—young women traveling at night beyond curfew hours or young men acquiring modern gadgets, an impeccable accent, or flexible work schedules—had more autonomy and creative liberty in their jobs, both of which were enabled through digital technologies and networks. Other simplistic explanations either portray the tech workers as powerless or compelled. Both these understandings essentialize young tech workers using binary categories such as precarious/empowered and unaware/vulnerable. We deepen our analysis to reveal that Gen Z tech workers do not always feel compelled to provide digital labor. If they choose to work in tech companies as knowledge workers or contract their labor, they are motivated by aspirations other than economic and professional rewards. The tech industry and workplaces offer opportunities for Gen Z to design their lives—routines and local spaces—to reflect their aspirations of modern and transcultural life. To a keen observer, it was evident that young people struggled to balance their aspirations for sociocultural mobility and their affinity to local norms. Such negotiations between their desires and lived realities increased the precarity of labor and consumption in the urban markets of India. Gen Z tech workers, especially those from middle- and higher-income backgrounds in Indian cities, mentioned that gig work in the tech industry or jobs as knowledge workers with the assumed location flexibility were dream professions. They wanted to be freelancers, digital artists, designers, software engineers, developers, or data analysts because these jobs promised a “nomadic life”—a lifestyle where they were not bound to a place. Urmila wanted to work at HP because she wanted to enjoy big-city life in Bangalore. On the other hand, Jayraj was a digital graphic designer who did not want to live in one place for more than a year. He only worked on a contractual basis, freelancing for companies and people only if the project offered a remote work option. He loved exploring new cultures, cities, and countries and wanted to travel the world. “I cannot afford to be tied down to one place. I want to be in Seoul and Tokyo, Toronto and Hanoi, Kathmandu and Nice, and many other places. Because of gig work in the tech industry, I can truly be a digital nomad,” he explained. For tech workers in Indian cities, working on transcultural teams and projects that surpass cultural and national boundaries was extremely important. They participated in projects involving teammates from different cultural contexts, thus contributing toward the transcultural flows of labor in multiple and meaningful ways. As we explore how Gen Z tech workers negotiate with precarious working conditions in the gig economy, we also narrate the transcultural strategies of resilience they have developed and refined to groom themselves as employable assets in the tech industry.

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TRANSCULTURAL FLOWS OF LABOR The proliferation of digital platforms and transcultural flows of labor enables the evolving landscape of the gig economy. Digital technologies and networks have ushered in emergent forms of employment such as independent workers, crowd-sourced work, elancers, on-call, and telecommunication employees, among others (Bricka and Schroeder 2019; Kessler 2018; Rangaswamy 2019). While workers from low-income backgrounds have always contributed different forms of unorganized labor within the gig economy, the platformization of this sector and the subsequent work opportunities in the tech industry are increasingly popular among Gen Z and across income levels (Bhatia et al. 2023). Many of these professionals have other choices. In appreciating the demand and aspiration for gig work among Gen Z in India, we also acknowledge its precarious nature, including the lack of legal and economic protections for workers (Ghosh, Ramachandran, and Zaidi 2021). Our primary argument is that Gen Z tech workers and aspirants are aware of the inequities inherent in forms of gig work. This awareness has not deterred them from their aspirations of working remotely, freelancing, or contracting for major tech companies. Instead, they have designed new strategies to negotiate the chasm between their aspirations and the realities of tech work in the gig economy. Young entrepreneurs and professionals in India also ride a new wave of innovation and global recognition in various tech-related fields. Gerd Höefner, former head of the Siemens Corporate Development Center for software, said, “The days when Americans and Europeans viewed Indian software developers as cheap ‘coding slaves’ are long gone” (Dhamija 2018). Young and aspiring tech professionals are building products, solutions, and businesses for solving global problems. They are conceptualizing and strategizing with top global leaders instead of merely implementing a predetermined vision for tech development in their field. Such experiences of working at the level of ideating paths and products of change grant young professionals a unique confidence to center their Indian identity in all innovation processes. Owing to their familiarity and comfort with new technologies such as AI and blockchain, affiliation with global networks, and intimate knowledge of local needs, Gen Z entrepreneurs are also capitalizing on this edge to create a promising start-up culture in the global South. It is important to note that their aspirations to work with globally oriented transcultural teams often co-exist with their attachment and familiarity with local norms and expectations. Similarly, they must negotiate between the privileges and precarity associated with gig work in the tech industry. As they inhabit a place between these overlapping and different desires and realities, they undertake dynamic maneuvers to navigate between local

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norms, including their everyday rituals of identity enactments, the realities of working as gig workers in tech companies, and their aspirations to foster transcultural experiences and connections. We met Suzane, a 23-year-old independent technologist who used different technologies to produce 3D virtual and augmented reality. She was a self-taught technologist. After an undergraduate degree in journalism, Suzane has spent years developing technical skills and competencies to build a portfolio as an independent technologist. She always wanted to work with start-up tech companies, not-for-profit organizations, and different government agencies trying to integrate technologies into development and welfare projects. More than anything, she wanted to explore other cultures, workplace dynamics, and outcomes designed in unfamiliar and new contexts. Suzane worked with team members from Fiji, Kenya, Istanbul, and French Polynesia. “I do not want to think that my world begins and ends in Mumbai or India. I do not like to travel, but I do like to explore different places without traveling. Digital technologies and social media platforms help connect with people far beyond your immediate reach, which is exciting,” she explained. Suzane had to constantly upskill herself and acquire more knowledge and competencies to connect with diverse teams and collaborate on projects in foreign places. She relied on her LinkedIn and Twitter networks to connect with people and organizations in her field. She also relied on social media and the internet to access the latest learning resources and insights on new technologies and media creation techniques. She believed that at the heart of gig work in the tech industry was a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to learning and labor. The existing education systems continue to offer limited learning opportunities, creating a gap between formal education and the work requirements in the gig economy (Sancho 2010). Suzane had to seek alternative approaches receptive to the rise of unanticipated forms of labor (Standing 2016) and the need for diversified learning opportunities (Twenge 2006). Existing education institutions and pedagogies were limited in two major ways: First, they were developed primarily to meet the demands of local job markets in India, and second, they were designed to be standardized and static. Gen Z tech workers, like Suzane, want to open themselves to global markets and job opportunities. They do not want a “9-to-5 government job” that comes with a promise of permanent employment and retirement benefits. Gen Z inhabits digital spaces that are fluid, with inbuilt dynamism and upgrades. Such an architectural fabric for socializing, learning, and collaborating is compatible with young people’s desire to challenge and question the local norms that impose limitations on their everyday experiences and realities and how they enact their identities. Suzane, for example, lived in a middle-income neighborhood in Delhi. The patriarchal norms in her family and community made it impossible for her to

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acquire higher education, especially in a technology-related field. Once, she had suggested applying for a graduate degree, and her father scoffed at her aspiration, saying, “Which boy will marry a girl who is more educated than him? How will we get you married?” To overcome the restrictions imposed on her due to the dominant gender norms in her local community, she used social media and the internet to create learning experiences that were empowering and transcultural. For many girls and women, remote jobs available in the tech industry are a way of overcoming the restrictions on our right to work in conservative families. Also, gig work in the tech field is rewarding because you get to work with people from different countries and contexts who value you for your merit. It is difficult to negotiate for the true value of my skills in local Indian teams sometimes. Mainly because there is a widespread belief in India’s tech field that a female professional is less proficient than her male colleagues. (Suzane 2020)

Suzane used digital media and networks to step beyond the local realities where women techies either faced restrictions from their families and communities or felt undervalued in the local labor markets even when statistics show that India tops the world in producing female graduates in STEM (Sindwani 2020). Transcultural work opportunities allowed them to evaluate the value of their skills and competencies in work environments where gender equity was a more pronounced issue and concern. Suzane freelanced with tech organizations based in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Finland. She had the opportunity of producing sophisticated content, such as 360-degree videos, 3D spatial constructions, and other technologically mediated texts and products, for her employers. Most importantly, she could work and earn money without leaving her room. She opened a personal bank account and did not tell her parents and family that she worked online for multinational companies. While Suzane had to negotiate with power relations based on gender norms in her local life, other young Gen Z tech workers faced different limitations in pursuing transcultural work experience and gig work. Arya, a 25-year-old UX designer in Mumbai, had developed a DIY approach to upskilling as a tech worker in the gig economy. She defined upskilling as “developing a diverse understanding of users in different cultures and designing to address differences.” She used digital technologies and connections to get a head start on ideas that were new in the Indian context. She had acquired three certifications in Inclusive UX/UI Design and actively referred to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines while designing for her clients. Transcultural experiences and connections over the internet kept her abreast of the latest trends and developments in her field.

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“Nobody cares about accessibility issues in India. I did not know that adding a screen reading feature to a page with text not only helps people with eyesight-related disabilities but also people who have ADHD. Enrolling in online courses taught by foreign instructors in countries that are way ahead in these matters is essential. Our graphic design or UX courses in India are basic,” she argued. For Arya, designing a DIY approach to access learning resources primarily circulated through digital transcultural networks was a transcultural communication practice (TCP). She learned to negotiate with a lack of upskilling resources in her local learning communities by building transcultural networks with professionals abroad. We observed that Arya treated her transcultural networks developed for learning purposes as strictly professional spaces. Her online practices in these spaces were driven by professional goals, such as upskilling, developing networks she could harness for job opportunities, and understanding how the market worked. Conversely, she relied on her local friends and communities for intimate connections, emotional support, and a sense of belonging. Gen Z tech workers like Suzane and Arya sought transcultural learning experiences to survive the demands of gig work in the tech industry. Transcultural experiences and networks, in this situation, were integral to their professional success and ability to negotiate with the limitations of local norms and realities. A case in point is their argument that traditional learning approaches and formal education cannot keep pace with the dynamic needs of technology-enabled gig work. Gen Z tech workers use digital technologies and networks to identify alternative approaches to upskilling, fueled by their desire to become globally oriented professionals who can work in diverse contexts and teams. Even so, they continue to inhabit the local norms, fulfill family expectations, and perform their identities according to their lived realities. Suzane created a private bank account and worked in transcultural and co-ed teams but never defied her family to enroll in higher education. Shreyansh, an aspiring graphic designer from Ahmedabad, is another example. His parents had consistently discouraged him from pursuing a creative and non-STEM career. He had adopted a DIY approach to learning graphic designing because he had no resources to enroll in a full-time degree certificate. So, he used his online connections to access learning resources and work opportunities to train as a graphic designer. However, he was determined to obtain a degree in chemical engineering. He sometimes criticized his parents for their narrow-mindedness and bias against non-STEM careers. However, he constantly acknowledged that a degree in engineering was a safe bet if he could not earn enough as a graphic designer. Finally, Arya believed that developing meaningful transcultural connections with professionals in the global North would give her a head start—introduce her to skills, technologies, and

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professional requirements relevant to modern and transcultural teams—but her emotional sustenance came from her local relationships. ASPIRATIONAL REACHING OUT: FROM DESIRES TO CONSUMPTION We met Yesha at a costume rental shop on October 1, 2017. She was shopping for Halloween. She picked out a Patiala salwar and a silk blouse in a light blue color. She accessorized the attire with a tiara, some gold-colored earrings, a thick bracelet, and hair extensions to increase the thickness and length of her hair. She wanted to dress like Yasmin—the princess from the story “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.” She had never celebrated Halloween before, but that year one of her close friends had organized a house party to celebrate the occasion. Yesha was one of the first few classmates to receive an invitation. Her parents had still not given her permission to attend the party. Sunanda, Yesha’s mother, expressed her doubts about this Western culture of partying with friends, saying, “I do not know why kids these days want to celebrate this Western holiday. We have so many beautiful festivals in India; why not celebrate those with such enthusiasm?” According to Sunanda, Western culture communicated through media channels had a widespread effect on the desires and consumption of local youth in India. She claimed that mediated reality was promoted to support the worldview and the existing power of the countries in the global North. When young people consumed foreign media and cultural texts, they were inclined to convert their local environments into the foreign places they encountered in their media engagements. She also argued that the consumption of foreign cultural texts compels young people to develop a non-local persona—how they speak and dress, the people they befriend, what they think about their families, and their aspirations. On the other hand, Yesha was thrilled about the invitation to the Halloween party. She had watched some of her favorite TV characters in famous shows such as Modern Family, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Schitt’s Creek, and Friends celebrate Halloween and Thanksgiving. She was constantly looking for ways to experience the glamour of the modern, often Western life, with her friends and in the local spaces she inhabited. From eating at Korean restaurants, watching English-language shows on streaming platforms, buying copies or products from international brands such as Zara, Gucci, and Prada, and following a skincare routine, to celebrating foreign festivals such as Thanksgiving and Halloween, Yesha and her friends publicly participated in behaviors associated with what they saw as truly global people. Yesha elaborated on her understanding of global as someone who can travel abroad and visit foreign

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places and cultures such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Korea. Someone who enjoys K-dramas and can afford to attend a K-pop concert in Europe. She said, “People who can do all these things generally have a distinct demeanor—the way they communicate in English, how much they spend on traveling and developing their personalities—and they have a special confidence to carry themselves. You look at them and know they belong to the echelon of well-traveled and educated people. The higher class!” Coming from a middle-income family, Yesha yearned to be global. She spent hours on digital media, talking with people she believed belonged to the higher class. She sent connection requests on social media to people in different countries with impressive social media accounts and who exuded self-confidence and glamour. Yesha mimicked their online behaviors and crafted an online identity akin to the social media profiles of people she thought were happening and classy. “Anyone can buy a Prada bag. You need a sense of confidence to carry that bag and look like it belongs to you,” she remarked as we browsed through some stores in an upscale mall in Mumbai. Soon we were joined by her friends, and they started clicking photos in the trial rooms while wearing expensive and branded dresses in the stores we visited. Two days later, most of her friends had edited the photos—removing the trial room doors and mirrors from the images—and uploaded them to their Instagram accounts. The photo update was accompanied by hashtags #shoptillyoudrop, #retailtherapy, #shopaholic, and #wearebougie. Back in the living room of their two-bedroom apartment, Sunanda came storming out of the kitchen when we returned with Yesha after her Halloween shopping. She shouted, “Do you know how much Yesha spent buying that costume? 1,000 rupees! Can you believe it!” Instead of arguing with her mother, Yesha apologized and promised to do extra chores at home to cover the expenses. Yesha was aware of the response she would get from her mother. She had rehearsed a counter-response thoroughly. She knew the domestic help would be on leave for ten days, and Sunanda would hire someone to help with the household chores. Yesha suggested helping Sunanda with housework in exchange for the Halloween costume. Sunanda eventually agreed. Yesha and her friends produced an online identity that would afford them the liberty to perform a transcultural identity. Though they used the word global to describe the identity rituals they performed online, we argue they were practicing transculturality for two reasons. The young girls used the digitally mediated cultural texts as a reference point to create something more deeply connected with their local realities. For instance, a year later, in 2018, Yesha and her friends did not have a house party for Halloween. Instead, they visited the farmhouse of one of their friends and spent the entire day listening to old ghost stories and visiting haunted places in the village. They posted

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photos of old banyan and neem trees, crossroads with lemon-chili offerings and earthen pots, and images from a Hanuman temple with sentences from the Hanuman Chalisa1 in the description. In all the photos from their village excursion, the girls wore traditional clothes and accessories—salwar kurta with dupatta (stole), bangles, and bindi. The photos on their Instagram feed and their Insta stories heavily emphasized their intimate connection with their Indian culture and identities. Riddhi, a 19-year-old girl in Yesha’s group, had posted a photo of her standing under a banyan tree, wearing a bright yellow salwar kurta. What was particularly striking in her photo was that she had applied a large purple bindi on her forehead. This photo was an anomaly on her Insta feed. Compared to this photo, all her other pictures captured her wearing chic and modern clothes from different brands. Her reason for posting a photo under the banyan tree is a case in point as to why young people influenced by Western or foreign media and culture prioritize their local connections more prominently when they see it as appropriate or relevant. We [Indians] have long talked about spirits, occult, or exorcism. We have many stories; our culture is deep. Instead of reading goosebumps or watching a Hollywood movie, we prefer to return to our roots. Our villages, elders, and streets are full of rich stories about the other worlds. Halloween is much more fun when we go back to our roots. The first year we had a party, and everyone had to spend so much money. We decided to learn more about our history this year, so we visited Viraj’s farmhouse near Nagpur. (Riddhi 2018).

According to the foreign cultural texts they consumed, throwing parties, inviting friends, and rebelling against their family and community norms were considered liberating practices. Yesha and her friends experimented with mimicking these practices but soon grew weary. They continued looking for ways to incorporate their desire for foreign lifestyles into their realities. However, they did not decenter their local lives, norms, and identities to look cool and happening. Instead, they followed their family norms, promoted traditional and community-approved ways of socializing with friends in the farmhouse and under the supervision of their elders, and created an enjoyable experience. They fulfilled their desire for foreign experiences without disregarding the significance of their local realities and identities. They practiced transcultural resilience by changing their consumption behaviors without completely altering their desires and aspirations for foreign lifestyles and practices. There is also a possibility that young people’s digital media consumption, virtual connections, and online experiences pluralize their cultural toolkit (Swidler 1986) and may lead to incoherent cultural practices (Lahire 2011; Daenekindt and Roose 2014). Digital technologies and networks afford Gen

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Z opportunities for sociocultural mobility. As their consumption of diverse and digitally mediated cultural texts increases, their familiarity with local norms and realities may get fractured. Familiarity with local norms and realities is pivotal to upholding and reinforcing dominant forms of conduct based on social identities of gender, religion, caste, and class. In situations where this familiarity with local norms is destabilized by exposure and the resulting desire for foreign experiences, young people bridge the gap between their aspirations and lives through strategic negotiation. They manifest those desired foreign experiences and identity rituals in their local spaces and routines and acknowledge their aspirations for sociocultural mobility. In doing this, they embrace foundational aspects of their local lives as integral to the stable and fixed aspects of their identities. Simultaneously, they open pathways to foreign experiences in ways that are amenable to their local lives. They accommodate their desire for the foreign without disrupting local social and cultural systems. This is not always the case. As we explore the experiences of Krish and other young GenZers, we will witness how some people grow to dislike and even despise their local realities and everyday experiences in their desire to acquire transcultural mobility. PERFORMING CULTURAL MOBILITY In a mid-size classroom in an urban school in Mumbai, we met Krish, a high-school teacher. He was 24 years old and had recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in education. Krish was raised in a middle-income family. His parents were teachers in their neighborhood primary school and could not afford to buy expensive things for him and his sister. Given their busy schedule and economic conditions, his parents did not allow their children to participate in extra-curricular and after-school activities such as sports events/ competitions, dance, yoga classes, or school clubs. As he described his childhood and upbringing, he always mentioned that his parents had a favorite quote every time the kids asked for expensive things or experiences: “Enough for food and drinks, never enough for anything else.” In other words, his parents strictly discouraged all forms of conspicuous consumption and the cultural practices associated with it. Through family socialization, Krish and his sister were encouraged to be frugal. As a result, Krish lacked opportunities to experience, learn, and enact cultural practices typical among his rich friends and classmates. When he entered college, his parents bought him a smartphone, and his worldview and range of experiences expanded dramatically. Krish created a list of priorities so that he could use his limited internet allowance effectively. His priority was to speak fluent English, learn grooming etiquette, and network with people from a higher-income background. He

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also wanted to develop a dressing sense akin to people in high-class society— how to team different ties with shirts, blazers with jeans/pants, and accessorize his outfits. He wanted to access, inhabit, and participate in high-class cultural spaces made available by intergenerational transmission among wealthy and modern families and communities. Krish had also enrolled in beginner classes for an image makeover and attended one session every week. In one of these sessions, he described his priorities to his image consultant, I want to become a high-class person who is confident in any company. I also mean that if I visit a foreign country, for example, the U.S., I want people to assume that I know my way around the world. I want them to think that I am a frequent international traveler. Do you know what I mean? I do not want to be Bunty from my classroom—the rich boy who owns a big sweets shop in Chandani Chowk. I want to look understated-rich, not just outwardly. Not rich because my father won the lottery. I want to look generationally rich or born rich. That comes from how I carry myself, talk, the people I network with, and the places I visit.

Given his middle-income context, his family or community did not introduce him to such cultural practices—including cultural tastes, opportunities to participate in cultural experiences, competencies to reenact/reinforce those practices, and knowledge about high-class culture. Scholars of the theory of cultural reproduction (Bourdieu 1984; Lareau 2018; Vaisey and Lizardo 2016) would have argued that people’s cultural practices result primarily from early socialization. Instead, we argue that Krish’s aspirations and desires for transcultural, global, modern, and rich experiences had roots in his digital encounters with people who reinforced the cultural practices distinct to higher-income communities and contexts. In his local community, Krish seldom came across people who reflected the lifestyle practices he was trying to learn and enact. He said his aspirations and desires for a different culture were intertwined with the time he spent on different social media platforms. Digital media broadened Krish’s social networks beyond his small-scale status group and offered new avenues for building cultural capital. Krish argued that digital media influenced his identity development as an outgoing, social, and confident young person. He relied on his online connections, digital content, and resources to transcend the limitations imposed on his experiences by his middle-income class status. He said developing a cultural capital offline or in his city required economic resources. Young people have to buy tickets and spend money to attend local concerts, visit art galleries, or buy products and services. In the online environment, people can create a persona without investing huge amounts of money. They can participate in high-class cultural conversations and be in the company of modern and global

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individuals without spending money to access such spaces. Also, it was much easier for Krish to use asynchronous communication channels to demonstrate his English-speaking skills and claim participation in high-culture circles. When I am online, I can re-edit everything so many times. I can use Google to be sure that what I am saying makes sense. You cannot do that offline. Moreover, if you want to meet any of these people offline, you must pay to have coffee at an expensive cafe, buy entry into expensive clubs and bars, and eat at fancy restaurants. (Krish 2020)

While Krish emphasized that digital media had supported his aspiration to acquire an upward cultural network, experiences, and practices, he expressed an increasing dislike for cultural norms in his local community. Often, this dislike stemmed from valid reasons: He did not like the prevalence of patriarchal rituals and rules in his family, he argued with his relatives when they supported superstitions, and he also tried to educate his siblings about dressing etiquette to prepare them for their upcoming interviews. However, his dislike for local realities was sometimes based on an extreme passion for foreign cultures and practices. He disliked aspects of his local life if they deterred him from realizing his transcultural aspirations or achieving upward cultural mobility. For example, he refused to visit the homes of his uncles and aunts on religious occasions because all of them lived in middle-income neighborhoods. He also stopped eating at local restaurants because he did not want to spend his pocket money at places he could not flaunt on his social media. Instead, he saved all his monthly allowance, ate at an expensive restaurant once a month, and posted a check-in status on his social media pages. Sadly, he also often mocked his parents, friends, and other family members when they could not speak English. Krish was using digital media to compensate for the lack of intergenerational inheritance of cultural capital, often measured by objects, knowledge, and behavior (Jæger 2011) associated with people on social media who project a global, elite, and high-culture lifestyle. He also used digital media to create simulated and free learning environments and opportunities to imbibe aspired transcultural practices and identity rituals. In his approach to acquiring upward cultural mobility, he was agentic and aware of his potential to rupture the cultural boundaries established by small-scale status groups in his offline and local spaces. Digital media had expanded his experiential realms to include people, places, and opportunities beyond his local reach and created a space for Krish to practice transcultural resilience. DiMaggio explained (1982) that the proliferation of modern systems and technologies, including international markets, transportation, media expansion, and urbanization, has

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shifted from cultural reproduction through intergenerational inheritance to cultural mobility by individual agency and creativity. LEGITIMIZING CONSUMPTION IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Young people from the global South were not so long ago regarded as the main driving force of the global illegal markets of pirated software and entertainment content. For a long time, pirated software, poorly copied videos and CDs, and gaming drives illegally obtained from the gray market were the only options for these young people to access global media content. The change in this scenario, especially for Gen Zers from middle- and high-level income backgrounds, has been startling in the past five years. Multinational companies have increasingly realized the importance of the markets in the global South—both for communication devices and content—and Gen Z is a major driver of this change. Two developments—the availability of affordable branded smartphones, tablets, and laptops and Over-The-Top (OTT) content—have been instrumental in accelerating the change for the youth of the global South. From being targeted as criminals, they are now recognized as a legitimate market that tech companies, entertainment and leisure content providers, advertisers, and marketing professionals cannot afford to ignore. The statistics from the countries of the global South, including India, clearly show that Gen Z is the biggest audience of OTT platforms in every country, that they drive the growth and content trends, and that OTT is the primary source of accessing global cultural content for Gen Z. The Kantar company conducted a study of media consumption habits of consumers sixteen years and older in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia in November 2021. Its survey of 6,700 consumers revealed that 44 percent of OTT viewers across the region are Millennials and Gen Zers. The Southeast Asian young viewers are clearly showing a preference for Korean and Japanese content in comparison to Western content. According to the study, while local content dominates Thailand, Korean content is undoubtedly Indonesia’s most popular genre on OTT. While 57 percent of OTT viewers ranked Korean among their top two genres, its popularity among female viewers is undisputed—three in four (75 percent) consumers ranked Korean content as their top preference. Meanwhile, the number of OTT viewers watching Western content plummeted, dropping nine percentage points, compared to the prior year. According to a report on the Indian OTT scenario (2021), the Indian OTT market (video and audio) is currently estimated at USD 1.8 billion (INR13,500 crores). It is expected to grow to USD 4.2 billion by 2025 and

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USD 12.5 billion by 2030. Rising daily hours of internet consumption, smartphone penetration, and a further reduction in data costs are fueling this growth. In addition to the top favorites Netflix, Disney+Hotstar, and Amazon Prime Video, the Indian youth audiences are also patronizing local and regional OTT players—MX Player, Zee5, ErosNow, Voot, SonyLiv, AltBalaji, AHA, and Hoichoi (MICA OTT Report 2021). With the range of options available, the compelling need to turn to pirated content is diminishing in these countries. This is not to say that every form of hacking, privacy breach, data theft, and rule-bending has disappeared from the countries of the global South. Cuba, for example, receives a huge amount of pirated US pop culture and K-pop products into the country through illegal channels. Our conversations with hardware and software service providers based in Mumbai revealed that one licensed program key gets shared among several friends and family members in India. Observing a rampant practice of password sharing in countries as different as India, Australia, Costa Rica, Chile, Peru, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, the streaming company Netflix is again considering a serious crackdown. The company also knows the step will fail with its Gen Z audiences (Burke 2023). Sites like Bit Torrent are still being used for downloading free movies, but youth from countries with affordable internet access and access to OTT platforms are turning away from piracy. India is the fastest-growing OTT market worldwide and has over twenty-five official languages; therefore, no Indian OTT platform can ignore regional content. However, interestingly, more and more global OTT content providers are now catering to the taste and preferences of the young audiences of the global South, including those from small towns and non-metro cities. “The debate between global and local is a very interesting one because affinity is becoming increasingly important for audiences,” said Rajesh Nair, vice president of business development and content acquisition at free streaming service DistroTV. “If I’m based in London and I’m producing an English documentary, I have to think, ‘When this is hosted in the U.S., or if it’s hosted in Canada, or if it’s hosted in Africa, how will that audience react to it?’ Even though I’m producing content locally for the local markets, I have to think of those territories reacting, because, ultimately, the monetization [also] comes from the audience engagement in those markets,” said Nair in an interview (Nathans-Kelly 2021). According to Manish Kalra, chief business officer for ZEE5 India, in addition to streaming regional language versions of Hindi and international movies and shows, major OTT players are moving aggressively for a piece of the vibrant South Indian market (2023). He said that as regional audiences acquire a taste for non-local content, OTT platforms must also cater to local expectations (IANS 2023).

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Similarly, Gen Z audiences from Latin America, with Mexico and Brazil leading, are pushing the OTT platforms to cater to their preferences with a rapidly growing number of OTT subscribers. Major US-based streaming companies are paying special attention to producing telenovelas and sports-based programs, keeping these audiences in mind (Elad 2021). With such a colossal presence as consumers of global cultural content, Gen Z groups from the global South are also becoming one of the most coveted groups for advertisers. These young audiences are constantly bombarded by brands to turn them into brand loyalists, because Gen Zers are trendsetters in their local places. Again, this engenders an exciting mix of negotiation strategies practiced by these young people. FOREIGN INFLUENCES AND LOCAL ANXIETIES While young people have designed transcultural strategies to acquaint themselves with global consumption patterns and market trends through a customized use of digital technologies and social media, the influx of foreign influences has also stirred local anxieties and a sense of alienation. The surging levels of global interconnectedness through digital media have opened up questions of “where to belong or not to belong” (Beck 2003, 454) among many Gen Z in cities of the global South. As young people encounter new cultures and social norms in their consumption of transcultural media, they experience fear and uncertainty alongside an aspiration for cultural mobility and a cosmopolitan mindset. Gen Zers have to maneuver and negotiate their identity rituals and practices within spaces with loosening and tightening local influences, as transcultural experiences inform their future imaginaries and personal motivations. They use transcultural negotiation strategies to address the complexities of desires, expectations, and aspirations in spaces where local norms and global forces interconnect at multiple levels. These strategies effectively enable young people to orient themselves and their actions in relation to the worlds they create and inhabit. The strategies are dynamic and designed to respond to the multiplicity and nuances inherent in the everyday experiences of young people. Gen Z in global South contexts cannot simply embrace the popular consumption culture or consumer behaviors, especially when these are beyond their financial reach or when they promote foreign identity practices. Young people in Indian cities are responsible for challenging and critiquing such dominant consumption practices. Adapting foreign influences to align them with their local realities alleviates the moral burden they feel for desiring experiences and things supposedly antithetical to or different from their local lives. Such negotiations where they install their desires and aspirations for transcultural mobility within a locally approved

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framework of identity practices and rituals testify to the co-existence of local anxieties, fear of alienation, and gratification derived from participating in global trends and markets. We have observed that many young people have reflected on the differences between cultures to identify practices and values they want to preserve. For example, many Gen Zers want to sustain existing family structures, primarily the strong parent-children and intergenerational bonds one finds in several countries of the global South. They want to adopt a gentle parenting technique and avoid harsh disciplinary practices. However, they do not want to lose touch with the security and mutual dependence embedded in their local family relations. As we strolled the clothes market on the streets of Ahmedabad in Gujarat with three young girls enrolled in a management institute in the city, we witnessed the amalgamation of fear, anxiety, and desire regarding global trends and consumption behaviors. The name of one of the girls was Suchitra, and we met her at an educational fair in early 2018. Suchitra was a 22-year-old management student, and she was accompanied by her friends Neha and Mahima. All three girls were raised in semi-liberal urban families and greatly admired their local realities, including regional cultural practices, family norms, religious beliefs, and festivals. They were active on several social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, and enjoyed transcultural media. Their media diet included Korean and Western shows, movies, and music; they followed international celebrities, admired Western and foreign lifestyles and practices, and had an expansive knowledge of youth cultures in different countries. While their consumption habits reflected a preference for global trends, they retained and represented their attachment to local norms and values in the media content they produced for consumption by others. Suchitra used her social media page to promote local arts, festivals, and crafts. Her online content focused exclusively on indigenous and generational art and craft forms. Besides her love for local cultural practices and rituals, she was driven by a fear that foreign cultures and values would overtake her community and other Indian cities if local youth communities did not try to archive and promote the grandeur of their cultural heritage. During one of our conversations exploring her anxieties and fears, Suchitra explained why she felt alienated from these global trends and other transcultural practices even when she aspired to experience them, I grew up watching Western media: Friends, Golden Girls, How I Met Your Mother, and other shows, movies, books, and music. English content was and is considered elite because we [Indians] believe that people who speak and understand English are well-educated and modern. So, I developed a personal taste for such content. As I became more critical, I realized how all this foreign content and products are weakening our local communities—business, arts, education,

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to almost everything local. I feel very guilty if I express my liking for foreign things without making serious efforts to represent and promote local lifestyles, practices, and cultures.

Suchitra’s friends supported and empathized with her perspective. Neha and Mahima were comfortably ensconced in their local cultures, especially the simple and community-driven life in semi-urban middle-class families. Also, Neha and Mahima did not acknowledge any desire for foreign products or lifestyles. They had consciously designed their media consumption and everyday routines to include regional, underexplored, and rich content. Neha was a self-branded food connoisseur. She was perplexed and disheartened by the demand for foreign foods in her city, often at the expense of healthy and sustainable local food options. She also mentioned how the different diet trends (or fads) had created a distrust for local Indian cuisines among her friends. She explained how her friends constantly tried to cut out carbohydrates from their meals and substitute local vegetables with imported ones. Local food systems in India are designed to support our bodies, our climate, and food availability. Unfortunately, many young people in my circles are crazy about foreign diets and eating habits. They think it makes them look cool. So, breakfast dishes such as poha, upama, and parathas are replaced with oats, cereals, and smoothies. The habit of eating a wholly balanced lunch with carbs (rice and rotis), proteins (dal and curd), and vitamins and fiber (vegetables) is replaced with small bowls of salads or meat-intensive meals. Witnessing how young people follow the Western world without a second thought scares me. (Neha, 2020)

All this while, Mahima and Suchitra were also searching for brand knockoffs for Prada, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton in the market. The knockoff products under each category resembled the original design and style but did not replicate the original brand logo. When Mahima and Suchitra bought a knockoff bag and some shoes, they did not do it because they wanted to mimic those who own branded luxury products. Instead, they wanted to mock those with their knockoffs, driving home the message that their local markets and artists could produce the same design and product at a much lower price. Both girls often posted photos with their knockoff products on their social media and created awareness about forced labor used by luxury brands such as Dior and Saint Laurent. Before joining a management institute for postgraduate education, Mahima had worked as a lifestyle journalist in Delhi. She had interviewed skilled artisans in India who worked at ateliers and export houses to produce luxury goods for the global market. Not only were these local artisans underpaid, but they also worked in debilitating conditions. Mahima believed that the young people in India, especially those

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from middle-income families, had developed a taste and desire for branded products because of the exposure to international fashion trends through social media. Though most of these luxury products were incredibly expensive, Gen Z aspired to earn enough to afford a “brand-conscious lifestyle.” Mahima observed that her friends would compel their parents to buy them branded clothes, bags, shoes, and accessories. They would take up small, part-time jobs to save money and buy branded goods. Though she appreciated their resolve to earn money and support a preferred lifestyle, she thought their consumption practices were informed by the relentless prevalence of foreign, often Western, values of materialism through social media and transcultural media and communication networks. As these young girls chose to define themselves based on their experiences in local communities and international and global online networks, they explicitly and continuously redefined their identities. Based on Akkerman and Bakker’s concept of “identity (re)making” (2011, 132), we argue that aspects of young people’s identities are constantly in flux as they decide which aspirations, encounters, relationships, and learnings are a part of their identities, and what to exclude or include. While Suchitra was more comfortable with acknowledging the influence of Western media and culture on her personal aspirations and her experiences in local settings, Neha and Mahima suppressed and ignored this discussion. Instead, Mahima and Neha spent a lot of time establishing how they produced content to promote local cultures and express their utmost passion for indigenous arts, cultures, and lifestyle practices. Their online identities were closely intertwined with their local realities and they exhibited consumption patterns that supported local cultures and people. All three of them were uncertain about the influence of transcultural and global forces on their everyday experiences and personal values. They were afraid that an uncritical acceptance of the pervasive influence of transcultural and global media, meanings, and cultures would weaken local identities and communities, making them more vulnerable to the power and dominance of global forces. They assumed the responsibility of undoing the influence of foreign consumption habits and trends by pledging their commitment to their lived realities in local communities and offline spaces. The rift between their aspired selves (unraveling under the influence of global-local interconnections) and their moral selves (created through immersion in local cultures and practicing the norms and values of their local communities and families) burdened them with the guilt of never doing enough. To define this guilt, Neha quoted one of her favorite poets, Ijeoma Umebinyuo: “So, here you are too foreign for home, too foreign for here. Never enough for both.”2

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WIELDING POWER THROUGH MARKET ACTIVISM The circulation of the cultural flows gets accelerated with the increasing internet use by Gen Zers from the global South. One of the natural outcomes is being targeted by products and services looking for new markets. This situation simultaneously places a person in two contradictory positions: first, in a vulnerable position as a target of incessant messaging to consume and follow the mainstream global trends; and second, in a position of power to influence the global market trends. A comparatively small but passionate number of Gen Zers from the global South have chosen the path to use their power as consumers and influencers in shaping the market trends toward sustainability and inclusivity. We see their presence in global consumer movements that use the tactics of buycott and boycott (Kam and Deichert 2020), supporting buying green, fair-trade, cruelty-free, and locally produced products and opposing fast fashion, sweatshops, cruelty toward animals, and child labor. It is not without reason that Gen Z has been called a “passionate generation” or a “protest generation.” Due to their ease with the internet, this generation is also better informed about the causes they support and are in touch with the global happenings around them. Sustainable or slow fashion has fast become a global movement supported by Millennials and Gen Z members concerned about environmental degradation and climate change. Young people from the global South are making this global movement their own. For example, India is seeing a growing membership in vintage and secondhand clothing movements in cities like Bengaluru and Mumbai, and Instagram has become a major site for thrifting and slow fashion start-ups. Several young people from the global South act as national/ local ambassadors for global sustainable fashion organizations. Let us take the example of the global organization, Slow Fashion Movement, which is working toward behavior change, political mobilization, education, and supporting those working to promote slow fashion. It has many local chapters— from both the global North and global South, with global ambassadors spread across the world. An ambassador works voluntarily and independently, and their role is to represent Slow Fashion in their community and location. The ambassadors receive much support from the global team regarding information and resources; this helps them network with other ambassadors across the globe. In turn, a global ambassador represents the organization in social media campaigns, blogs, podcasts, and events. Such a role allows young people to foreground their local context and contribute to the global cause. Brown Living, for example, is an Indian online group that curates sustainable products for sale and is run by a young team who call themselves “earth advocates.” Their blog describes sustainable living as a worldwide movement

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that has deep roots in Indian culture. They connect sustainable consumption to India’s independence movement when Mahatma Gandhi called for using locally made products. In our personal communication with slow fashion researcher Anjali P.S., she argues that understanding the practices that represent the slow fashion movement in India is an exercise in decoding taste, demystifying paradoxes (i.e., to follow trends or to forsake them, boycott or buycott, buy new or keep the old, and so on), and a realization that choosing what you wear every day is ultimately a political act. One such practice that has become even more widespread since the COVID-19 lockdowns is online thrifting—where users of social media (mainly Instagram) “thrift” or buy and sell used articles (specifically clothing in this context). While there is a rich history of clothing exchange in India within kinship networks, wearing a stranger’s clothing is often frowned upon. Here is an example of how an everyday practice is transformed through the transcultural practices of buying, selling, and posting a “thrifted fit” on Instagram. This is especially true of Gen Zers, who cultivate style on a budget (thrifting fits perfectly in their price range as they hunt for a good bargain). Their quest for seemingly “vintage” pieces of clothing (treasure hunting), the pursuit of “cool,” and fulfilling anti-capitalistic intentions are mainly aimed at avoiding buying new clothing, especially fast fashion. Their practice of buying thrifted products aligns with their goals of caring for the environment and creative expression of self (consumption of thrift as an act of creativity) through obvious and visible secondhand clothing. Buying and selling thrift implies carefully curating vintage (vintage equals authenticity in thrifting) clothing, because most clothing in thrift stores is factory surplus, rejected, and imported clothing from charity shops across Europe and South Korea. Such an approach to consumption showcases their globally oriented fashion sense and originality. Slow fashion, in that sense, is a very personalized practice. As Anjali argues, slow fashion enthusiasts may or may not subscribe to one or more such trends but curate their wardrobes in a way that ensures that the pieces of clothing stay in circulation for longer. They protest the basic structure of fast fashion because it generates colossal amounts of waste and has a big carbon footprint. This is especially true for items that are discarded and rejected. Gen Y and Z are also heavily influencing their parents into wearing thrift. This is especially significant in India because of the social stigma related to wearing strangers’ clothing in middle-class families. The consequence of this movement is that a shared critique manifests itself on social media. Thrifting in India, apart from the physical stores/charity shops/NGOs, exists in the dynamic social media setting, where access to the internet and Instagram (mainly) is a prerequisite. The network of thrifting occurs across different cities through Instagram thrift shops and apps (like This for That) and circularity-based tech

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platforms like Relove. The involvement in preloved fashion manifests in not just appearance through a performance of self but also in lifestyle choices that include practicing zero-waste living, upcycling, composting, and so on. This phenomenon takes shape on social media, specifically on Instagram for Gen Y and Gen Z. It is performed by tagging stories and reels, creating guides, and self-regulating local WhatsApp groups. There is also a significant simultaneous move toward creating more awareness offline. Some offline activities to generate awareness include swap shops, community donation drives, and creating new products through waste, to name a few. Body positivity is another global movement with still limited but essential market repercussions. The body positivity movement has seen a steadily growing participation from the global South because women from multiple generations identify with the issue. For example, body shaming is a routinely normalized practice in Indian families and society. However, the traditional Indian beauty standards never put a premium on height or ultra-slimness for women or an athletic body for men. Fair skin was the most sought-after beauty attribute, especially for women. It was a cumulative influence of global beauty pageants, the fashion and apparel industry, and global supermodels through which these foreign body ideals gained widespread traction in Indian society. Now again, with increasing awareness of the body positivity movement in different parts of the world thanks to social media, Gen Zers are reconsidering these unattainable expectations. A few Gen Z and Millennial designers with a global following, such as Sabyasachi, Amit Aggarwal, Aneeth Arora of the brand Pero, and Masaba, among others, have supported the current discourse on body positivity in India with plus-size and anti-fit designs. Due to the global following that these leaders have acquired, they have facilitated higher acceptance for Gen Z influencers, models, and followers who embrace body positivity in their work. Several Gen Z influencers are variedly creating content on body positivity, fat acceptance, and self-love that has been expanded to address skin color. As a result of active advocacy by influencers, several Indian brands have introduced entire repertoires in plus sizes. Knowing that their personal concerns find resonance in global locations gives a renewed confidence to plus-size models and influencers in India to demand recognition in India as well as globally. Similarly, Gen Z influencers from many countries, such as Costa Rica, South Africa, Bangladesh, and Argentina, are garnering visibility and shaping the fashion sense of their followers. Diaspora influencers also play an important role in circulating cultural flows in multiple transcultural digital spaces. The body positivity movement has not come of age yet in the global South. Plus-size models still struggle to find their rightful place in the market. Gen Z bloggers and activists are constantly debating the correct meaning of body positivity and the over-commercialization of the movement. Many models

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have questioned the label “plus size,” while many brands include larger sizes just as tokenism to appear inclusive. Gen Z has, however, embraced the movement’s ethos and made it a part of their engagement, thus compelling the fashion market to bring inclusivity to its agenda. Social media and digital technologies enable an abstract set of experiences where cultural and territorial boundaries are porous, and individuals are pushed out of the broader institutional and discursive continuities within which they were raised (Kinnvall 2004). Until recently, massive life changes such as migration, travel, or territorial movement for various reasons led people to transcend the security of their local cultures, communities, and relationships. With digital media, this boundary-crossing experience between different cultures, contexts, and identities is much more immediate and with different implications for young people consuming international media, navigating global communication platforms, and negotiating between local realities and transcultural aspirations. For Gen Z in urban centers of the global South, digital media engender an inevitable tension between their need for permanence and stable identity and their desire for identity (re)making and foreign lifestyles and experiences. Such lived contradictions can create ontological insecurities, fears, uncertainty, or a feeling of alienation among young people. As Sigel (1989) has noted, “There exists in humans a powerful drive to maintain the sense of one’s identity, a sense of continuity that allays fear of changing too fast or being changed against one’s will by outside forces” (459). Gen Z’s digital media engagements create complex relationships, communication, values, and identities. It is, therefore, impossible for young people to think in terms of a single, integrated, or stable identity. To deal with these complexities in their identities and lived realities, young people use transcultural negotiation strategies to mitigate their guilt or the feeling of alienation they experience. For some young people, these negotiation strategies involve hand-picking elements from different cultures and contexts to curate a locally centered and self-affirming world. Others may deny or resist the influence of global forces on their identity rituals and carve a space for exclusively local values, norms, and practices. However, others may pendulate between compliance and resistance—they conceal their aspirations for foreign experiences and products and explicitly promote their loyalty to local communities. In all different situations of transcultural negotiation, many young people overcompensate for the guilt they experience while indulging themselves with foreign markets, trends, products, and consumer desires.

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NOTES 1. A Hindu God and Lord Ram’s devoted follower in the epic Ramayana. Hanuman Chalisa are forty verses in praise of Lord Hanuman. Reciting Hanuman Chalisa is a common cultural practice in India, and chanting is considered especially powerful when one is facing any danger. 2. These lines are from Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s poem “Diaspora Blues,” published in her book Questions for Ada (2016).

Chapter 5

Transcultural Digital Imaginaries

AT A NEW YEAR’S PARTY In December 2018, a small group of Gen Z participants invited Kiran to attend New Year celebrations in a small neighborhood community in Vasant Vihar, Delhi. A digital-savvy group of young people from a neighborhood in Delhi had organized a New Year’s Eve party and booked a banquet hall in a three-star hotel in their residential area. They also requested one of their cool friends to DJ at this party. The group had decorated the banquet hall with silver balloons, a golden tassel curtain, and a New Year–themed selfie and photo booth. When Kiran walked into the banquet hall at 4:00 p.m. on December 31, the girls looked happy in their “little black dresses,” and the boys wore shiny tuxedos. All of them spoke fluent English. The playlist they had created for the party was saturated with English songs by top artists such as Zedd, Alessia Cara, the Chainsmokers, Sia, the Weekend, Clean Bandit, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and many more. They had memorized the lyrics and sang them in English without a trace of an Indian accent. Observing the young people effortlessly in sync with each other, Kiran thought that they had pre-decided a theme for the party and had dressed accordingly. However, it was evident through conversations that the friends had not agreed upon the theme or dress code. Instead, they insisted that they all had a similar dressing sense and taste in music and knew what would be appropriate for such a party. Zeba, a 14-year-old girl from the party, described her eye make-up as “smokey eye” and explained why it complimented her black dress and minimal make-up vibe. Ruturaj, another 14-year-old boy, said he could not stand being in a room with one too many colors. “I selected the decorations for the party. I wanted some bling—the goldens and silvers—and I wanted to be minimal. 101

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So, I chose to wear a simple black tux and pants. I did not want to wear colorful clothes because the decorations were jazzy.” As Ruturaj explained how and why he had cultivated a classy and understated dressing style, Kiran felt uncomfortably self-aware of the bright red and yellow kurta she wore at this New Year’s party. Though the young crowd of classy party-goers was excited to see her at the party, they were also skeptical about her dressing sense. Zubair, a 15-year-old fashion enthusiast, approached Kiran and said, “I have a few tips you could use later, maybe? First, a side part of your hair is outdated. Center-part your hair. Non-skinny jeans are in; skinny jeans are out—and, last, wear silk kurtas or camis instead of what you wear. Synthetic is so out.” For a brief second, Kiran was flustered, offended, and angry all at once! When the surge of emotions had ebbed, she asked Zubair how he knew so much about fashion, and he said, “Instagram, of course!” Every young person at this party had social media profiles and spent hours watching and creating online content. On average, they spent three to four hours on social media daily. As they scrolled through reels made by urban, globally connected, and tech-savvy young people, they cultivated ways of situating themselves within cultural landscapes generated by the interaction between local and global flows of ideas, beliefs, values, practices, experiences, commodities, aspirations, and identities. These young people continuously tried to imagine their social existence—that is, how they fit with others who inhabited shared transcultural and digital spaces. When young people imagined their social existence in relation to others (including non-human entities such as digital media and networks), they demonstrated two core behaviors. First, the young people we interviewed closely observed the online practices of others: how people act on social media, what kinds of online personas they curate, and how they articulate their identities, values, and practices online. Our participants did not understand social media algorithms’ full potential and power (and how they influence what social media users interact with and see). They believed that the content trending on their social media profiles demonstrated the accepted norms and expectations in transcultural and globally connected communities. They used online content to interpret the boundaries of normal behavior and acceptable identity performances online. Their digital networks exposed Gen Zers to experiences and information that helped them situate their aspirations and values in interaction with those of others in transcultural digital contexts. Once the young people had acquired a deeper understanding of shared identity narratives, they modeled their offline behaviors to mimic online identity performances, allowing them to materialize their aspired realities. The second core behavior, therefore, involved translating aspects of their online identity performances into everyday practices and offline rituals. At this stage, Gen Zers often realized the influence, comforts, and constraints

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of their local realities and the need to negotiate with dominant norms in their families and communities. For the young people organizing the New Year’s party, for example, local norms and expectations conflicted with the West-dominated cultural practices of celebrations. Zubair, Ruturaj, Zeba, and their friends consumed social media content documenting New Year celebrations by celebrities and influencers in the United States. The desire for elitism, joy, and modernity produced through these US-specific images, videos, and narratives enamored the young friends at the party. They wanted to experience a “New York-style New Year celebration” (Zeba 2019) where a ball drops at the stroke of midnight and couples kiss each other. The online content they consumed influenced their aspirations for romance and friendships. Many young people at the party emphasized that they had always wanted more freedom. They wanted the latitude to define the norms and expectations concerning their relationships with others. Social media engagements, connections, and content only reinforced an already existing desire to transcend locally imposed boundaries on love, friendship, personal desires, sexual identities, and belief systems. The third core behavior, therefore, is developing negotiation strategies to navigate local expectations and norms while creating opportunities and experiences for their aspirational transcultural selves to manifest in their offline spaces. These negotiations are acts of transcultural resilience because they do not explicitly oppose local realities. For instance, the young people at the New Year’s party had procured parental permission and funds to organize the party in lieu of a promise that they would be home by 8:00 p.m. They clicked photos, recorded videos, and made reels about their party but did not post them online until midnight. They carefully curated an online identity of an urban, party-going, modern youngster and simultaneously followed the rules and limitations established by their families. They spent time with their romantic partners at the party, but none posted couple photos on Instagram or Facebook. The youngsters at the party had cultivated a transcultural imagination that normalized having romantic relationships at a young age. They also manifested their desire for romance in their offline lives. Many of them, however, were uncomfortable embracing these desires on social media. Arth, a 16-year-old boy at the New Year’s party, said, You post it on social media, and then it is public. The content I watch online can be as global and modern as I want because consuming such content does not have an uncontrolled impact on my local life. However, when I post something online and create content, I must remember the norms and customs in my family and community. What I post is public and becomes my identity. What I consume is untraceable so that no one can punish me.

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Digital networks and social media introduce young people to different forms of cultures, lifestyles, identities, and values instantly and constantly. While Gen Zers are keen observers of online identity performances, these observations serve as interpretive frameworks to identify acceptable and expected norms in offline and online contexts. It is critically significant to highlight how these transcultural online interactions and experiences also shape their aspirations and desires—especially the question of “who they want to be” and the narratives they create in digital spaces to reflect it. This question of “who they aspire to be” and how they express their aspirations flirts with two intersecting aspects of their realities: digital media’s promise of possibilities and the comfort and constraints of local lives. Young people cultivate transcultural and digital imaginaries at the intersection of their lived realities in offline contexts and the manufactured-yet-felt expansiveness of their digital networks and identities. These imaginaries serve as shared cultural resources for understanding and enacting new modes of existence. As a result, Gen Z has shared aspirations, desires, and a collectively held set of practices to enact accepted ways of being. There is room for personalizing these enactments and customizing their behaviors to suit their lived experiences. Their transcultural digital imaginaries are fueled by their digital engagements and materialize through everyday practices and narratives in their online and offline spaces. Before we begin exploring the complexities of young people’s transcultural digital imaginaries, it is critical to acknowledge that we draw theoretical force from some foundational discussions on social imaginaries, and identify our points of continuation and departures. ON IMAGINARIES People rely on their imagination to create collective experiences and inhabit and evolve cultures, communities, nations, and technologies. Scholars from different disciplines (Anderson 1983; Appadurai 1990; Hecht 1998) have explored the concept of imagination or imaginaire to understand how people create and sustain a shared understanding of how life and relationships should unfold, and what changes this unfolding should entail for their technological, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts. Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) was one of the earliest scholars to coin the term social imaginary to define collective frameworks that people develop and the shared guidelines they use to understand their social existence in relation to others. These collective and shared frameworks help people create a navigable social world. Scholars examining the process of globalization, primarily due to the proliferation of digital technologies and media, took a keen interest in this concept. They

Table 5.1: Transcultural Quotidian Resilience Framework Transcultural Practices of Resilience Inhabiting the norms

Description

Enacting agency is also witnessed in people reinforcing or complying with existing community norms and expectations. Compliance with norms is not always forced or compelled. Social norms create comforting experiences and offer a sense of security. Compliance is sometimes a deliberate choice and involves active meaning-making. Between subversion Resilience is visible when people occupy spaces between comand compliance plete subversion of and compliance with the existing power structure. Resilience is negotiated and personalized. People acknowledge the limitations and possibilities in their local lives when interacting with global experiences. People’s transgressions of sociocultural norms are seldom explicit or radically loud. Interweaving local People design personal negotiation strategies to bring local and and global global experiences together. They neither disavow the global, nor do they uncritically accept the local. Their negotiation involves choosing different experiences and identities that align with their aspirations and evolving values. Global-local interconnections influence young people’s online Materializing and offline lives. Resilience is enacted as materializing globalglobal-local local interconnections by carefully cultivating relationships, interconnections networks, identities, and resources. Such negotiations inform the local spaces people inhabit and their online interactions. Personalizing culYoung people’s everyday realities, social identities, quotidian tural experiences online practices, and relationships influence their interpretation of cultural experiences emerging from local-global interconnections. Young people have customized repositories of meaning-making and interpretative frameworks to analyze cultural experiences. Seldom is the interpretation merely limited to a collective cultural lens promoted by macro organizations of cultural influence. Playful Circumventing power structures, authoritative figures, and socicircumventions etal expectations are sometimes a playful pursuit. Play, here, implies that young people do not want to introduce systemic changes. They want to create small moments of friction to fulfill personal desires and goals. Transcultural resilience is playful because it is transient and may or may not lead to long-term changes in existing conditions. Authoring strategic Carefully positioning themselves in the global spaces, strateginarratives cally filtering-in and filtering-out aspects of their global aspirations, local lived realities, and identity dimensions. Young people use diverse social media platforms and constantly learn about platform affordances, audiences, and new technical features to be able to tell multimodal stories effectively.

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wanted to understand how globalization influenced culture in contemporary societies and how these changes inform or constitute social imaginaries (Gaonkar 2002). One of the most prominent explorations of this concept in the context of modern societies is Charles Taylor’s book Modern Social Imaginaries (Taylor 2003). Taylor defines social imaginaries as “incorporating a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we fit together in carrying out the common practice” (172). According to Taylor, social imaginaries are collective because large groups share and articulate these imaginaries in the form of images, stories, legends, and other narrative forms that inform widely held cultural practices. Moreover, these imaginaries evolve with time. Changes brought about by modern society also alter the ways we imagine our society and its future. Social imaginaries are, therefore, analogous to the ever-evolving thoughts that become culturally embedded in language and practices. Many scholars have revisited Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries to answer one critical question: How have technological developments (and globalization) altered people’s engagement with others and the world, and, consequently, their social imaginaries? Manfred Steger introduced the term global imaginary (2008) as large-scale consciousness initiated by the pervasiveness of globalization processes and normalizing the belief of the “world as a single whole” (2008, 2). Analyzing globalization processes involves paying keen attention to the different technologies mediating global flows across territorial, cultural, and experiential boundaries. The advent and proliferation of several communication technologies have generated new forms of discursive and technical capacities and practices. On the one hand, these discursive and technical capacities emerge in response to technological inventions and innovations and shape people’s futuristic visions for their place in the world (Kelty 2005, 206). On the other hand, enacting the new discursive and technical capabilities establishes “a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (Taylor 2003, 106) for people’s collectively held futuristic visions for themselves and their communities. Flichy treads similar theoretical grounds in his magnum opus, The Internet Imaginaire (2004). His primary argument is that the internet, and by extension other digital technologies, are not simply communication channels. The internet and various forms of communication media and channels now constitute the dominant narratives in society, thus shaping the ideological forces, routine practices, and modes of conduct. In other words, digital imaginaries thrive because they shape the current frameworks people use to make sense of their place in

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the world and establish futuristic visions and prescriptive guidelines for how societies can be steered in the direction of those futuristic imaginations. Some of the earliest theories of social imagination focused primarily on how people use collective frameworks to understand their social existence in the present, with a sparse discussion of how imaginaries can also be future-oriented. Imaginaries can be defined as articulations of visions for the future. Anticipation for these future visions to materialize can initiate social and technological developments (Van Lente 2012) and alter the collective frameworks of the present. Futuristic desires and goals influence shared expectations and definitions of technological, cultural, social, and other practices and guidelines constituting the collective frameworks of the present (Hilgartner 2015). To explore the political potential and future influence of technologies, Jasanoff and Kim (2009) introduced the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, defined as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 6). These different studies on digital technologies and imaginaries fall under the umbrella of “digital imaginaries,” which is being “used increasingly as an analytical tool to describe the co-creation of technological innovations, and the contingent social relations and situations” (Bhatia 2023). Scholarship in this field is further diversified with studies exploring the role of agents and actors who articulate, sustain, or change these imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2009; Lehtiniemi and Ruckenstein 2019; Olbrich and Witjes 2016). A critical question about digital imaginaries is underexplored: How do rapid technological changes embed into people’s daily lives—their routines, interpersonal relationships, desires, aspirations, and values? Existing literature focuses on macro-institutions of power as agents primarily interacting with and influencing digital imaginaries. These studies use secondary data and historiography (Mukherjee 2019) to trace the role of governments, political/public figures, and corporations in shaping imaginaries about technology and society. To understand how imaginaries dovetail into people’s routines and lived experiences, scholars should prioritize three lines of inquiry: First, how do people articulate digital imaginaries they inhabit through everyday practices and interactions with others (human and non-human: technologies)? Second, how do their interactions, relationships, and connections through digital technologies inform and evolve their personal aspirations, desires, values, and future goals? Third, how do they introduce changes in their local and lived lives to create space for their aspirational and future selves to materialize? To answer these three questions and reorient discussions on digital imaginaries to people’s narratives (i.e., the meanings they use, create, and articulate

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and their practices), we offer the concept of transcultural digital imaginaries. We define transcultural digital imaginaries as evolving and collective interpretive frameworks people use to understand their sociocultural existence in relation to an influx of global, transnational, and multinational flows of communication, values, ideas, and experiences. People cultivate transcultural digital imaginaries when they use digital media and networks to engage with territorially-removed cultural and social experiences and relationships. Even as these digitally mediated interactions are at the heart of transcultural digital imaginaries, we can observe and document their influence on young people’s everyday experiences in their local spaces and cultures. Transcultural digital imaginaries are present-focused and future-oriented. They serve as shared guidelines for navigating transcultural spaces and experiences online. They also encourage people to imagine different, varied, or alternative futures of transcultural identities and practices. While the present-focused dimension of these imaginaries allows people to develop competencies and skills to inhabit transcultural and digital cultures online, the future-oriented visions enable users to modify their local realities and offline practices in alignment with their imaginaries. Transcultural digital imaginaries are a unique and new analytical tool to center the complexity of individual experiences, aspirations, and desires as people forge a bridge between the constraints and comforts of their local lives and the aspirations and expectations of inhabiting transcultural digital worlds. Negotiation as resilience is at the heart of such an analysis. In the following sections, we draw on our six-year-long ethnography data working in urban communities to describe some ways in which young people cultivate transcultural digital imaginaries. Cultivating Transcultural Digital Imaginaries Janet was a 19-year-old college student from Mumbai and an Electronic Dance Music (EDM) enthusiast. We met her at Sophia’s college through one of our research participants in early 2020. She wore baggy jeans and a loose top. As she walked across the street and into the cafe, she had her headphones on and was listening to music. To start a conversation and create a rapport with Janet, Kiran asked her what kind of music she liked and got an instant reply, “EDM!” Janet loved listening to EDM and attending concerts but was also an aspiring music producer. She wanted to revolutionize the “EDM scene by fusing the beats with the sounds and vibe of Bollywood,” she explained. Her friend Nilima introduced Janet to EDM in 2017. Nilima moved to the United States in 2016 and started attending house parties and celebrations with her new friends in California. She regularly talked with Janet and encouraged her to apply for a master’s program in the United States so they could attend

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university together. While Janet did not intend to move abroad, she was interested in learning more about the common cultural practices in Nilima’s friend group. She followed Nilima’s friends on Instagram and Snapchat, talked to them through text messages and video calls, and discussed topics of shared interests, especially music. Janet thought learning about musical genres trending in different countries would inspire her to produce new forms of music. As she developed a taste for EDM, she realized she could infuse EDM beats with Bollywood’s sonic landscape and create something quirky and young. She was an amateur and aspiring music producer. She relied on other music stalwarts to learn how to create remixes/covers, fuse the beats, generate an Indo-World vibe, and, most importantly, how to promote her music online. She wanted to center Bollywood in her music production, but she continuously sought collaborations with young artists and producers in other countries, especially South Korea, the United States, and England. She wanted to include Indian aesthetics in her music, but the Indian people were not the only targeted audience for the music she wanted to produce. She said, Social media demands a certain kind of online presence that is more expansive. Young artists should use this characteristic to their advantage by carefully creating a worldly identity through the content they post. When I say worldly, I do not mean Western or lacking connection with my Indian culture. I use the term worldly because there is a growing consensus among my artist friends about the demand for Indian content. Not in its classically traditional sense always. For example, I do not think people in South Korea, Japan, or Cuba want to listen to classical Indian music in its purest rendition. Nevertheless, they definitely want to listen to Indian music if it is made more relatable through fusion with other popular music genres. If I infuse EDM with Bollywood beats and sounds, I believe it will be more accessible across cultural and territorial boundaries. My followers include aspiring and new composers from Finland, Turkey, Russia, the U.S., and other countries.

Janet had spent hours studying the social media practices and content of established and amateur music composers and other micro-celebrities. Interacting with other social media users and music enthusiasts from different countries online helped her identify shared guidelines of conduct: how to communicate online, what kinds of discussions and identities she should perform to increase her following, and, most importantly, what type of music she should create to cater to the sensibilities of always-online, globally oriented, and locally based audience groups. When you ask Janet how she makes these decisions on what to include or exclude and how to perform an identity online, she says it is “common sense.” The common sense Janet referred to is one dimension of what we define as transcultural digital imaginaries. She observes others, mimics them

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sometimes, and adopts online behavioral patterns and practices that enable her to have meaningful relationships with her online global network. Her understanding of the collective frameworks of online conduct and expectations also seeps into the type of content she creates and how she shares and promotes it. She emphasized that social media had made it possible for her to imagine different types of audience groups consisting of people from several cultural backgrounds and social situations and with unique identities and choices. Some of her professional choices as a music composer were rooted in an awareness that as an independent artist on social media, she cannot be rigid and cast herself into binaries of West versus Indian. Accordingly, she created an online identity that was neither “too modern for the mainstream Indian audience nor too alien for the people from other cultures,” she explained. Her online identity and content were a rich blend of her local cultures and the aesthetics of globally connected young people mediating their culture, experiences, and values through digital media. She borrowed from collective frameworks of meaning-making to navigate online spaces. Janet drew interpretive forces from the transcultural digital imaginaries to mold her online practices. She also relied on transcultural digital imaginaries to imagine a future vision: how she could become an online sensation in music composition. She curated her present-day practices according to the transcultural digital imaginaries but also tried to identify ways those practices could help her achieve her future goals and desires. Janet’s online practices and present-day understandings of shared expectations and conduct online informed her future aspirations for herself and technology. Transcultural digital imaginaries sustain and reinforce a set of practices, sensibilities, shared expectations, and guidelines. As imaginaries evolve, so do people’s aspirations. This is because evolving digital imaginaries sustained through technological changes and innovation test the boundaries of acceptable or unacceptable and achievable or impossible. Increasing technical capabilities also change how people process information, language, and engagement with online spaces and realities. Technological changes and the rise in accessibility introduce changes in our transcultural digital imaginaries and create new possibilities and opportunities to emerge. These opportunities, capabilities, and possible practices have the potential to disrupt existing and past aspirations and introduce new ones. Transcultural digital imaginaries, therefore, should be used as an analytical tool to understand the present-day practices, behaviors, and contexts that can change future goals and desires of people. In the following section, we elaborate on how transcultural digital imaginaries feed people’s aspirations and further percolate into their local lives in offline contexts. Such an analysis will help us highlight the use and pervasive presence of transcultural digital imaginaries in our everyday lives, relationships, and cultures.

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ASPIRATIONS: FROM ONLINE TO OFFLINE A common observation in our conversations and work with young people in cities of India is that the digital is an aspirational space. Unlike their offline spaces, social media offered opportunities to socialize with people in an incredibly multicultural setting. It does not mean that all young people actively sought and used these opportunities and expanded their online networks to include people with varied cultural backgrounds. Young people sometimes created closed and homogeneous online communities for security or due to a lack of exposure and confidence to venture out of their comfort zones. However, the mere act of inhabiting online spaces and using digital technologies designed to support multiple connections and communications simultaneously equipped young people with technical capabilities and skills. These capabilities and skills are at the heart of globally connected and technically mediated communities. For example, the digital aesthetics of social media require young people to pay close attention to the identities they create and perform online. The intentional and required creation of such identities reminds them of the various multiple identities and practices other people possessed and articulated. Jyoti’s narration of her social media engagements and interactions explains this phenomenon. As a 21-year-old girl, Jyoti spent nearly three to four hours daily on social media. She is a micro-influencer on Instagram with six thousand followers and shares content to promote herself as a yoga enthusiast and an indigenous food activist. She regularly creates content documenting her yoga practices and offers advice on diets, nutrition, and the economics of the food industry. When she creates content, Jyoti always includes English subtitles, if her videos and reels are in Hindi, to reach wider audiences from different cultures and countries. People around the world are learning about different food cultures and fitness regimes. Jyoti has clients from six countries in her online yoga classes: China, Nepal, the United States, England, France, and Australia. Her clients are English-speaking urban dwellers who have had some experience traveling and living in a new country. Also, she could create a portfolio of international clients because her indigenous food advocacy and yoga-related content on social media were perceived as authentic. To design her content, and consequently brand herself as a yoga and nutrition enthusiast through it, Jyoti spent hours engaging with the content of other creators from various cultural backgrounds as an audience. She had to learn new production and crafting skills, including the technical expertise required to harness the potential of digital networks and platforms. She explained her process of creating content to have an international appeal,

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Observing other successful creators on social media and then mimicking them is the ground rule to increase engagement. You learn some basic skills and competencies when you spend much time scrolling through social media. It is like learning a language as a child. Your parents speak it, they communicate with you, and you learn. And, it is more than that. You do not only learn the language, but you also learn the meaning. You learn what “no” means and when it is applied. It shapes your behavior. It is the same with social media. The more time you spend online interacting with content and people, you catch up with the rules and guidelines. And once you know them, you shape your content and online identity accordingly.

Jyoti’s explanation supports our argument that transcultural digital imaginaries are dynamic and relational and evolve through continuous interaction between digital media, user practices, and sociocultural contexts of technology use. Transcultural digital imaginaries are activated and sustained when people use collective frameworks to understand expected norms and guidelines of digital interactions, identity articulations, and create content. Transcultural digital imaginaries are unique because the affordances of digital media and platforms constitute them. These affordances are actual or imagined properties of digital media. Affordances determine and constrain specific uses of digital platforms. Furthermore, digital media affordances not only embed the platform’s technical capabilities. Imagined and actual use of digital media emerges through the relationship between technological capabilities and the social and cultural contexts surrounding digital media use (Ronzhyn, Cardenal, and Rubio 2022). Imagined use of digital media (Nagy and Neff 2015) may not be aligned with its actual use or rational knowledge, but it influences online behaviors and practices. According to Jyoti, digital media did not pose any major security and data privacy threats to users. She was, therefore, comfortable sharing sensitive information with her clients over Instagram messenger, including her bank account number and other required banking information to receive her yoga class fees. She did not use antivirus software on her phones and computers. As collective frameworks of acceptable norms are at the heart of transcultural digital imaginaries, so are personal experiences that are complicated and non-generalizable. Kamya, a 19-year-old college student from Bangalore, imagined that social media algorithms were designed to give more power to people from the global South. She believed that “social media was the great equalizer” because it had been possible for her, a small-town girl from Bilmora, to amass ten thousand followers in a few months. It is well documented that while algorithms determine what users watch on their timelines and how advertisements and content are ranked, they are not designed to purposely create equitable and democratic horizontal networks

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of communication. Kamya imagines digital media as a space where aspiring actors like her can compete with nepotism and classist biases prevalent in the entertainment industry worldwide. “You do not have to be a star kid to gain a massive fan following now; you should be talented and know how to use your socials. Digital media will do the rest,” she explained. As we narrate Jyoti and Kamya’s imagination of the transcultural nature of digital spaces, we also initiate a discussion around evolving personal aspirations and desires. For example, Kamya had different goals before she amassed a huge following through her social media content. She wanted to become a dance teacher at a private school in her city and train young kids in classical dance. When she posted her dance videos on Instagram and Facebook to market the personal classes she ran during the evening hours, she started getting requests from people in different Indian cities to schedule online classes for them. To start the business of online dance classes, she first accepted clients from cities across the country. Within the first few years, she realized that more international visitors were engaging with her online dance reels and videos and messaging her with requests to enroll in her online classes. Kamya did not want to remain a dance school teacher anymore. She took an online beginner’s course on social media marketing and started to brand her social media profiles and curate content. She wanted to self-brand as an outward-looking, locally grounded dance teacher with an international clientele. As a result, she spent time adding textual and voice-over descriptions (primarily in English) for various Bharatnatyam dance poses covered in her videos. She assumed that international followers would have little background in Bharatnatyam, so she created a series on her social media for beginners. The aesthetics of such series targeting audiences from different cultures were globally oriented and technologically driven. She used the correct hashtags, interacted with followers to build engagement on her posts, and also organized watch parties to encourage new dancers to observe the online classes she conducted. She explained the transcultural aesthetics of her social media participation, It is an attempt to allow more people to access my content, regardless of language, culture, and other barriers. In the pre-digital age and when I had a guru who taught me Bharatnatyam, you were supposed to occupy the same physical space and communicate reverence through your presence, not just movements and gestures. Digital media have changed the teacher-student relationship, but it has also increased the scope of my work. I can promote this dance form in multiple ways and encourage more people to take it up. We can preserve our heritage by using digital spaces to teach them this dance form, and they will take it forward in their offline spaces.

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For Kamya, Jyoti, and other young digital media users in urban centers of India, transcultural digital imaginaries were a mix of technological and sociocultural possibilities. Transcultural digital imaginaries manifest in existing online articulations and practices. These imaginaries are, therefore, based on current forms of accepted online norms and conduct. An interesting point of inflection here is that many young people emphasized that their online performances and articulations were more aspirational and future-oriented than their offline practices. To say it differently, how they presented themselves online was the closest they could come to their aspired selves. Their local lives in offline contexts were not the first space where they experimented with their aspired selves. Zeba explained during the New Year party that she could not enact her online identity in front of her family and friends. She is an outgoing girl on social media who engages with strangers through the consumption and circulation of content. She posts photos of travel destinations in different countries, such as Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Turkey. Along with her photos, she narrates a cultural story about the place, a story that would interest people anywhere in the world. She writes travel blogs, creates free-to-download itineraries, and shares photos and videos. At first glance, it may seem that Zeba travels a lot, but all her content is developed through secondary research. Zeba had not visited the places she covered in her writing. She did not have the monetary resources to become a travel influencer. However, she was predisposed to use her social media to simulate “what it is to travel to these places and write about them like real, famous travel journalists,” she explained. Her offline and lived experiences were distant from her aspired self online. However, she had started initiating changes in her routines to realize her desire of becoming a world-famous travel blogger. Zeba could not visit foreign countries and travel destinations. She belonged to a middle-income family; no one in her community had traveled abroad for leisure. So, she explored hidden tourist spots in her city, especially unique heritage sites in Ahmedabad, and clicked photos and recorded videos. She started posting about these local sites to attract more foreign engagement on her social media profile. Designing novel strategies to allow facets of her online aspirational self to materialize in her offline context encouraged Zeba to ground more firmly in her local realities. She realized that documenting foreign travel might appeal to upper- and middle-income people in India. However, if she wanted to brand herself as a travel blogger and expert for a global audience, it was important to offer a glimpse into the local and less explored places in her city. Zeba said, These local places are a unique selling point of my social media brand as a travel blogger. Every foreign person knows about Paris, London, Vancouver, or Japan.

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Few of them would know about Jama Masjid or Sabarmati Ashram. I have had many inquiries about these places from people visiting India from different countries. They want authentic, local experiences.

Zeba used stories of foreign tourist places on social media to reflect her aspiration to travel abroad. She imagined that digital media offered opportunities to create an online identity close to her aspired self. While it was challenging to materialize this aspired self entirely in her offline spaces, such aspirational articulations online have implications for her offline and lived realities. Zeba’s experiences and those of other young people in our work reflect the core dimensions of digital transcultural imaginaries. The first dimension of these imaginaries includes how digital media users access, inhabit, and draw from these collective frameworks of norms and guidelines. The first dimension is present-focused, rooted in existing behaviors and practices. The second dimension of digital transcultural imaginaries manifests through the affordances of digital media and platforms. For many young people, the sociocultural and technical possibilities afforded by digital media helped them imagine a future-focused aspirational identity. In other words, Gen Z could craft and perform an aspired self online and participate in online interactions and relationships to understand what it meant to be their aspired selves. Transcultural digital imaginaries, therefore, are simultaneously futurefocused. Finally, translating these aspirations into their lived experiences and offline contexts, young people gradually introduced small and mostly nonsubstantial changes in their routines, values, and norms. They found small strategies to retain the comfort of their local lives and negotiate with its constraints. They brought their understanding of the world and global forces into conversation with their local cultures. In doing this, they prioritized their aspired self (i.e., what they wanted to become). These negotiations with their local norms and the resulting changes in their lived experiences feed into their interpretation of the collective framework they use to examine their social existence in relation to a present-focused set of practices and guidelines and a future-centered approach to exploring possibilities of becoming. Transcultural digital imaginaries are, therefore, grounding and evolving as digital affordances, user practices, and personal desires change and where negotiations take precedence over binary (global versus local, now versus future, macro institutions versus individuals) and fixed ways of identifying and being.

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FROM TRANSCULTURAL IMAGINARIES TO FUTURE BUILDING The previous deliberation has pointed to an important characteristic of transcultural imaginaries—they are aspirational and future-oriented. Transcultural imaginaries encourage people to envision different or alternative futures regarding their identities, practices, and lived realities. For transcultural imaginaries to be materialized in the lived realities of young people, multiple and synergistic actions are required from all the stakeholders—young people and their parents and families, of course, but also governments and public institutions, UN agencies, corporations and the private sector, civil society actors and nonprofits, policymakers, administrators, and academics/ educators. Before we outline the potential action by different stakeholders, it would help to embed them in the historical context of debates surrounding the future of the global information and communication system. The McBride commission report, Many Voices One World, published in 1980 by UNESCO, started an important debate on the world information and communication order and global media flows. Later, these debates continued under the umbrella of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005. The report specifically highlighted issues of commercialization and concentration of the media, and it drew attention to inequalities and imbalances in global communication and information flows. Mansell and Nordenstreng (2006, 16) explained, When the MacBride Report was published, its authors were very concerned about the dominance of the industrialized countries—and especially the United States—in the production and distribution of media content. Today, interest is focused on the impact of the forces of globalization on media production (in terms of both concentration of ownership and opportunities for self-publishing through blogs and other new Internet-supported services) and in the resilience of local audiences in terms of their capacity to resist external media or to translate their content into their own cultural milieu.

It is a sad reality that although both the report and deliberations at WSIS generated more awareness, brought about some policy changes, and encouraged academic research, many of the problems identified by the report persist even today despite the hope that internet-based technologies and the consequent democratization of communication would alleviate many of these problems. There are still huge inequalities at both local and global levels. Most global poor, especially those from the poorest parts of the global South, lack access

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to skills, devices, data, and information. Most of the young people whose experiences are included in the book belong to middle- and higher-income families, but there are still numerous Gen Zers who cannot access devices and data. Surveillance from governments, corporations, families, and communities is spreading with the increased uptake of new technologies. Though young men and women are equally susceptible to institutional and market surveillance, women from poor social-economic strata face the maximum assault on their privacy in their local environment (Bhatia et al. 2023). Our earlier chapters point to some visible cracks in the old order defined by a oneway information and communication system flow. The global flows, however, are far from equal or balanced. Risks for participating in the information society persist for young people. Even though there is a sense of power in being acknowledged as legitimate consumers and skilled professionals, the balance of power ultimately skews in favor of multinational corporations, and Gen Zers are experiencing increasing levels of precarity and conflicts in their lives. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child1 is the most authoritative document on human rights concerning children. It brought the children’s agenda to the global platform and compelled multiple stakeholders to address the gross violation of children’s rights. While the UNCRC offers a useful way forward in debating larger questions about children’s rights, scholars have critiqued it from various disciplinary perspectives. Veerman (2010) and Livingstone (2019), among others, have drawn attention to the need for it to be updated to suit the digital environment because when it was formulated, the internet had barely entered the quotidian lives of children. The critics have also noted that “the notion of an independent rights-bearing individual self does not speak to the social realities in the Global South, where children are not part of nuclear families but rather live in larger networks of family, clans, villages, and communities” (Asthana 2017). Based on his work with Palestinian young people, Asthana (2017) has called for not just updating but reimagining UNCRC to address issues such as privacy, safety, internet governance, privatization of public spaces and services, ethics, and social justice. We conclude this chapter by exploring initiatives by different stakeholders to ensure that the hopes of Gen Z and the next generations are supported and that their aspirations translate into reality. That includes initiatives on governing and nurturing equitable information exchange and making their local lived realities more conducive to benefiting from multidirectional global flows. Multiple national governments in the global South have realized the power of digital media. This has led to two types of outcomes. On one side, e-governance, infrastructural development, and digital literacy and skill development are given priority in the national agenda. At the same time, internet bans

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have become a tool for governments to arrest dissent. Policy and regulations concerning communication and information flows are yet evolving. We still have the potential to shape these policies and regulations at the level of formulation and implementation in such a way that we minimize digital as well as sociocultural, economic, and political inequalities. Corporations will play a big role in ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusivity. They must embrace the motto that doing well is important, but doing good is as important. Localizing their products, designing devices and software and pricing them in a way that democratizes communication in the true sense, and treating digital labor with dignity are some of the recommended actions. Multinational corporations need to pay better attention to the needs of the young people from the global South, and treat them with respect (i.e., as legitimate consumers and not just as mass markets for profit-making). Beginning with the WSIS, civil society organizations and nonprofits have increasingly contributed to creating a more level playing field for marginalized groups. They work as advocacy pressure groups, initiate social change, and promote equity issues as a priority on the public agenda. They have also been key drivers of media and information literacy initiatives in the global South. Despite recommendations and some government intervention, media and information literacy have not been an integral part of the formal educational system. It is now crucial for educators and families to recognize the importance of multiliteracy for the young people of the global South to fully participate in the information society and the digital public sphere. Here, we would like to broaden the concept of multiliteracy, initially developed in response to the changes in how people communicate. Multiliteracy acknowledges the changes brought about by the new media technologies and the diversity in language use across countries and cultures. The approach has four key aspects: situated practice, critical framing, overt instruction, and transformed practice (Cope and Kalantzis 2015; Yuan 2017). We propose strengthening these aspects by consciously including geopolitical, historical, media and information, and eco-media literacy in formal and nonformal pedagogies. Young people in the global South often have a glossed-over idea about the concepts of global and globalization. In our interaction with students in India, money, luxury, aspiration, and inaccessibility are often associated with the concept of global. Most of the content children consume about global cultures and global societies is limited to countries of the global North and tries to glorify travel, migration, and education abroad, among others. The concept of “global” is often linked with the desire for upward social mobility (Bhatia, Arora, and Pathak-Shelat 2021). We recommend education that exposes young people to histories of colonization and subjugation and opens the debates on neo-colonization. Students should be sensitized about the distributed nature of power (Foucault) and

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their positions as dominant and dominated simultaneously. This is not to create anger, guilt, or analysis paralysis in young people but to encourage them to participate in global spaces with sensitivity and perspective. Media and information literacy programs must be scaled up many folds to equip Gen Zers from the global South with a public voice and the technical competency to tell their own stories with authority. Civil society organizations and educational institutions can play a supportive role here in helping young people acquire diverse audiences. Peer learning is an excellent source for young people to thrive in global digital spaces. Ultimately, we must trust young people to design their learning experiences and collaborations (Bhatia et al. forthcoming). Global research on young people has articulated their expectations, desires, and hopes for the kind of world they want to live in and for the kind of internet that will contribute to such a world (Winther et al. 2020; Livingstone, Stoilova, and Nandagiri 2019; Third 2022; Pathak-Shelat et al. 2022). Children provide a clear vision of the digital world they want. They want a more private, protective, and transparent digital world that is age-appropriate and enables their interests, relationships, and opportunities. They believe that parents, governments, and commercial companies should respect their rights, particularly those that would give them access to truthful information in their own language, privacy, and protection from violence and inappropriate content. They also want to maximize the benefits of being online, in particular, to create and shape a better world (Third and Moody 2021). Based on her work with over five thousand children in seventy countries, Amanda Third (2022) argues that “given space, time, the right support, and a sense that their opinions count, children across cultures can be powerful agents of change. Time and again, I’ve seen first-hand how children from diverse contexts use their participation to imagine a better world and to contribute to their communities and the decision-making that impacts their everyday lives.” Young people certainly have a vision for the future they aspire to inhabit and the resilience to take on challenges in the path to fulfill their aspirations. However, we cannot expect them to accomplish this mammoth task alone. NOTES 1. For more information, visit https:​//​www​.ohchr​.org​/EN​/ProfessionalInterest​/ Pages​/CRC​.aspx.

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Index

advocacy, 49, 50, 60, 97, 111, 118 agency, 14, 16, 17, 23, 29, 34, 38, 39, 41, 46, 58, 89, 105, 128, 130, 133, 137, 144 Ahmedabad, 11, 30, 35, 44, 49, 76, 82, 92, 114, 135, 143 algorithm, 102, 112 Anime, 8, 41–45 anonymity, 36, 40, 56, 125, 134 anti-Dalit, 2 anti-queer, 70 aspirational reaching out, 83–86 aspirational reality, 45 asynchronous communication channels, 88 authoring strategic narratives, 105 Bahrain, 69 Bahujans, 53, 55 Bangalore, 11, 49, 52, 57, 61, 62, 75–78, 112 between subversion and compliance, 17, 105 Black Lives Matter, 2, 3, 6, 54, 124, 137 blood tax, 59 #blueforsudan, 64–66 body positivity, 97 boundary-crossing, 98 brand-conscious lifestyle, 94

Brazil, 54, 55, 91, 124, 129, 134, 137 BTS, 1, 25–28, 83 BTS Army, 25–28 buycott & boycott, 95, 96 Canada, 4, 5, 19, 42, 64, 74, 81, 90 caste, 3, 53–55 civic activism, 14, 57 civil society, 61–70 climate activism, 49, 50–52, 95 climate justice, 50–53 collective frameworks of the present, 107–15 collective identity, 27, 49, 50 communal violence, 5, 68 consumer movement, 95–98 consumption practices, 76–96 context collapse, 57 cosmopolitan-neoliberal online persona, 31–34 cosplay, 42, 43 counter-culture, 44 critical framing, 118 cultural hackers, 21 culturally-grounded methodology, 57 cultural proximity, 28, 29, 138 cultural reproduction, 87–89 cultural texts, 2–23 cultural toolkit, 85 143

144

Index

cyberbullying, 36 #dalitlivesmatter, 2, 3, 53, 54, 55 Dalits, 2, 6, 53–55 Delhi, 1, 10, 11, 44, 45, 50, 53, 55, 56, 61, 73–80, 93, 101 deliberate disengagement, 37–39, 46 Digital India, 31, 76 digital labor, 77–119 digital literacy, 117 Discord, 9, 13, 35–40 dispersed activism, 68–70 DIY, 19, 80–83 Do-it-yourself, 80 earth advocates, 95 EDM, 108–10 e-governance, 117 Egypt, 16, 49, 64, 133, 144 electronic dance music, 108–10 enabling diversity, 43–47 encrypted communication channels, 66 enterprising individual, 32 environmental sustainability, 52 ethnic loyalties, 8–11 Facebook, 4, 9, 14, 18, 19, 25, 26, 30, 32, 40–44, 64, 68, 92, 103, 113 fast fashion, 95–98 fleeting solidarities, 69–71 formal education, 82, 118 fund-raising, 58, 61 future-oriented, 107, 108, 114, 116 gaming communities, 30, 35–46 gaming leagues, 35 gender minorities, 56, 61 gig economy, 77–81 global ambassador, 95 global interpersonal relationships, 62–67 globalization-generated proximity, 7 global-local, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 16, 17, 22, 94, 105 global North, 13, 59, 64, 82, 83, 95

global South, 10, 11–15, 46, 52, 61–63, 89, 91–119 global transformation, 2–10 GOI, 12, 31 Government of India, 12, 31 Gulf countries, 70 Halloween, 83–85 Hallyu, 25–30 hidden solidarities, 66–67 homogeneity, 6 homogenization, 6, 15 human rights, 54, 63–66, 117 hybridity, 6, 15, 131 identity performances, 102–4 image consultant, 77, 87 image makeover, 87 imaginaire, 104–6 incels, 36 indigenous & generational art, 92 Instagram, 2, 12, 14, 18, 19, 25, 56, 84, 85, 92, 96–113 international markets, 88–98 internet affordances, 46 internet shutdowns, 64–66 interpretive frames, 52 interweaving global and local, 105 intimacy, 5, 41, 46, 59 Japanese manga, 8, 12, 44 Jio, 1, 14 June 3 massacre of 2019, 64 K-dramas, 25, 27, 73, 84 Kenya, 65, 66, 80 knockoff products, 93 knowledge workers, 75–78 K-pop, 1, 5, 10, 12, 18, 22, 25–30, 84, 90 Kuwait, 69 labor market, 75–95 Lahu ka Lagaan, 59–61 leisure, 14, 39, 41, 46, 89, 114

Index

145

LGBTQ, 42, 43, 69 Libya, 64 LiFE, 12 local anxieties, 91–92 luxury products, 93–95

Otaku, 41–47 over-the-top (OTT), 11, 14, 26, 31, 73, 87, 89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 118, 127, 129, 139 overt instruction, 118

Macbride Report, 116 macro forces of power, 6–8 Malaysia, 89 Many Voices One World, 116 materializing global-local interconnections, 105 matrimonial advertisement, 74 menstrual equity, 60 Me Too, 55–59 micro-forms of lives, 5 military atrocities, 64–68 misogynistic cultures, 36 MOBA, 35 mobilization, 3, 70, 95 Movimento Brasil Livre, 55 multiliteracy, 118 multinational, 13, 54, 75, 76, 81, 89, 108, 117, 118 Mumbai, 2, 3, 11, 12, 25, 26, 50, 60, 75, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86, 90, 95, 108

patriarchal ideology, 3 patriarchy, 37, 56 performative compliance, 23 period tax, 61 personalizing cultural experiences, 105 Philippines, 89 pink tax, 61 playful circumventions, 105 playful improvisation, 21, 22 policymakers, 61, 116 posturing, 33, 34, 46 power relations, 5–21, 81 precarity, 73–79, 117 present-focused, 108, 115 primordial affiliations, 7–11, 18, 22–43 private communities, 41–46 pro-democracy movement, 64–70 protest generation, 14, 95 pseudo-feminism, 56 purposive non-assimilation, 39

nation-states, 29, 32, 53, 64 negotiating dynamic context, 67–71 negotiation strategy, 33, 67 neo-liberal definitions of agency, 17 Nepal, 63, 111 networked society, 54 Niti Ayog, 12 nomadic lifestyle, 78 nonprofits, 116, 118

Qatar, 69 QPR, 18–47 quotidian playful resilience, 13–46, 105, 123 quotidian resilience, 10–67

Occupy Wall Street, 55 online bois locker room, 36 online communities, 25–47 online harassment, 55, 56, 57, 58, 68 online learning communities, 30, 34, 46, 82 online thrifting, 95, 96 ontological insecurities, 98

Saudi Arabia, 69 self-reflexivity, 50 sense of belonging, 27–33, 42–46, 82, 131 sexual harassment, 55–58, 68 shielded forms of activism, 63, 64 Singapore, 89 situated knowledge, 23

repressed sexuality, 36 rite of passage, 76 romance, 4, 27, 30, 103

146

Index

slow fashion, 95, 96 social identities, 9, 23, 50, 86, 105 social imaginaries, 106 social media ethnography, 11 social movements, 4, 6, 51, 62, 139, 143 sociocultural mobility, 74–78, 86 solidarity rooted in dissonance, 50 South Africa, 60–66, 90, 97 South Asia, 35, 60–63 start-up culture, 12, 79, 80 strategic essentialism, 53, 69 streaming service, 90 strong theories, 6, 11 subjective experiences, 11, 14, 29 Sudan, 11, 51, 64–69 surveillance, 68, 117 tax on period, 61 TCP, 18, 20, 22, 23, 28, 33, 34–47, 82 tech-savvy, 74, 102 tech workers, 76, 78, 80–82 Thailand, 89, 114 Thanksgiving, 83 transcultural communication practices, 18–28, 34 transcultural digital imaginaries, 108–19 transcultural fan group, 43

transcultural friendships, 64–66 transcultural online community, 37 transcultural solidarities, 50–67 transnational funding organizations, 58 transphobic language, 38 travel journalist, 114 Twitter, 14, 25, 56, 63–68, 80, 124, 139 UNICEF India, 60 UN Information Center, 60 unorganized labor, 79 upskilling, 81, 82 urban markets, 78 UX designer, 31, 32, 56, 81, 82 veganism, 52 Vietnam, 89, 114 vlogs, 68 white-collar, 75, 77 women’s rights, 56, 58, 63 World Summit on the Information Society, 116 Yoga, 73, 86, 111, 112 zero-waste living, 97

About the Authors

Kiran Vinod Bhatia is a digital anthropologist working at the intersection of marginalization and digital media. Her research examines the role of digital media technologies, states, and corporations in enabling and sustaining the marginalization of vulnerable and low-income communities in Global South countries. She is interested in understanding how young people from low-income contexts in the Global South use and ascribe meaning to digital technologies. She hopes that highlighting the underexplored realities of digital media users in resource-constrained contexts will help build diverse, equitable, and inclusive digital structures and policies. Bhatia also studies the interlinkages between digital technologies, policies, protest cultures, and social movements. She has over eight years of fieldwork experience as a media educator in India and Sudan. Her scholarship promotes media literacy efforts in emerging markets and supports pro-democracy efforts worldwide. She is a senior researcher at FemLab, leading projects on user behaviors/ interactions, design cultures, and educational technologies in the field of creator and gig economy. As a program director for a Sudanese not-for-profit organization, her team, Al-Kashif, studies disinformation, internet shutdown, and digital activism. She has a doctorate in Mass Communications (minor in Anthropology) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also a fellow in Communication Management from MICA. Manisha Pathak-Shelat is professor of Communication & Digital Platforms and Strategies at MICA, Ahmedabad, India, and chairs MICA’s Centre for Development Management and Communication. She is the editor of the Journal of Creative Communications, published by Sage with MICA. Manisha believes in scholarship that is socially engaged, accessible, and global in scope. She considers her academic work as a way to make meaningful contributions toward a better world through teaching and writing. 147

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About the Authors

She has taught and worked as a media consultant and researcher in India, Thailand, and the United States. She has a PhD in Mass Communications with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Wisconsin– Madison in the United States, and in Education from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. Manisha’s research interests are media and information literacy, young people’s media cultures, inclusive design, communication for social change, new media, gender, and transcultural citizenship. The common thread that connects her work is the exploration of how ordinary citizens engage with media and use communication to experience agency, explore identities, and participate in social change. She has shared her research globally as a speaker and through her books, journal papers, book chapters, and articles. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Journal of Youth Studies, Education and Information Technologies, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Communication Inquiry, Journal of Children and Media, Comunicar, Media Asia, and Journal of Consumer Behavior, among others. Awards and fellowships include the Soviet Land Nehru Award, the Shastri Indo-Canadian Faculty Research Award, the Salzburg Seminar Fellowship, the TATA Fellowship for the Study of Contemporary India, the MICA AGK Award for meritorious service, and the lifetime achievement award for contributions to media and communication education by the Global Media Education Council. Manisha has been part of several international collaborations with researchers from Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, Egypt, and the United States. She represents MICA at UNESCO’s Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue University Network and as a member of the Global Kids Online and FemLab research networks. She has led several capacity-building programs for nonprofits, various state governments, the corporate sector, and international organizations.