Anirban Baishya

Talk Title: From Sovereignty to Solidarity: Theorizing the Selfie as Political Utterance in Contemporary India

November 12, 2026, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CT
In-person: 206 Ingraham Hall
Register for Zoom attendance here.

Presentation Description: Ever since it burst into the scene, popular discourses have negatively framed the selfie through pop-psychology accounts of Narcissism-related selfie disorders. Contrary to such accounts, this paper argues that we need to think of selfie culture as a digitally facilitated, and increasingly customizable mode of digital engagement in public life, that can be used for both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic purposes. With this starting postulate, I examine two contrasting poles of selfie mobilization. First, I discuss how the Indian state has mobilized the selfie to create what can be thought of as a consensus society through campaigns such as Beti Bachao Beti Padhao and Swachh Bharat. In contrast to this rationalization of the selfie’s potential under the sign of sovereign power, I discuss how a more organic form of selfie-solidarity can be seen functioning in anti-caste discourse and other forms of anti-hegemonic activism. This form of selfie-solidarity, what I call “withnessing,” is not merely a way of seeing and showing the self in the service of Narcissism and commodification, but a mode of being in community through digital gestures and utterances, and a form of imaging and imagining ethical futures. While both activist, solidarity-based mobilization and explicitly political mobilization of the selfie draw on the selfie’s affordances of networked visual communication, polyvocality, and viral circulation, they speak with and for different constituencies, and for different imagined communities.

About the Speaker
Anirban Baishya is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests lie at the intersection of visual and digital cultures, with a particular emphasis on media aesthetics, ethics and affect. His first book, The Selfie Machine: Selfies, Platforms and Digital Image Culture in India forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in November 2026.