PhD Defense: Basanti Timalsina, HU
Please join the Department of Humanities (HU) for Ph.D. student Basanti Timalsina's doctoral defense, held in the Petersen Library, Walker 318, at 1 p.m. on July 9.
Timalsina's dissertation is titled “The Rhetoric of Indian Farmers’ Protest: History, Media Representation, and Protest Narrative.”
From the abstract:
Social media has played a significant role in protest mobilization, collaboration, and communication during major protest movements such as the Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Occupy movement, and others. Social media’s accessibility and adaptability enable the repurposing of media content to suit users’ need. In this dissertation, I examine the active, purposeful, and strategic use of media tools and symbolic acts of resistance, as well as their impacts on the representation of the Indian farmers’ protest movement of 2020-2021. While the farmers’ protest first began locally to repeal the three controversial farm bills introduced by the Indian government, the movement later intensified and transformed into a General Strike and garnered wider national and international attention.
Indian agriculture has long been the backbone of the Indian economy, with 82% of the farmers being “small and marginal” who rely on agriculture as their source of livelihood (FAO1, para. 4). The farming communities were directly impacted by the farm bills and prompted farmers to resist the government’s move. I connect the discussion to Indian agricultural history and argue that the allied community of subaltern farmers and farmer unions provided strong support for promoting narratives of farmer identity and union history. The study engages in online mainstream media and social media content analysis, establishing connections between media framing, representation of narratives, protest mobilization, and leadership roles, which offers an activist perspective on the rhetoric of protest. I argue that media strategies for the representation of activist-led alternative and counter-narratives were effectively employed through historical referencing, memory work, and narrative integrations. Further, the involvement and support of ‘organic intellectuals’ (Gramsci, 1971), along with the negotiation strategies adopted by the farmer leaders, contributed to the sustenance and success of the protest movement.