Engaging with Cultures and Administering the Arts in the Days of Digital Humanities

Dr. Shubhasree Bhattacharyya : Assistant Professor
HOD, Centre for Linguistics and Literature, Ramoji Krian Universe
In the last few years I have increasingly become a virtual person. I find meeting people tiring. My head often turns heavy with information trickling from different sources. The eyes are sore and the fingers ache by the end of each day of work. Yet, I seek solace in my Smartphone, often creating my artwork on virtual platforms. I write this to you knowingly that many of you feel and operate on similar lines. Such are our associations with the word “culture”; far from abstract and intimately connected to practices within our everyday. Yet, strangely enough, few other words are as misused. We inhabit this time-space, often mindlessly… of practicing love and hate in the name of culture. So how do we deal with what’s going on? How do we create our own niche? They say there is nothing that a bit of retail therapy cannot sort out. You and I have an easy solution. To walk into a shopping mall and buy things to our heart’s content. A pleasant soundtrack will guide us through to become more wonderful buyers than we already are, of products, and of concepts as products. But what are our options to see through and live these times, and not merely to survive them? Hold on. Are you trying to “interpret” what this piece of writing means? If so, I suggest you stop doing so. Shift the focus, right away; from “interpretation” to “engagement”.  Bridge the gap between the academic, the artistic, and the entrepreneurial approach in arts and culture. We here at RKU fondly call this PG diploma course “Culture Studies and Arts Management”. And this course is as much for the artist, the academic, the traveller, and the entrepreneur in you. 
                                We adopt an experiential approach here beginning with the awareness that we are not likely to change the world. But we will enable you to create your own niches in it. Theories and practices in culture studies, methodologies for working in the New Media, archival management, administering the arts, sound cultures and recording technologies in the contemporary - these are only a glimpse of the number areas you will become proficient in. Photo essays, multimedia pieces, virtual exhibitions, research proposals, academic and creative pieces will form a part of the portfolio you will take away with you. And you will intern with art galleries, arts organisations, museums, visual and sound archives, community outreach programmes, arts and cultural festivals. You are not merely a student but a learner and a collaborator in this campus housed in the world’s largest integrated film city. And after the RKU experience, you are an independent practitioner, an efficient collaborator, and an arts administrator alike. 
                  ____________________________________
Assistant Professor – Shubhasree is a Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. She taught “Comparative Indian Literature” at the University of Delhi and “Academic Writing” at Shiv Nadar University. Her artistic and academic interests include Work Music, Sound and Urbanity. She is a writer and translator and has made documentaries and short films. Shubhasree is a founder member of a Kolkata based soundscape project and is currently working on a virtual exhibition on work sounds.

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