Gayas Eapen

Bio

Gayas Eapen is a PhD candidate in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State University. His areas of research interest include materialist and digital media studies, platforms, infrastructures, and identity. His forthcoming dissertation project is focussed on supposedly anachronistic objects, technologies, and practices that offer evidence of parallel media technological or institutional histories informing the present moment; using them to interrogate identities and subjectivities and the role of media technologies in forming them.

Area(s) of Expertise

What is the place of digital media technologies within ever changing global contexts and emerging relations of power? To answer this question, my research examines mobile media infrastructures and practices to include a whole range of “older” technologies that are seen as pre-modern but are actually quite contemporary–including “DJ trucks”,  hookahs, motorbikes, pushcarts, jewelry, flags, and other similar artifacts. My work so far can be divided into two dimensions. The first engages with media technologies, distinguishing them as sites of mediation, infrastructure, and cultural techniques within specific historical and regional contexts. The second dimension focuses specifically on digital media, in its various forms and scales and its interaction with local sensory configurations, cultural practices of mediation, and situated and emerging dynamics of power. 

Publications

• Jugaad Infrastructures: Platforming Habituated Ecologies during the Kerala Floods of 2018 , Asiascape: Digital Asia (2022)
• MEDIATING PRECARITY THROUGH MOBILE APPS , AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research (2020)