Arnika is an interdisciplinary scholar of Thailand working at the intersections of the country’s aesthetic and political modernities. She is the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema and Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong. She is currently a professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.

Digital futures: Asian media temporalities and the expansion of the sphere of politics

Arnika’s project investigates the temporal properties of the digital and draws the counterintuitive properties of digital mediation in relation to the dis:connectivity of a global gaze on Asian political spheres. It examines the temporal efficacy of features unique to the digital sphere and inquires into the counterintuitive ways in which contexts of political constraint shape and facilitate political expression. Digital futures thereby interrogates assumptions about the teleologies of progressive politics and investigates digital media across political fields and national boundaries in a highly globalised Asia.