Dear colleagues,

Very excited to share my recent chapter, “Networked Afterlives: Necropolitical Algorithms and Rumours as Acts of Resurrection,” published in The Digital Life of Grief: Online Mourning in the Age of Hashtags, Algorithms, and Social Media, edited by Katrin Gerber, Larissa Hjorth, and Crystal Abidin.

Drawing on sensory ethnography of the 2020 Delhi pogrom, the chapter develops networked afterlife to theorise how violent deaths continue to act politically through the circulation and misattribution of images, rumours, and digital traces. It conceptualises rumour as an anticipatory form of this afterlife and algorithmic resurrection as the mechanism through which past violence is repeatedly reactivated within necropolitical infrastructures, keeping some deaths politically active and usable across time.

The chapter is open access: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003712169-12

I would also like to share an article I published earlier, “Phantoms of the Drains: Imaginations of Conflict in Everyday Infrastructures,” in Contemporary South Asia. Here, I trace the afterlife of the 2020 Delhi pogrom through an unlikely ethnographic object, the city’s neglected nullahs (municipal wastewater drains). I follow the drains' opacity, chemical thickness, movement, and capacity to conceal and erase, making them sites of speculation, where rumours of unrecovered bodies, partial memories, silences, and mistrust of the state give uncertainty a durable social life. Through sensory ethnography, I examine how this uncertainty enters the body and everyday movement through quickened crossings, hesitation, avoidance, smell, atmosphere, and unease, while WhatsApp images and rumours continually move the haunting between screen and street. I develop the concept of the “trauma trove” to describe how ordinary infrastructure can sediment unresolved violence through the entanglement of materiality, caste and state abandonment, embodied memory, speculation, and digital circulation.

Open access article’s link: https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2026.2649745

Both pieces emerge from the same broader ethnographic engagement with the afterlives of communal violence, while approaching those afterlives through different material and mediated forms. I would love your feedback and thoughts on these pieces.

This new book, The Digital Life of Grief: Online Mourning in the Age of Hashtags, Algorithms, and Social Media, edited by Katrin Gerber, Larissa Hjorth, and Crystal Abidin, is a particularly timely and wide-ranging collection that brings together compelling work on how grief, mourning, and the politics of loss are being transformed by algorithms, hashtags, platform economies, digital memorial practices, and emerging cultures of online remembrance. (https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003712169)

Best wishes,
Soma

(Connect with me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/somabasu.com)