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How can documentary film overcome 'engagement at a distance' to perceptively express urban experience? In this article, I examine modes of sensory mode of spectatorial engagement in Cities of Sleep (Dir: Shaunak Sen, 2015) to foreground the place of the body and lived experience in portraying homelessness in Delhi. Drawing upon the concept of social aesthetics that recognises the perception of culturally patterned responses produced in socio-cultural environments as a form of knowledge about the world, I make two arguments. A corporeal focus on the sensuous body conveys urbanisms translated into effect, sensation, and behaviour that invite bodily connections with the documentary's traditional outsiders and victims. Next, by revealing individual negotiations with subjectivity, the film dismantles the notion of unified on-screen subjectivities to challenge audience expectations of a stable self in documentary representation. Instead, subjectivities are shown to respond to social experience, and everyday encounters, revealing a terrain of power relations experienced corporeally and emotionally. Political meaning, therefore, I contend derives not so much from the verifiable value of evidence or documentary transparency but from the act of feeling, sensing and perceiving which attempts to collapse our distance from a represented subject and world 'out there'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do we learn about documentary forms, practices and relations when marginalised communities adapt documentary filmmaking to revise their historical conditions? The use of documentary filmmaking by Indian media collective Chalchitra Abhiyan responds to three historical circumstances: socially marginalised groups' under-representation in media industries, their misrepresentation in mainstream media products and the systematic deployment of mainstream traditional and new media forms to promote religion-based constructions of Indian national identity. In this media ecology, community use of documentary functions for social transformation, through representation and the relationships, methods and practices defined by the needs and goals of otherwise marginalised communities (such as Dalits and Muslims) who use media for functions of visibility and counter-representation. Examining media production and circulation together with the arena of social relations, I contend that 'embedded aesthetics' of documentary in this setting involves a representational focus on the collective in agentive processes that use documentary to recognise, deconstruct and reinterpret an accepted victimhood into a form of resistance (Ginsburg, Faye. 1994. 'Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media.' Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 365–82). Critiquing individualist social relations of mainstream media, concrete documentary practices re-organise digital and physical modes of media production and circulation by reference social and cultural functions, connecting filmmaking to lived histories of discrimination and possibilities of collective resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last few years have seen tremendous growth in the E-commerce industry. It has further improved due to COVID -19 pandemic. We are witnessing a change in consumer buying behavior and online shopping has become the new normal. In addition to safety consideration, the convenience factor has also encouraged the need for a much faster, efficient e-commerce operations. The e-commerce and the last-mile delivery operations has recovered from the impact of pandemic. It has bounced back with more positive energy and expected to grow more in the coming time. This has increased the number of vehicles doing last-mile delivery, which will increase fuel consumption resulting into increase in carbon emissions. The use of Electric vehicles for last-mile delivery may contribute towards the implementation of green supply chain logistics practices. Though consumer is still skeptical about purchasing Electric vehicles, because of high initial cost, limited range, and lack of charging infrastructure, this may not be the case with organizations involved with last-mile delivery. The reduction in the overall cost of delivery may turn to be beneficial to them by providing the required competitive edge of cost. Through this paper, the use of electric vehicles for last-mile delivery for different logistics providers will be studied and its benefits will be analyzed. Secondary data and use cases aligned with the objective will be used for this research work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can documentary as visual research method create a relay between feminist scholarship and the goals of feminist struggle? The use of co-constructed documentary responds to the three key concerns of feminist research: the situated nature of knowledge; the critique of hierarchical knowledge; and the intention towards emancipatory action. In other words, documentary-making opens out from a "discourse of sobriety" or representation of historical truth to encompass material transformative potential not merely through representational instruments but re-organized methods, relationships, and practices which critique documentary's social relations of power. The methodological challenge and opportunity involve the re-framing of documentary participant as collaborator with a stake in decision-making and documentary construction. Taken further, this agenda complicates the notion of documentary authorship and related concepts of creative autonomy, individuality and artist "voice." In this paper, I take up these questions to argue that dialogic authoring in contemporary art theory and practice drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin and Grant Kester) provides the theoretical foundation of an interactional concept of art generated between co-participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I investigate Indian filmmaking that emerges from the encounter between urban experience and documentary practice to examine how Indian feminist critique responds to neoliberal discourses of urbanism and gender. I consider the analysis of urbanism in Sameera Jain's documentary My Own City (2011) which depicts how women become "out of place" in neoliberal cities by focusing on the gendering of urban temporality, mobility and belonging, in relation to which women's subjectivities and performances are mediated in the nation's capital New Delhi. In the second section, I conceptualize the use of a deliberate strategy of place-specific performance in the film as "emplacement" which enables a visible field of gender performances and observable mutations of both, subject and space. In contrast to documentary staging or re-enactment, conceptualized as emplacement, the audiovisual recording of complex relations of "becoming" allows place-specific ecologies of material, sensory and social environments to be considered together in the construction of gender. Following the film, the paper outlines provocations regarding critical ways of conceptualizing place in how cultural forms like documentary represent gender in relation to geographies and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Film festival discourses position festival audiences in homogenized ‘local’ contexts where ‘local’ is geographically and conceptually located within national boundaries distinct from the global flows of cultural traffic that festivals facilitate. Particularities of audience constituencies, such as the relationship with cinema and the historical and cultural contexts in which cinema and festivals are experienced, are overlooked. Other approaches position audiences within the rubrics of the ‘cinephile’, a descriptor of audience behaviours that insufficiently references the consumption contexts and processes of meaning production that occur at each consumption site. Using personal observations from an encounter between documentary film and nascent audience constituencies at the Ladakh International Film Festival, India, the author suggests that desire for the cinematic object emerges from social and historical contexts exceeding cinephilia. A phenomenological approach affords a meaningful framework for locating its significance. Finally, the consumption of documentary film transpires as a unique instance of restoring equity within this cultural-historical cinema context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]