Accepted Panels

Movements require resource mobilisation but it also needs effective means of engagement especially at a time when information is communicated through mediated technologies. People have occupied city spaces, taken out marches and met with police repression. In all the marches and sit in at various cityscapes, the holding of visual placards with handwritten messages has become an important component of protest. These placards have provided a counter discourse and challenged the institutional and official decisions taken by the government and implemented on the people. Therefore, the counter discourses emerge out of the events where people mobilise and narrate their understanding in defiance of the present regime. At a time of attention economy where many of the corporate and state media are vying for the attention of people or censoring contents from being perceived by the people, humour and satire are deployed for negotiating the labyrinth of state and online censorship, and catching the attention of people to communicate the discourse of citizenship based on graded hierarchy and exclusion. Paul and Dowling (2018) stated about the Murdochisation of India’s mainstream media with rampant corporate corruption and less to nil coverage of the events that affect the marginalised community. Recent studies have cocentrated on the way online spaces are used  for alternative cultural production and dissemination where narratives of the marginalised communities are represented through the creation of digital channels (Chatterjee, 2022), websites creation of contents especially through memes (Jain & Shivaprasad, 2022) , and stand up comedy that provide counternarrative  to the hypervisible mainstream media. The paper will analyse selcted digitally mediated placards of the anti CAA and NRC protest sites into themes like upending rhetorics, gali as questioining authority, technology and development in understanding how humour and sarcasm are deployed for the creation of injustice symbols.