Introduction rary media which draw on a variety of critical resources. To this end, we tried to have in our workshop media activists, cultural critics and researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to think together about the new questions we need to be asking today regarding the media. We would like to think that we made a small effort in the direction of evolving new 4 concepts for the study of media in India as well as rethinking strategies for intervening meaningfully in media debates. Our attempts to find conceptual frameworks produced in India did not meet with much success. [One of the things we did was to look at bibliographies provided by Indian writers on TV, for instance; to give just one example, the book Affirmation and Denial by Prabha Krishnan and Anita Dighe which looks at the construction of femininity in Doordarshan programmes has a bibliography with 92 references, out of which only 19 are Indian sources, with the majority of them being data analyses or reports.] Except for the writings of a small handful of critics, we could not find much that resonated with our concerns. We have, therefore, had to invent our methodologies as we went along, and our projects will necessarily bear the marks of our conceptual struggles. One of the crucial differences of our work from the mainly western work we've mentioned is that you will not find in our analyses the clearly demarcated filmic text, or TV text (whether defined as episode, or serial, or flow) which is then explicated by the critic. In other words, film, TV or the newspaper is not a "pure" object for us, and our questions are not simply "media questions" but are seen as structured by a particular political-historical field, by the context in which we live. We have been interested, therefore, not just in cinema or television programme as text, but in the institutions and practices of these media and their audiences. Importantly, our perspectives are shaped by an interest in cultural critique, and our interpretations of texts and institutions also attempt to reveal the political stakes in media debates. The new visibility of women in the media, both as objects of representation and as producers of programmes, is an index, in some ways, of the success of the women's movement. This success, however, can also be seen as problematic in other senses> as the Media Discussion at the 1995 evaluation of two decades of the women's movement (organised by CWDS and Asmita in Hyderabad) showed. While today larger numbers of women work in the electronic and print media, there has been a paradoxical de-emphasizing of women's issues. Wary of being slotted as "women's issue" persons, women journalists and producers are insisting on their ability to be part of the mainstream media. At the same time, the intricate links between programn ing and advertising, for example, result in the increased targeting of women as consumers. The depictions of women in both prime time and daytime TV programmes on DD and satellite channels as well as female viewers and theirresponses need to be systematically analysed to understand how they too are invited to participate in the creation of the new Indian in the age of globalization. Women's dissatisfaction with their lives, with the unequal structures of our society, its denial to women of access to opportunities, all these are mobilized in innovative ways by the print and electronic media. We see an increased emphasis on the individual; and on the Journal of Arts 6* Ideas