Meet the 2024-25 Global Fellows

Sagnik Dutta is an associate professor at OP Jindal Global University. Their research interests include global/postcolonial approaches to counterterrorism, data colonialism, data justice, secularism, gender, and minority citizenship. Their work lies at the intersection of political theory, legal anthropology, postcolonial/decolonial theory, and gender studies.

As part of their fellowship, Dutta seeks to explore the interaction between various scales of legal activism and advance scholarship on algorithmic surveillance and critical studies of algorithms beyond abstract legal categories. Dutta's project is an ethnographic exploration of everyday negotiations between lawyers and digital rights activists, with algorithmic surveillance by the state in Delhi, India. By examining engagements with the law, Dutta aims to understand how local legal cultures shape legal consciousness in situations of surveillance.

Patrick Murphy is a professor of Media Studies and Production at Temple University. His research interests include global communication, environmental communication, development communication, ethnographic methods, and Latin American media and cultural theory. He is the author of The Media Commons: Globalization and Environmental Discourses and has co-edited several volumes. Murphy has been a visiting professor in the School of Communication and Humanities, Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Querétaro, Mexico, was a Fulbright-Garcia Robles fellow in Mexico, and served as a delegate of the American Documentary Showcase series in Ecuador.

As an #IAS_NUQ Global Fellow, Murphy will work on a book chapter on post-development, degrowth, and other decolonial discourses related to environmentalism. This chapter is part of a larger book project, "Communication, Development, and the Environment," which traces the place of the environment within the field of communication for development and social change (CDSC).

Chikezie Uzuegbunam is the MA Programme Coordinator and Deputy Head of School in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa, where he teaches Media Studies. He has published extensively on digital technology and young people, popular culture, political and health communication, and misinformation.

At #IAS_NUQ, Uzuegbunam will concentrate on the book project for the Mellon Foundation-sponsored initiative "Youth, Sociality, and Digitality in South Africa." As the project's lead investigator, he will map the process of sorting, cleaning, and strategizing the analysis of the varied categories of data gathered for this project. He will also work on the first chapter during his time at #IAS_NUQ.

Ratnamala Vanamalai is a professor and chair of Communication Studies at Mizoram University, India. She holds a PhD from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tamil Nadu, and has been a visiting fellow at Cornell University. Her research interests include caste and communication, media and minorities, race, space, and the city, as well as media and indigeneity.

During her fellowship at #IAS_NUQ, Vanamamalai aims to examine the dichotomy between modern media and traditional news values within a syncretic model of Mizo media in Mizoram, a north-eastern state of India that shares a border with Myanmar and Bangladesh. She will explore the role of the Young Mizo Association (YMA) in shaping the news culture in Mizoram and how Tlangau, the indigenous medium run by YMA, influences communication in Mizo society. She will work on her manuscript on the hegemony of state, religion, and indigeneity in media pluralism, focusing on the portrayal of Mizoram in Indian national media and the influence of religion on media practices in the region.