SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

I conduct work at the intersection between anthropology, film history, visual/digital culture and media studies, integrating ethnography and history as well as theory and practice. My principal region of specialisation is India. I have carried out fieldwork in Pondicherry (Tamil Nadu) in 2006 and in Chennai (Tamil Nadu) and Bangalore (Karnataka) for a period of twenty months between 2007 and 2009. During fieldwork, I engaged with communities of documentary filmmakers, both at a virtual and physical level through online listservs, film festivals and regular film screenings. I also conducted archival research in film libraries and film archives such as the National Film Archive of India (Pune), the office of the Independent Documentary Producers Association (Mumbai), the Indian government’s official Films Division (Mumbai), the British Library (London) and the British Film Institute (London).

My PhD thesis is an historical ethnography of documentary film practices in India. I investigate the way contemporary film practices and practitioners from India conceptualise and debate their past. I argue that a critical examination of history is necessary to analyse a multitude of documentary film practices in the present. In my dissertation, I explore this subject both ethnographically and historically suggesting that the two approaches complement one another. In doing this, I place documentary film in India in relation to other media practices and challenge the way (documentary) film history is often written.
My current research investigates the relationship between technology, politics and aesthetics in the field of digital practices of image-making in India. I investigate the extent to which the contemporary production and consumption of digital images are interconnected and part of a transnational series of exchanges. This work builds on my previous research findings, which suggest that the growing (independent) production and consumption of audio-visual images in the subcontinent is shaping new subjectivities and communities. These new identities seem to (re)direct their image-making practice towards a transnational sphere and urge further investigation. My research is driven by the question, what are the cultural, political and aesthetical implications of this trend at a national and international level? As part of my engagement with these questions, I co-organised a panel discussion on the digital practices of image-making in South Asia during the 2012 Association of Social Anthropologists Conference (ASA12), in New Delhi and during the European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) in Lisbon, in July 2012.