For close to two decades — seventeen years, to be precise — I have worked with media as a way of
knowing. That work has taken the form of documentary film, photography, community archives, performance and
event documentation, curatorial projects, and, increasingly, computational and AI-assisted methods. The
mediums have changed and the tools have changed; the underlying question has not. It has always been a
question about representation: who holds the camera, who builds the archive, whose account of a place is the
one that gets kept.
Digital humanities is where that question has found its most complete form. As a field, DH sits at the meeting
point of humanistic inquiry and computational method — not merely using digital tools to study culture,
but treating the tools themselves as objects of critical attention, asking what they make visible and what
they quietly discard. For work concerned with Indigenous and Adivasi media, that critical dimension is not
optional. Archives are infrastructures of power. Metadata schemas encode assumptions about what a thing is.
Classification systems built elsewhere rarely hold communities that were classified by them. DH is
the field that gives me a vocabulary for building differently, and for arguing about why the building matters.
I am currently pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities at UCLA alongside my doctoral work,
which has given a formal frame to methods I had been arriving at through practice. What I find most useful
about DH is that it does not ask me to choose between the parts of my work. The fieldwork, the filmmaking,
the archival practice, the teaching, the scholarship, and the technical experimentation are not separate
tracks that happen to share an author. DH is the point at which they intersect — less a new direction
than an organic evolution, a name for what the whole body of work has been doing all along.
This page gathers the archival and digital projects. Films, photographs, and other media practice now have
their own page, Film & Media.
This page is still in development. More projects will be available to view soon.
Ways of Seeing
2021–present · Curator · Digital archive
An Adivasi (Indigenous) Media Archive
An archive of Indigenous and community media from Jharkhand and beyond, organized around one question: who
holds the camera, and who keeps the record? It brings together a searchable catalog of more than a hundred
films, collectives, platforms, state documents, and texts; a screening room; an annotated literature
review; and First Principles for community control over how Adivasi material is described and circulated.
It grew out of my work with the AKHRA collective in Ranchi and my doctoral research.
2026 · Digital humanities project · Interactive map
Infrastructures of Visibility
How the state maps Adivasi land into data, and how a counter-map might make Indigenous spatial knowledge
visible without exposing it. With an interactive map of Jharkhand built from Census and Forest Survey
data, and a proposal for a digital akhra. Begun in DH 221 with Dr. Nour Joudah at UCLA.
