Research
A Decade of Practice
Over the past decade, my research and creative practice have moved across different regions, communities, mediums, and methodologies — from ethnographic fieldwork with migrant industrial workers in Delhi, to community filmmaking with Adivasi communities in Jharkhand, to documentary production and curatorial work, to my current doctoral research on Indigenous media sovereignty.
- MA Dissertation, Ambedkar University Delhi — “On ‘Being’ or ‘Becoming’ a Migrant: Migrants’ ‘Life World’ through the Lens of Migration — A Study of Migrant Industrial Workers in Delhi.” Fieldwork in Delhi’s Patparganj and Wazirpur industrial areas examined how migrant workers were positioned as insiders or outsiders to the urban space through language, taste, education, and other social markers, using field ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation.
- MPhil Dissertation, Centre for Development Practice & School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi — “On Becoming ‘Ho’: It’s Not Just a Film — Community Film-Making in Turibasa, West Singhbhum, Jharkhand.” Fieldwork was based in Turibasa, a village near Chaibasa in southern Jharkhand, on the Jharkhand–Odisha border.
- Documentary Filmmaking & Curatorial Work (2017–2021) — concurrent with my role as Project Researcher / Research Curator at the Centre for Development Practice (Ford Foundation & Ambedkar University).
- Ph.D. Research (2021–present, UCLA) — organized around three sub-themes: (a) Indigenous Media and Documentary Studies, (b) Writing and AI, and (c) Digital Humanities.
Dissertation
Indigenous Interfaces: Visual Sovereignty, Digital Archives, and Adivasi Mediascapes in Jharkhand, India
My dissertation examines how Adivasi (Indigenous) media collectives in Jharkhand, India, create visual counter-archives that challenge colonial regimes of representation through participatory filmmaking practices. The project sits at the intersection of visual anthropology, documentary media, and archival studies, and is informed by fieldwork and interviews conducted in Jharkhand.
Interests & Areas of Work
My work sits across several overlapping fields, each showing up in a different part of my research and creative practice:
- Indigenous Media Studies — how Adivasi and other Indigenous communities use film and digital tools to represent themselves on their own terms.
- Visual Anthropology & Decolonial Art — participatory and community-authored filmmaking as a way of unsettling colonial regimes of representation.
- Critical & Community Archival Studies — who gets to build, hold, and access an archive, and what that means for communities whose stories have historically been documented by others.
- Digital Humanities — using digital tools and methods to analyze, present, and preserve cultural and archival material.
- Political Economy of Media Production — the funding, labor, and institutional structures that shape whose stories get made and distributed.
- Writing Pedagogy & Curriculum Design — building writing- and media-based courses that connect critical theory to hands-on, critical-making assignments.
- Project & Community Management — organizing conferences and running collaborative research and media projects with community partners.