MERiSA is an academic working group that supports ethnographic research, multi-modal scholarship, and public discussions about South Asia.
We aim to build an inclusive community across institutional borders to think through methodological, theoretical, and ethical challenges of doing research in global South Asia, focusing particular attention to questions of media, mediation, and materiality.
Global South Asia
Understanding ‘South Asia’ as a list of current nations, or a shaded region on a map, is limiting.
MERiSA is making room for research that embraces the interconnected realities of lives across the subcontinent and around the world by furthering understandings about the geographies, migrations, diasporas, and imperial/postcolonial realities that recursively bring the subcontinent into global conversations.
Media Ethnography
MERiSA is inviting an expansive take on the genres and methods informing cultural research.
Considering the expanding appeal and use of ‘ethnography’ in interdisciplinary spaces, we aim to invite more perspectives into conversations that push the theoretical and methodological questions around the practices of ethnography forward.