Join MERiSA for a special media ethnography-focused writing workshop!

We are inviting applications from advanced graduate students who are working on questions of media and ethnography in South Asia (broadly construed) to come together for a workshop and mentoring session led by our advisory board member and accomplished media anthropologist, Tejaswini Ganti (NYU Anthropology and Program in Culture & Media).

Prof. Ganti is a long-term ethnographer of Hindi language cinema production (e.g., “Bollywood”). She has conducted many years of fieldwork amongst film production teams in Mumbai and within their extended professional communities of practice in India and the US, as well as in public domains of media circulation. She is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Duke University Press 2012) and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004, 2nd ed. 2013), and has written focus articles on topics ranging from uncertainty and ambiguity as a productive force in filmmaking to film censorship and the class and gender politics of film production culture. Additionally, she produced the documentary, Gimme Somethin’ to Dance too! (1995) which explores the significance of bhangra music for South Asians in the U.S.. Prof. Ganti is currently finishing a book on translation practices, language ideologies, language politics, and regimes of value in the Hindi film industry and its allied dubbing industry, for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2022. A passionate advocate for the value of ethnographic methods in media industries research, Prof. Ganti is a core faculty member in the the NYU Program in Culture and Media where she has mentored several generations of media anthropologists.

This workshop is an excellent opportunity for late-stage PhD students to air ideas they are developing as part of dissertation projects (or redeveloping coursework for further audiences) to a generous community of peers. Each workshop participant will present their prepared paper in 15 minutes, in the style of a conference (papers should be 8-10 double-spaced pages). They will then receive 1-1 feedback from Prof Ganti and share in feedback from the group.

Please note: The workshop is free and open to all current PhD students across institutions worldwide. To be able to provide the most insightful and enriching comments and feedback for all attendees, this session is capped at 4 participants.