Core Members
Miriyam Aouragh is a researcher at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminister, where she also teaches internet politics. She completed her PhD from the University of Amsterdam, on the implications of the internet as it first emerged in occupied Palestine during the outbreak of the Second Intifada since 2000. In 2009 she was awarded a Rubicon grant for a research project at the Oxford Internet Institute. This combined ethnographic fieldwork and critical media analysis to examine the role of Web 2.0 inside/by activist movements in Palestine and Lebanon. Her work is published in several books and journals including her monograph, Palestine Online (I.B. Tauris 2011). In 2013 she was awarded a Leverhulme grant for a new research project to be undertaken at CAMRI, on the impact of online media and digital technology during revolution and counter-revolution in the Arab world.
Somnath Batabyal is a lecturer in Media and Development at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research focus is on media and identity politics in India. He is the author of Making News in India (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change (Routledge, 2011).
Paula Chakravartty is an associate professor, Gallatin School and Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University. Her research and teaching interests span comparative political economy of media industries, postcolonial and critical race theory, and social movements and global governance. She is the co-editor of Race, Empire and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins Press, 2013), the co-author of Media Policy and Globalization (University of Edinburgh Press and Palgrave, 2006), and co-editor of Global Communications: Towards a Transcultural Political Economy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
Sune Haugbølle is an associate professor in Global Studies and Sociology at the department for Society and Globalization at Roskilde University, Denmark. His work focuses on social memory, cultural production, and ideology in the modern Middle East. He is the author of War and Memory in Lebanon (2010), co-editor of Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East (Indiana University Press, 2013) and director of the research group Secular Ideology in the Middle East.
Min Jiang is an associate professor of Communication and Affiliate Faculty of International Studies at UNC Charlotte, also Research Affiliate at the Center for Global Communication Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Her work is interdisciplinary, blending new media studies, political communication, international communication, legal studies, and information science, focusing on digital technologies (search engines, microblogging), Internet policies, social activism, and digital diplomacy in the context of China.
Aswin Punathambekar is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (NYU Press, 2013), co-editor of Global Bollywood (NYU Press, 2008), and co-editor of Television At Large in South Asia (2013). His research and teaching focus on digital media and political culture, media industries and production cultures, media history, and public culture with a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. He is an associate editor of Media, Culture and Society and he currently co-edits the Critical Cultural Communication series for NYU Press. Website: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/aswinp/
Jack Linchuan Qiu is associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he serves as deputy director of the C-Centre (Centre for Chinese Media and Comparative Communication Research). His publications include World’s Factory in the Information Era (信息时代的世界工厂) (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2013), Working-Class Network Society (MIT Press, 2009), Mobile Communication and Society (co-authored, MIT Press, 2006), some of which have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Portugese, and Korean. He is on the editorial boards of 10 international academic journals, including six indexed in the SSCI, and is associate editor for the Journal of Communication. He also works with grassroots NGOs and provides consultancy services for international organizations.
Srirupa Roy is a professor of State and Democracy and Director, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany. She is the author of Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Duke University Press, 2007) and co-editor of Visualizing Secularism and Religion (University of Michigan Press, 2012) and Violence and Democracy (Seagull/Berg, 2006). She is currently working on a political history of mediated activism in India.
Tarik Sabry is a senior lecturer in Media and Communication Theory at the University of Westminster where he is a member of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and deputy director of the Arab Media Centre. He is author of Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday (I.B. Tauris, 2010) and editor of Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field (I.B. Tauris, 2012).
Guobin Yang is an associate professor of Communication and Sociology in the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (Columbia University Press, 2009).
Elaine J. Yuan is an associate professor in the Communication Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests focus on how various social relationships and institutions are mediated by new forms of social media and mobile media. She applies hermeneutic, historical, and comparative approaches to examining issues of privacy, community, nationalism, activism, and marketplace as mediated institutions, practices, and rituals. Some of her works are available at www.uic.edu/~eyuan.