Shakuntala Banaji
Associate Professor and Programme Director MSc in Media, Communication and Development
Dr. Shakuntala Banaji lectures on International Media and the Global South, Film theory and World Cinema, and Critical Approaches to Media, Communication and Development in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. She is UK Principal Investigator for two large funded projects (CATCH-EyoU, Horizon 2020 & MEC Personalised Media and Participatory Culture in the Middle East). Dr Banaji's research interests include the theory, history and textual study of cinema, particularly South Asian media and Hindi films; the socio-political contexts of audiences, representations of class, sexuality, gender and ethnicity; tensions between popular and elite media; internet cultures; online civic participation; young people, children and cultural identities. She is currently researching the politics, ideologies and pedagogies of different forms of citizenship and participation offered to children and young people via the internet and other media in Europe, the Middle East and India. In particular, she is examining the representation of children and young people in different forms of media, the ways in which participation and agency are construed based on class, religion and ethnicity, and what different groups of youth and children learn from or make of the media they access in their daily lives. Her academic books include South Asian Media Cultures, (Anthem Press 2010), The Civic Web: Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation (MIT Press 2013) and Children and Media in India (Routledge, 2017). She is also the author a mystery novel, Truth Lake, set in India.