About
Project Title
Screens of Othering, Screens of Resistance: (Dis)Affect, Audiences, and the Politics of the Gaze
Research Topic
Saumyadeep’s PhD research examines audiences’ affective engagements with screen representations of caste in India. It traces how mainstream cinema’s banal, casteist, caste-blind, fetishised, and orientalist portrayals, which genuflect to the caste-class-capital nexus of Bombay’s Hindi cinema, contrast with the recent burgeoning of anti-caste, decolonial filmmaking across Tamil and Marathi cinemas, where Dalit filmmakers seek to reclaim the gaze and assert sovereign authorship through an Ambedkarite epistemology.
Grounded in the political economy of media and the intersecting structural forces of caste, class, and gender, this research offers a phenomenological study of embodied and lived accounts of viewing caste on screen, and examines how such cinematic encounters shape processes of meaning-making and subjectivity formation. The main focus is to shed light on how representations of caste inflect the everyday realities of viewers and contribute to processes of subjectivation, both anti- and pro-caste, across shifting terrains of submission and resistance, reproduction and boycott, along the dialectic between critical and complacent spectatorship shaped by conditions of viewing and spectatorial subjectivities.
Biography
Saumyadeep holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Calcutta and an MA in Sociology from Presidency University, India. Guided by a longstanding interest in how media shapes and is shaped by social and political realities, he went on to pursue an MSc in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He currently works as a PhD researcher in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, while teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Media and Communications, Sociology, and the LSE Summer School.
He also serves as a Research Officer with the LSE Research Ethics Review Board (RERB), reviewing MSc, PhD, and staff research ethics applications and contributing to the School’s commitment to ethical research practice for students and staff. Outside academia, he loves walks along the Southbank, watching films and sunsets. Saumyadeep warmly welcomes queries from prospective applicants considering research and navigating higher education, especially those from caste-marginalised or otherwise marginalised communities.
Supervisors
Professor Shakunatala Banaji and Dr Wendy Willems.
Expertise
Audiences, Spectatorship, Caste, Cinema, Psychoanalysis, Web 2.0, Political Communications