Saumyadeep Mandal

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 is an interdisciplinary media scholar, sociologist, and educator with expertise in film and reception studies, critical caste and race studies, and the political economy of media. His methodological grounding includes audio-visual discourse analysis, semiotics, and phenomenologically informed interview and ethnographic methods. He holds a BA in Sociology from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and an MA in Sociology from Presidency University, Kolkata. Guided by a longstanding interest in how media both shapes and is shaped by social and political realities and power structures, he went on to pursue a second master’s degree, MSc in Media and Communications, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

He is currently a PhD researcher in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE, where he also teaches across undergraduate, postgraduate, and summer school courses in Media and Communications, Sociology, and International Relations. He additionally serves as a Research Officer with the LSE Research Ethics Review Board (RERB), where he reviews MSc, PhD, and staff research ethics applications, contributing to the School’s commitment to ethical research practice. Outside academia, he enjoys long walks along the South Bank, watching films, and chasing sunsets. Saumyadeep warmly welcomes queries from prospective applicants navigating higher education, especially those from caste-marginalised and other underrepresented communities.

Supervisors

Professor Shakunatala Banaji and Dr Wendy Willems.

Expertise

Audience studies, Film theory, Caste, Decolonial aesthetics, Political economy of media, Media phenomenology, Disinformation, Misinformation, Hate speech