Dr Saumyadeep Mandal

Biography

Saumyadeep is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where he completed his PhD with no corrections. A sociologist and media scholar, his research spans film theory, audience studies, media reception and critical theory, with particular interests in screen cultures, decolonial aesthetics, media and resistance, the gaze, affect and disaffection. His research examines how caste, in its intersections with class, gender, sexuality, religion and space, shapes audiences’ embodied and affective (dis)engagements with cinema in India. It explores the dialectic between critical and complicit spectatorship across two contrasting representational regimes: mainstream dominant-caste Indian cinema and the burgeoning anti-caste cinema movement. Extending bell hooks’ (1992) concept of the oppositional gaze to Dalit spectatorship, his research directs a critical gaze towards casteist and anti-caste cinema alike, including the gendered limits of the latter’s decolonial project. In tracing how Dalit spectators come to critical consciousness, his thesis turns to Ambedkar’s lifelong call to “educate, agitate and organise,” reading it as a theory of conscientisation avant la lettre, long before Freire gave it that name. This framing informs its examination of cinema’s role in cultivating a critical awareness of caste and opening possibilities for resistance. Bringing Yao’s (2021) theory of disaffection into conversation with hooks’ oppositional gaze, his research also examines tactical refusal and protective withdrawal as agentic spectatorial modes, showing how looking away can be as political as looking back.

He works primarily with qualitative methods, including sensitive interviews and ethnography, audio-visual discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, semiotic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis and thematic analysis. Having served as a member of the School’s Research Ethics Review Board, he also has extensive experience advising on the ethics of sensitive projects, including research involving children and vulnerable participants, trauma-sensitive interviewing, sensitive political material and fieldwork.

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.

Research Interests

Film studies, film theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial aesthetics; Caste and critical caste studies; Audience studies, media reception, and media as pedagogy; Media, resistance, and the gaze; Media, affect, and disaffection