Shakuntala Banaji

Shakuntala Banaji is Professor of Media, Culture and Social Change in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where she also serves as Programme Director for the MSc Media, Communication and Development.

Professor 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. She has published extensively on young people, children and media as well as gender, ethnicity and new media and cinema, with more than fifty articles and chapters on orientalism and racism in media, Hindi horror films, social media use in the Middle East and North Africa and children, social class and media in India. Her recent publications deal with disinformation, misinformation and fake news, creativity, democracy, the internet, social media and civic participation.

Professor Banaji's research addresses the intersection between socio-political contexts, media, identities and participation. Her focus is twofold: first on the lives of children and young people in different geographical and class contexts, with a critical take on the ways in which rhetorical conceptions of creativity, citizenship, development, participation and digital media construct the notion of agency, and position child and youth subjectivities. And second, on the ways in which historical propaganda and current disinformation, misinformation, toxic speech and hate speech are reconfiguring the public spheres of India, the UK and other nations. These themes have been pursued through ongoing and recently completed projects.

The European Commission Horizon 2020 Young 5a funded project, CATCHEyoU - Constructing Active Citizenship with European youth: policies, practices, challenges and solutions, which investigated media constructions, participatory practices and policy visions of youth active citizenship. And, Personalised Media and Participatory Culture (2015-2018) in collaboration with American University Sharjah, funded by the LSE Middle East centre's Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme. Her edited book with Sam Mejias, Youth Active Citizenship in Europe: Ethnographies of Participation, was published with Palgrave in 2020.

Current research includes a WhatsApp misinformation grant with Ram Bhat studying the connections between lynching in India and misinformation circulated online and research into the connections between mediated disinformation, social media and histories of hate in Brazil, India, Myanmar and the UK, which will be forthcoming as a new book, Social Media and Hate with Routledge in 2022.