My research projects often contain a practical component, typically drawing on my experience in web communication as a way of exploring different forms of professional practice and communicating about important social issues.
Media Action Against Rape (MAAR)
Currently I am co-directing Media Action Against Rape (MAAR) with Dr Chindu Sreedharan, a GCRF funded research and capacity building project by Bournemouth University and UNESCO in New Delhi. This is a 20-month study to map the journalistic challenges of reporting rape and sexual violence across India. See @MAARnews for details.
As part of this project we are running the MAAR NewsTracker, co-published by Bournemouth University (England) and Ashoka University (Sonepat), in collaboration with Amity School of Communication (Noida), Docfort Meducation (Bangalore), Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts (Pune), and the Department of Journalism and Communication at University of Madras (Chennai). You can read more about our team by following this link. And if you like what we are doing, and want to join this conversation, please email us here.
Aftershock Nepal
Aftershock Nepal was a Bournemouth University-led journalistic intervention into the humanitarian crisis in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake there. A practice-led research project, in partnership with Kathmandu University and Tribhuvan University in Nepal, and Symbiosis International University and Amity University in India – to produce sustained news media coverage of how ordinary Nepalis were coping with life after the disaster, published online (http://www.aftershocknepal.com). We also collaborated with three mainstream Indian news organisations – Huffington Post India, Rediff.com and Open Magazine – to further the reach of the reportage from our student journalists. 38 students and 7 staff across three nations collaborated on this challenging and complex project. We interviewed more than 150 earthquake survivors and published 93 stories, experimented with different forms of storytelling (including 360 video production). Background: http://www.connectindia.co.uk/portfolio/aftershock-nepal/
Project India
Project India provided alternative news coverage of the world’s largest exercise in representative democracy: the 2014 General Election in India. A collaborative journalism initiative led by Bournemouth University, it saw BU students working with their counterparts in India. We worked with four educational institutions in India. The University of Madras, Amity University, Jai Hind College, and Pondicherry University. In addition, we worked with three online news organisations — Rediff.com, Wonobo.com and Elections.in. Several of our students travelled to India, and in all we published more than 70 news and feature articles. We published on a single-issue web site and several social media channels. In addition, our stories were also picked up by our media partners. In all, 43 young journalists worked on Project India — 15 of them from BU, and 28 from the four Indian institutions. Website: http://www.project-india.com