Sahana Udupa is professor of media anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) and the founder of the Center for Digital Dignity. Her research and teaching interests include digital politics, global digital media and extreme speech, online hate speech, online nationalism, media policy, fact checking, politics of artificial intelligence, and journalism cultures.
Udupa is recipient of Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard University and Francqui Chair in Belgium. In 2023, she received the European Research Council Consolidator Grant award (2 million euros) for a multi-year project on contentious speech on small social media platforms. In 2016, she received the European Research Council Starting Grant award (1.1 million euros) for her project on digital media politics. In 2020, she received the European Research Council Proof of Concept grant for developing a collaborative AI assisted process model to tackle online extreme speech (more details: AI4Dignity). In 2021, the United Nations Department of Peace Operations commissioned her to write a research paper on digital technology and extreme speech, which was published as part of the UN digital transformation strategy for peace operations. Together with the School of Social Sciences, Technical University of Munich, she runs a multidisciplinary study of online misogyny in Brazil, Germany and India. The project has received one million euros of funding from the Bavarian Institute for Digital Transformation (2022-2025).
Prior to joining LMU, she was Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the School of Public Policy, Central European University.
Across ongoing research projects, Udupa’s work has traced the transforming media and urban landscapes of late capitalism. Conceptually, her work raises the question of “mediation” as a media technological, performative, and experiential space to articulate political practice. Keen to create conversations between research and communities, her projects have sought to translate research findings into possibilities in the “real world”, inviting policy makers, critical scholars and students for a collaborative effort to address the “dark side” of digital communication. She is eager to work with students committed to critical research on digitalization and digital media, especially to devise ways to creatively think through issues of marginalization and digital harms as well as the potentiality of digital participations.
Her first book, Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics (Cambridge University Press, UK, 2015) is a critical reading of news cultures and urban transformation. It shows how the expanding news media played a critical role in the contested aspiration of building a ‘global city’ in India, when commercial journalism became both an object and agent of global urbanization. More about the book in the New Books Network podcast available here.
The second book, Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media, is co-authored with Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (New York University Press, 2023). Focusing primarily on social media and staging a number of examples of platform entangled politics and digital mobilization globally, Digital Unsettling sets the theoretical ground and unfolds a methodology to place ‘the digital’ in the longue durée of coloniality.
The co-edited volume, “Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Online Extreme Speech” (with Iginio Gagliardone and Peter Hervik, Indiana University Press, 2021) examines global cultures of online extreme speech with a critical ethnographic approach. In 2019, she published two special issues: “Extreme speech and global digital cultures” in International Journal of Communication (with Matti Pohjonen); and “Digital politics in Millennial India” in Television & New Media (with Shriram Venkatraman and Aasim Khan).
With Stephen McDowell, she has coedited a volume on South Asian media politics for Routledge (London). Her work has been published in American Ethnologist, New Media and Society, International Journal of Communication, Media, Culture and Society, Communication, Culture and Critique, Economic and Political Weekly, Critique of Anthropology and others. She also contributes to popular media and policy debates, and has co-organized media policy consultation workshops in New Delhi involving media practitioners, policy makers, Internet regulation experts and civil society groups.
Udupa serves on the advisory board of MediaWell, an initiative by the Social Science Research Council Network for Peace, Security and the United Nations, to review research on digital political communication. She is the co-editor for the book series, “Anthropology of Media”, published by Berghahn (New York) (with Mark Allen Peterson). She serves or has served on the editorial boards of American Ethnologist; Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism; Communication, Culture & Critique; Television & New Media; and Media Theory Journal. She is the co-convener for the Media Anthropology Network at the European Association of Social Anthropologists.te
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Digital Unsettling
Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media
Digital Hate
The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech
