Host City India: Chico

Kanchan K. Malik

Dr. Kanchan K. Malik is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, India, where she also served as Head from 2017-20. She has been a Faculty Fellow with UNESCO Chair on Community Media since 2011 and Editor of the e-newsletter, CR News. With a dual Master’s in Economics and Mass Communication, Dr. Malik worked as a journalist with The Economic Times, New Delhi, before kindling her career in academics. Dr. Malik’s teaching and research are in the areas of community media, women in community communications, journalism studies, and media ethics. She has worked with national and international research projects and published papers on media interventions by non-governmental organizations for empowerment at the grassroots level.

Dr. Malik co-authored with Prof. Vinod Pavarala the much-cited book ‘Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India’ (Sage: 2007). Her co-edited book is ‘Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves’ (Routledge: 2020). She recently worked on the manual ‘Strengthening Gender Sensitive Practices and Programming in Community Radio’ (UNESCO, 2021).

Dr. Malik’s Fulbright-Nehru teaching component will comprise thematic seminars focusing on how community media in South Asia have enabled women to create gender spaces, challenge women’s marginalization in access to media and help mainstream gender in social change discourses. Her research project will seek to develop a framework for interpreting the empowerment question through the culturally rooted lived realities of women engaged in community communication and untangling how women negotiate with and navigate the deep-rooted issues affecting gender equality.

Megha Bahl

Ms. Megha Bahl has been practicing criminal law in Delhi for the last seven years. Through research and litigation, she has engaged with the legal issues underlying incidents of custodial violence, sexual offenses, the stifling of journalistic freedoms, and the criminalization of the lives of indigenous people and manual scavengers, among others. She has worked with teams on the prosecution and defense sides of the criminal justice system, acquiring an in-depth understanding of the functioning of institutions like courts, police, and prisons.

Before this, Ms. Bahl obtained her master’s degree in sociology from the prestigious Delhi School of Economics. This academic training and her long engagement with organizations working on issues concerning the democratic rights of people have helped her identify the socio-political reasons for the occurrence of crimes. She has also understood the operation of power that determines access to justice and the availability of rights to victims and accused persons.

After completing her training under the Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Fellowship, Ms. Bahl intends to start a research and litigation clinic in India focusing on interventions that impact the constitutional rights of accused persons and victims in the criminal justice system. A synthesis of academic discourse, courtroom observation, and the lived experiences of people will help generate and disseminate meaningful ideas towards developing more humane jurisprudential practices in India.

Divya Gupta

Ms. Divya Gupta is an English language teacher with the Directorate of Education, Government of National Capital Territory (GNCT), Delhi. She has more than 13 years of teaching experience. Currently, she is engaged with the Library branch at the Headquarters of the Directorate of Education where she is involved in improving the infrastructure and reading resources at the libraries of Delhi government schools. She works with librarians at all the Schools of Specialized Excellence in Delhi to ensure that young learners enjoy reading from their early years and get access to age-appropriate engaging books. She is also responsible for developing these libraries as safe spaces where students can explore reading at their pace.

Ms. Gupta was instrumental in creating Delhi’s first Reading Room in one of the Schools of Excellence. She strongly believes that libraries are centers of learning that play a significant role in raising a thoughtful, tolerant, sensitive generation of thinkers in addition to being springboards for academic achievement and language acquisition.

Through her Fulbright journey, Ms. Gupta aims to learn how the multiplicity of perspectives in different cultures impacts learning around the globe. During her FTEA program, she is gaining insights into curriculum design and the latest models of lesson planning. She is excited to interact with educators from the U.S. and other countries and create a network of educators for continuous professional development.