Host Institution India: University of Texas at Austin

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.

Manvi Tandon

Manvi Tandon is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. She completed her master’s in English literature from Banaras Hindu University in 2022, following which she taught English at North-Eastern Hill University, Tura, Meghalaya for a semester as a guest lecturer. For her doctoral research, Manvi is studying narratives of relational childhood trauma. She is working in the area of childhood studies and is deeply interested in childhood ideology and child rights advocacy. Her academic interests include childhood narratives, translation, and popular culture.

Manvi studies Indian fiction for her doctoral thesis. She avidly participated in volunteering and social work during her undergraduate days through the National Service Scheme (NSS), and an internship at My Home India where she worked with ‘Children Under Need for Care and Protection.’

As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Manvi is assisting with teaching Hindi at the Department of Asian Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, TX. She hopes to contribute to the university’s language programs and foster cross-cultural understanding. This opportunity will also allow her to immerse herself in American culture and share her knowledge of Indian life, to fulfill her role as a cultural ambassador.

Miriam Chandy Menacherry

Miriam Chandy Menacherry, filmmaker and founder of Filament Pictures, is known for her documentary films which celebrate everyday heroes, such as Stuntmen of Bollywood (2005), Robot Jockey (2007), The Rat Race (2011), Lyari Notes (2015), The Leopard’s Tribe (2022) and From the Shadows (2022). She was a Global Media Makers fellow (instituted by Film Independent) and a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television) India fellow. She is also a masterclass panelist at IFFI on “Indian documentary on the World Stage”.

Miriam has completed her postgraduate degree from the AJK Mass Communication Research Center, New Delhi. Her social documentaries shed light on invisible narratives to construct a complex reality overlooked by mainstream media, and they have been selected at leading film festivals and broadcast worldwide. Her films have also been screened in educational institutes in India and abroad such as IIT Mumbai, Mount Carmel College, AJK Mass Communication Research Center, New York University, the University of Texas at Austin, Oxford University, and SOAS.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence (Research and Teaching) fellowship at the University of Texas, Austin, TX, Miriam is engaging with students of film to develop a dialogue about critically important yet invisible stories from India and expand the scope of her research supported by the India Foundation for the Arts to visibilise the contribution of women in cinema to include parallel developments in Hollywood.