About Padmapriya Govindarajan

I'm Padmapriya Vidhya-Govindarajan, a PhD student at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. I study social movements, participatory media and political cultures in India, China and the Sino-Indian relationship. My recent interests include the experiences of digitality and mediation in postcolonial environmental justice movements, and I focus on coastlines in South India for my dissertation. Broadly, however, my research interests stretch across environmental media studies, anthropology of science, postcolonial science and technology studies, political theory and film cultures, and I'm an interdisciplinary and multi-methods scholar. I have a Master’s in China Studies (focus on IR and Politics) from the Yenching Academy of Peking University, and a Master’s in Development Studies from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. In the past, I have researched and written on political speech and its relationship to territoriality, lawyers’ movements for constitutional rights, urban informality and law as part of my academic study as well as outside of it. I conduct research in English, Tamil, Hindi and Chinese.