MIT South Asian Alumni Association: Global Digital Culture and Identity in South Asia

Join our distinguished panel as we look at the impact of digital technologies on the media landscape in South Asia and identity formation in local, national and diaspora digital spaces. In this live webcast from December 3, 2020, we discuss issues of representation, access, connectivity and power in these spaces. Panelists:  DJ Rekha/Rekha Malhotra is a DJ, producer, curator, and educator. They have been credited with pioneering Bhangra music in North America via Basement Bhangra club night (1997-2017). They are a proud resident of Jackson Heights, Queens. Rekha was the sound designer for the TONY award-winning Broadway Show, "Bridge and Tunnel", received a Drama Desk Award nomination for their work on the play "Rafta Rafta".  Rekha has done remixes for artists that range from Meredith Monk to Major Lazer, and has performed at the Obama White House and internationally. They are on the board of Queens-based Chhaya Community Development Corp., serving to economically empower New Yorkers of South Asian origin. They have produced events for Central Park SummerStage and the South Asian Block Party for the Biden Harris Campaign. They have a BA in Urban Studies from Queens College, and a Masters Candidate in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and produces the weekly podcast Bhangra and Beyond. Dr. Aswin Punathambekar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He holds a PhD in Media and Cultural studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an M.S. in Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aswin’s research and teaching focus on the impact that globalization and technological change have on the workings of media industries, formations of audiences and publics, and cultural identity and politics. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (NYU Press, 2013), co-author of Media Industry Studies (Polity, 2020), and co-editor of Global Bollywood (2008), Television at Large in South Asia (2013), and most recently, Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia (2019). He is currently working on a co-authored book, provisionally titled The Digital Popular: Media, Culture, and Politics in Networked India. Parmesh Shahani is Vice President at Godrej Industries Ltd. and the founder of the Godrej India Culture Lab. He is a passionate advocate for LGBTQ inclusion in corporate India and has guided many of the country’s leading companies on their inclusion journeys. His first book Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India (Sage Publications) was released in 2008 and re-released in June 2020 as an updated edition and his second book Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion in the Indian Workplace (Westland Business) was released in August 2020.  Parmesh holds an MS in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. He has been a TED Senior Fellow, a Yale World Fellow, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. He is a member of the FICCI taskforce on diversity and inclusion and a board member of KHOJ International Artists’ Association. Ms. Huma Yusuf, the Wilson Center’s 2010-11 Pakistan Scholar, is a weekly columnist for Dawn, an influential Pakistani newspaper. She also writes regularly for the International New York Times. Earlier in her career, she was features editor for Dawn.com and for the Pakistani monthly news-analysis magazine Herald. Her writing earned her the UNESCO/Pakistan Press Foundation “Gender in Journalism 2005” award and the European Commission’s 2006 Natali Lorenzo Prize for Human Rights Journalism. She was recently named one of Foreign Policy’s top 100 women on Twitter.