Media, Power, and Democracy in South Asia

What does democracy look like from below? This talk will look at how ordinary lives are reshaped by surveillance, majoritarianism, and corporate-political nexus in South Asia. Exploring media influence, gendered surveillance, majoritarian and casteist politics, the struggles of urban poor workers and the slow erosion of democratic rights in contemporary South Asia through Neha Dixit’s ‘The Many Lives of Syeda X’, this talk explores how journalism can recover erased histories, expose routine violence, and hold power to account.

Neha Dixit is an independent journalist based in New Delhi. She has covered politics, gender and social justice for seventeen years. Most of her work is investigative, narrative and long-form. She has reported for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Caravan, The Wire, and other notable publications. She has won over a dozen international and national journalism awards, including the One Young World Journalist of the Year Award 2020, the International Press Freedom Award 2019 from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist 2017, the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism 2014, the Lorenzo Natali Prize for Journalism 2011 from the European Commission, among others.

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