Job description

My phd dissertation focuses on The Morung Express, a newspaper in Nagaland State, India, established by human rights activists in 2005. With a strong interest in indigenous issues, the newspaper presents itself as an alternative to mainstream media in India and claims to be guided by the historical experiences of the Naga people. The study examines a particular period in the newspaper's life (2020-2023) through a multi-method approach that includes content analysis, interviews with its journalists, editors, founders, and draws from experiences of the author's journalistic practice with the newspaper. The research was guided by three overarching questions, including the ways in which indigeneity and religion were connected to 'Naganess' in select cases covered by The Morung Express in 2020, how its knowledge workers reflected on these connections in 2022-23, and how the institution related to boundaries between indigenous, religious and secular media. Nagaland is inhabited by a Christian majority in a region surrounded by secular, atheist, Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist polities in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Myanmar. Using articulation theory, this study lays out how indigeneity and religion are connected to local and global scales in The Morung Express, and how such scaling practices shape and extend concepts related to 'Naganess' in specific cases and situations. Analytical themes such as a 'morung calendar' and 'debated prohibitions' contribute to these explorations. A focus on re-articulations and contradictions enables a study of shared understandings in Nagaland, limits set on their public articulation and challenges to such limits. Outlining a media paradigm informing the practices of journalism at The Morung Express problematises notions of 'indigenous media' and its relations to religious and secular media in this context.   

In other news : I was a visiting research fellow at the School of Divinity University of Edinburgh, Scotland (UK), from September 2021-February 2022.

I have been trained as a research scholar at the Norwegian Research School in History (Oslo) and the Research School Religion-Values-Society (Oslo).   

Papers presented at conferences of: the European Association for the Study of Religion, the British Association for the Study of Religion and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.