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Email: mehak.sawhney [at] mail.mcgill.ca
Twitter:
Research Interests: sound studies, environmental humanities, oceanic media, surveillance studies, critical AI studies, media theory, STS, global media cultures, South Asia and the Global South
Bio:
Mehak Sawhney (she/her) is a PhD candidate and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Communication Studies at 海角社区. Her doctoral project titled Audible Waters: Sounding and Surveilling the Indian Ocean focuses on the acoustic production of submarine oceanic territory with postcolonial India and the Indian Ocean as its primary sites of analysis. It maps the political geography of sound by exploring military security, oceanic laboratories, marine conservation and fishing as sites where territoriality is made and unmade through the deployment of submarine monitoring technologies such as sonars as well as scientific disciplines such as underwater acoustics and bioacoustics. She also works on the intersection of sound and AI with a focus on the history of data analysis and machine listening in bioacoustics as well as the politics of listening in automated speech recognition and voice analysis.
She has co-curated Capture All: A Sonic Investigation (2020-2022), a collaborative artistic and research project between Sarai, Delhi, and Liquid Architecture, Melbourne, that explores questions of sonicity and situatedness in the Asia-Pacific region. Previously, she was a researcher at Sarai, the media programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, where her work investigated urban sound and listening cultures. Her work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Kalfou, Amodern, Disclaimer, and The Wire. Mehak holds an MA and MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi.
Select Publications:
Journal Issues, Edited
McLean, Laura, and Mehak Sawhney (co-editors). ,听Disclaimer, co-published by Liquid Architecture and Sarai, August 2022.
Journal Articles
Sawhney, Mehak. Media, Culture & Society 44, no. 2 (2022): 341-361.
Sterne, Jonathan, and Mehak Sawhney (co-authors). Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 9, no. 2 (2022): 288-306.
Sawhney, Mehak. 鈥淎qua Audibilis: Sonic Borders and the Making of Underwater Territory,鈥� Special Issue on 鈥淲hen Was the Smart Border?鈥� Cultural Studies (forthcoming Spring 2025).
Public Writing
Sawhney, Mehak. Platypus, Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, American Anthropological Association, 2024.
Sawhney, Mehak. The Wire, 10 October 2020.
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