Paris was a great venue for the first in-person international conference in a long time for the Department of Communication, SN School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad (UoH) which was represented by two research scholars and a faculty member at the 72nd annual meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA). Research Scholars from the Department, Ms. Devina Sarwatay and Ms. Chinar Mehta, attended the 5-day conference, held in Paris between May 27 and 31, along with Professor Usha Raman. The ICA is the largest association in the media and communication discipline, and the Paris meeting was attended by over 3000 scholars from across the globe.
Ms. Sarwatay chaired sessions in the Communication & Technology and Mobile Communication Divisions and participated in a research escalator where she had the opportunity to discuss her work with senior scholars from the discipline. She also served as a peer mentor for another emerging scholar in the Children, Adolescents, and Media Division. Ms. Mehta presented a paper as part of a Feminist Scholarship panel entitled “Interfacing with Informality: A Decolonial Feminist Labour Lexicon”, drawing from an IDRC-funded study on informal women workers in the digitized economy.
Prof. Raman participated as a speaker, presenter and chair across six different sessions, primary among them an invited panel that discussed challenges of platform design and regulation in the context of adolescent mental health and vulnerability. She also presented a paper on how datafication mediates decision making in the clinic, as part of the Communication & Technology Section.