Alumnus’s doctoral research on community radio to be published by Palgrave Macmillan

Dr Aniruddha Jena’s The Cultural Praxis of Community Radio in India, co-authored with his doctoral supervisor Prof. Vasuki Belavadi and carrying a Foreword by Prof. Vinod Pavarala, is scheduled for release in December 2026.

The Department of Communication, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad (UoH), is pleased to announce that a book arising from doctoral research carried out at the Department has been accepted for publication by Palgrave Macmillan. The Cultural Praxis of Community Radio in India: Community, Culture, and Communication, authored by Dr Aniruddha Jena, an alumnus of the Department, together with his doctoral supervisor Prof. Vasuki Belavadi, is now listed on Springer Nature and is scheduled for publication in December 2026.

The book appears in the Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change series, edited by Pradip Ninan Thomas and Elske van de Fliert.

From thesis to book

The book has its roots in Dr Jena’s doctoral research at the Department of Communication between 2017 and 2022, undertaken under the supervision of Prof. Belavadi, and in his close engagement during those years with the UNESCO Chair on Community Media, which is housed in the Department. The Chair provided the intellectual platform and the network of community radio practitioners within which the research took shape.

Drawing substantially on ethnographic fieldwork with Radio Dhimsa and Radio Swayamshakti in Odisha, the book examines community radio not merely as an instrument of information dissemination or development messaging, but as a medium of cultural expression, identity formation and epistemic resistance among indigenous and marginalised communities. It explores how hyper-local stations enable communities to articulate their own cultural narratives, challenge dominant media discourses and build communicative autonomy, and it argues for re-theorising community media as culturally embedded, politically meaningful and participatory infrastructures. The volume is addressed to scholars, students and practitioners in media studies, development communication and anthropology.

Acknowledging the Department

Sharing the news with the Department, Dr Jena expressed particular gratitude to Prof. Vinod Pavarala, Professor Emeritus, who served on his Doctoral Research Committee and was Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair on Community Media during his doctoral years. Prof. Pavarala has also written the Foreword to the book, which Dr Jena described as “especially meaningful”. He was equally grateful, he said, to Prof. Kanchan K. Malik, Dean of the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication and present Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair, “for her encouragement and support over the years”.

“Since the book emerged from my doctoral research and academic engagement at the Department, I wanted to share this news with you,” Dr Jena wrote, adding that the work reflects the space the University gave him to pursue questions of culture, identity, knowledge, participation and everyday communicative practice.

About the authors

Dr Aniruddha Jena is Assistant Professor of Communication at the School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. Before joining IIT Mandi he taught at IIM Kashipur for close to three years. He is Co-Vice Chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and a member of the International Communication Association (ICA) committee for the Outstanding Journal Article of the Year award. In 2025–26 he was a Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at the Global Cultures Institute, King’s College London, where he continued his research on community media and communication for social change.

Prof. Vasuki Belavadi is Professor at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, and Senior Faculty Fellow at the UNESCO Chair on Community Media.

The book is listed at link.springer.com/book/9783032351654. More on Dr Jena’s work is available at aniruddhajena.in.