The University of Hyderabad is proud to announce that its alumna, Dr. Devina Sarwatay, has been appointed Lecturer in Digital Sociology at City St George’s, University of London. She takes up the post in the Department of Media, Culture and Creative Industries, School of Communication and Creativity, where she has held a Presidential Fellowship since December 2023.

The appointment caps a decade of work at the intersection of technology, media, and society. Dr. Sarwatay is an award-winning scholar of young people and digital cultures, an office-bearer in two of the largest international associations in the discipline, an assistant editor at a leading journal, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her doctorate was completed at the Department of Communication under the supervision of Prof. Usha Raman.

An award-winning research record

Dr. Sarwatay’s paper with Prof. Usha Raman, “Everyday negotiations in managing presence: young people and social media in India,” published in Information, Communication & Society, won the Best Published Article Award 2023 from the Children, Adolescents and Media (CAM) Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) — among the most competitive honours in the field, and one rarely won by work grounded in the Global South.

Her published work now spans eighteen journal articles and six book chapters, and has been cited close to 300 times. Recent highlights include:

  • Social Media + Society (2025) — a single-authored study of kidfluencers in India, on commodification, consumption, and the perpetuation of dominant culture
  • Media International Australia (2023) — children’s TikTok cultures in India under restrictive parental mediation, with Jing Lee and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye
  • Journal of Communication (2021) — a collectively authored essay on decolonising open science and Southern interventions
  • Frontiers in Human Dynamics (2021) — media literacy, social connectedness, and digital citizenship in India, with Prof. Usha Raman and Prof. Srividya Ramasubramanian
  • Handbook chapters with Routledge and Wiley-Blackwell, including contributions to Children, Media, and Technology and The Routledge Handbook of Media Education Futures Post-Pandemic

Her research agenda is organised around what she calls the ‘Big Three’ strands — Digital Communication, Competency, and Comportment — examining, respectively, experiences and practices, abilities and literacies, and citizenship and ethics. She also reviews widely for journals in the field and writes regularly on new scholarship for The British Journal of Sociology, Journalism, and the Journal of Children and Media.

Leadership across international associations

Dr. Sarwatay holds elected and appointed positions in the discipline’s principal international bodies:

  • Vice-Chair, Media Education Research (MER) Section, International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), since July 2023
  • International Liaison, Children, Adolescents and Media (CAM) Division, International Communication Association (ICA), since May 2024
  • Assistant Editor, editorial board of Media, Culture & Society, since March 2026
  • Core team, Media Education Lab, since February 2023
  • Organising Executive Committee, 2026 International Conference on Social Media & Society; and member of the British Academy’s Publishing ThinkIN Group, 2024–25

Taken together, these roles place her at the centre of how research on children, young people, and media is commissioned, reviewed, and published internationally.

Teaching and academic citizenship

In July 2025, Advance HE recognised Dr. Sarwatay as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Her teaching spans inclusive, research-led pedagogy across diverse cohorts, and her work now appears on syllabi in communication, media studies, digital sociology, media anthropology, and youth digital cultures.

She has also invested consistently in the research training of others. Through her doctoral years she led sessions on framing research problems and on online research methods for students at Gujarat University, MICA, SCM Sophia, and Shanti Business School, and spoke on professional communication at her own Department in Hyderabad. As part of her fieldwork she ran sessions for schoolteachers on misinformation and for students on cyberbullying, returning her findings to the communities that had taken part in the study.

The Hyderabad years

Dr. Sarwatay joined the Department of Communication in August 2017 after qualifying for the UGC-NET Junior Research Fellowship, holding the JRF until August 2019 and continuing as Senior Research Fellow until August 2023. She was elected on merit to the Academic Council for 2017-18. Her doctoral research was supervised by Prof. Usha Raman of the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. Her thesis, “Growing up on Social Media: Indian Adolescents’ Experiences, Perceptions, and Practices,” was examined by Prof. Nimmi Rangaswamy of IIIT Hyderabad, among others, and the degree was conferred at the University’s 23rd Convocation in October 2023. She moved to London as a Presidential Fellow two months later.

University of Hyderabad community congratulate Dr. Devina Sarwatay on her appointment and wish her every success in London.

More details: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3453-5786