Prof. (Dr.) Kanchan K. Malik, Department of Communication, S N School of Arts & Communication, University of Hyderabad (UoH), has been awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship (FNAPE) for 2022-23. As part of the fellowship, Prof. Malik will research and teach at the University of Texas, Austin, USA, for seven months starting September 1, 2022.
Prof. Malik’s Fulbright project is titled ‘Women in Community Communication: Negotiating Empowerment’, a multidisciplinary area that draws diverse conceptual insights from gender and development, women studies, and community communication for analysing the complex process of women empowerment and its linkages with voice.
Prof. (Dr.) Kanchan K. Malik
Dr. Kanchan K. Malik has been with the Department of Communication, UoH, since 2007, where she also served as Head from 2017-20. She has been a Faculty Fellow with the ‘UNESCO Chair on Community Media’ since 2011, an Editor of the e-newsletter – ‘CR News’ and the Vice-Chair for the Ethics Working Group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). With a dual Master’s in Economics and Mass Communication, Prof. Malik worked as a journalist with ‘The Economic Times’, New Delhi, before settling for a career in academics.
For over two and a half decades, Prof. Malik’s academic interests and endeavours have been in Community and Alternative Media; Women and Community Media; Journalism Studies; and Media Ethics. She has worked with national and international research projects and published scholarly papers and chapters on media interventions by non-governmental organisations for empowerment at the grassroots level. Her research has also contributed to policy advocacy efforts for community radio in India.
Prof. Malik has co-authored with Prof. Vinod Pavarala the much-cited book ‘Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India’ (Sage: 2007). Her co-edited book is titled ‘Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves’ (Routledge: 2020). She recently worked on the manual ‘Strengthening Gender Sensitive Practices and Programming in Community Radio’ (UNESCO, 2021).
Prof. Malik’s Fulbright teaching component will be thematic seminars focusing on how community media in South Asia have enabled women to create gender spaces, challenge women’s marginalisation in access to media, and mainstream gender in social change discourses. Her research project will seek to develop a framework for interpreting the empowerment question through the culturally rooted lived realities of women engaged in community media and untangling how women negotiate with and navigate the deep-rooted issues affecting gender equality.