I’m currently working on two major projects one in Europe (http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/CATCH-EyoU.aspx) and one in the Middle East and North Africa (http://www.lse.ac.uk/middleEastCentre/research/Collaboration-Projects/collaborations%202015-2016/AUS/Home.aspx) both of them examining the connections between sociocultural environments and young people’s political and civic creativity in offline and online environmentments. Fascinating issues with respect to gender and sexuality, and the ways in which young people decide to or are constrained to mobilise around these have emerged from our case studies of creative civic practice. As I’m on sabbatical this term, I’ve recently travelled to Greece to present my findings about the multitude of young people’s creative participatory practices for the European project, and to Sharjah to collaborate with my co-Investigator on the Personalised media project.

I’ve had two new books out recently: Children and Media in India: Narratives of Class, Agency and Social Change. (London and New York: Routledge) in 2016 and Youth Participation in Europe: Stories of Hope and Disillusion. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) with Cammaerts et al. in 2015.

In the past year I’ve delivered keynotes at IAMCR (Leicester 2016 http://iamcr.org/leicester2016/plenaries ) about the need to decolonise global communications scholarship; and at MeccSa 2017 http://meccsa2017.org.uk/keynotes/ about the uneven and unequal development being pushed in India under the guise of digitisation. I will be delivering the Estonian Sociological Association Keynote in Tallinn this month on young people, democracy and online civic cultures, and in June I will travel to Fudan University in China to deliver lectures as co-chair of the Fudan-Harvard Yenching Institute workshop on new media, gender and sexuality.

Alpa Shah

AlpaShah

Alpa Shah is an LSE Associate Professor in Anthropology. She directs the Programme of Research on Inequality and Poverty, exploring how and why India’s low castes remain at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy despite economic growth. She is the author of ‘In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India’. She has published more than twenty-five essays and journal articles and has edited seven volumes on issues ranging from affirmative action, agrarian change, revolution in India and Nepal, emancipatory politics, the underbelly of the Indian boom, and Adivasi and Dalit political pathways. She has also scripted programmes and reported for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.

Alpa iscurrently completing two books. The first is a co-authored book on social inequality exploring how neoliberal capitalism in India has expanded through entrenching the intersection between class, caste and gender. Over the next year Alpa will be working on a photo exhibition based on this book to be exhibited at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS in Autumn 2017 and on hosting young Tribal Scholars from India at the LSE. Her second book project is on the world’s longest standing armed revolutionary struggle - India’s Maoist inspired Naxalite movement –and is based on extensive long-term ethnographic field research in guerrilla strongholds. Alpa is delighted to have been invited to deliver her last keynote lecture in Ranchi city, the capital of Jharkhand where she has conducted years of fieldwork. It was entitled, ‘The Wonders of Adivasis: Emancipated Women, Feminist Men and the Threats to Gender Relations in Jharkhand’