Padmapriya Vidhya-Govindarajan is a PhD student at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. She studies social movements, participatory media and political cultures in India, China and the Sino-Indian relationship. Her recent interests include the experiences of digitality and mediation in postcolonial environmental justice movements, and she focuses on coastlines in South India for her dissertation.
Broadly, however, her research interests stretch across environmental media studies, anthropology of science, postcolonial science and technology studies, political theory and film cultures, and she is an interdisciplinary and multi-methods scholar. She has a Master’s in China Studies (focus on IR and Politics) from the Yenching Academy of Peking University, and a Master’s in Development Studies from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. In the past, she has researched and written on political speech and its relationship to territoriality, lawyers’ movements for constitutional rights, urban informality and law as part of her academy study as well as outside of it. She conducts research in English, Tamil, Hindi and Chinese.