Amrita Ibrahim
I have a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and my research and teaching areas focus on the anthropology of media, surveillance, and policing; visual anthropology, and protest and politics.
I was a College Fellow at Harvard in 2013-14, where I taught courses on visual anthropology, research methods, and digital media.
I am currently working on a book project titled Surveillance, Publicity, and the Crisis of Credibility in Indian Journalism, drawing on fieldwork conducted with journalists in Delhi, India between 2008-2014. It investigates how journalists manipulate trust and suspicion of government and public institutions when creating public mandates. Following certain major news events, I show how the discourses, practices, and ideologies of journalism constitute new regimes of monitoring and surveillance in the age of ubiquitous social and interactive media. These regimes intersect with and are bolstered by their interaction with other institutional forces, such as the law, police, and the family. I use journalists and their work as a means to interrogate the concepts of surveillance, policing, and monitoring and what these might mean through an anthropological lens. A second focus in my work is sexual violence, sexual assault, and gender both as journalists cover these stories as well as how these events and experiences shape journalists and the reporting they do.