Dr Asif Ali Akhtar is LSE Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.
Dr Akhtar earned his Ph.D. from the department of Media, Culture, and Communications at New York University (NYU) in January 2023, defending his doctoral dissertation entitled “Television Siyasat: Genealogies of Electronic Media and Extralegal Politics in Pakistan” under supervision of Professor Arjun Appadurai. Dr Akhtar’s research probes the wide ranging and variegated effects following the abrupt privatization of broadcast media through regulations enacted during the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf (1999-2008) to assess the myriad regulatory failures ensuing a protracted political crisis during the fledgling democratic era overshadowed by the powerful military establishment’s continuing manipulations in law, politics and media.
Dr Akhtar’s doctoral research ties the contemporary precarity in regulation and governance of media technologies in Pakistan to the country’s enduring colonial legacy. The dedicated archival research he has conducted at the India Office Records (IOR) collection tracks back particular tendencies of paralegal control and draconian censorship in Pakistan to various regulatory enactments under the rule of the East India Company during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In recognition of the originality of combining archival techniques with anthropological fieldwork methods and the depth, breadth and theoretical rigor of his research, Dr Akhtar’s dissertation received the departmental distinction award and was also nominated for NYU’s University-wide Outstanding Dissertation Award. Dr Akhtar also holds an M.A. in Politics from the New School of Social Research (NSSR) also in New York, NY as well as a B.A. in International Studies and Economics from Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, OH.
While mapping out current directions of his research, Dr Akhtar is working on developing a book proposal offering a cohesive analysis of Pakistan’s peculiar set of media and regulatory challenges in order to better understand how these affect the volatile political situation at present. The broadening of this research program also seeks to consider these issues in terms of regional as well as global problematics of media and communication affecting other societies around the world. Building upon his doctoral research on legacy media, Dr Akhtar seeks also to connect the historical analysis of print and broadcast media regulation to illuminate some of the complexities of current debates in law, media and governance focused on the regulation of cutting-edge technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, facial recognition, algorithmic automation procedures and cryptographic verification protocols, among others, that are rapidly reshaping contemporary societies in significant ways at present.