Biography

At LSE, I am studying how media and communications shape the everyday lives of women in India’s Hindi heartland. Capturing their experiences at different stages of life and vocation, I seek to understand how women navigate the push and shove of culture in the age of social media platforms. Before starting my PhD, I was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research Lab, India where I worked on civic participation and misinformation on social media platforms.  

I graduated with distinction from LSE’s Department of Government for my MSc, before which I was based in India. I attained a diploma in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from the Lady Shri Ram College for Women at the University of Delhi, and a bachelor's in Mass Communication from the Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication. Before transitioning into research, I worked as a multimedia journalist in India, and have volunteered with women and children’s NGOs.

In London, I teach seminars for the LSE Summer School course ‘International Journalism & Society’ led by Professor Charlie Beckett, and as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for LSE Sociology’s undergraduate course ‘Power, Inequality and Difference’ led by Professor Fran Tonkiss. My PhD research is supported by a studentship from the AHRC through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. I can be contacted on my university email and welcome any queries about navigating higher education, especially from candidates who come from underrepresented backgrounds. 

Publications

Mishra, D., Akbar, S., Shekhawat, G., & Pal, J. (2022). Virality and the Virus: COVID-19 Cures on Twitter in India. In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). University of Hawaii at Manoa. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/virality-and-the-virus-covid-19-cures-on-twitter-in-india

Dash, S., Mishra, D., Shekhawat, G., & Pal, J. (2022, May). Divided we rule: Influencer polarization on Twitter during political crises in India. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 16, pp. 135-146).

Arya, A., De, S., Mishra, D., Shekhawat, G., Sharma, A., Panda, A., M Lalani, F., Singh, P., Kommiya Mothilal, R., Grover, R., Nishal, S., Dash, S., Rashid Shora, S., Akbar, S. Z., & Pal, J. (n.d.). DISMISS: Database of Indian Social Media Influencers (Snowballed Sequentially) on Twitter (V1 ed.). Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/doi:10.7910/DVN/F3EWLZ

Grover, R., Shekhawat, G., & Pal, J. (2021). Twitter superstars don’t win elections: A Poster on Twitter Campaigning and Electoral Realities in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly Elections. In ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) (pp. 428-431). https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471982

Dash, S., Shekhawat, G., Akbar, S. Z., & Pal, J. (2021). Extremism & Whataboutism: A Case Study on Bangalore Riots.  arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.10526.