Media Studies

Meeta Rani Jha

Lecturer, Ph.D., Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London

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COURSES TAUGHT
Media and Democracy
Gender, Race and Global Popular Culture
Research Methods in Media and Cultural Studies
Beauty, Intersectionality and Gendered Nationalism
Honours Thesis Preparation and Seminar
Reading the Media: Hip Hop, K-Pop and LatinTelenovelas
Cultural Studies Research Methodology
Beauty and Fashion in Popular Culture: A Comparative Study
Gender, Media and Globalisation

RESEARCH AREAS
Critical Feminist Studies – Race, Media, Culture and Postcolonial Studies
Transnational Media Studies- South Asian Popular Culture – Diasporic cinema practices of Bollywood cinema
Critical Beauty Studies – Globalization, Nationalism and Gender relations – focusing on the US, India and China.
Political and Public Sociology: Silicon Valley tech industry gender, race, and ethnicity research

BIO
Meeta Rani Jha’s scholarship explores lived experiences of gender and decoloniality in everyday cultural practices. She has taught extensively as a full and part-time faculty in California and in London (UK). She earned a Masters in Feminist Cultural Studies and a Ph.D., in Sociology from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her scholarship originates from her advocacy as a Black Rights Worker, at Salford Law center (Greater Manchester, UK), where she coordinated legal rights on racial and domestic violence and organized Black and minority ethnic community organization to claim state resources.

Her scholarship centers race and feminist studies, focusing on transnational cinema cultures and everyday experiences of migration, un-belonging and of occupying liminal spaces. In exploring women of color spectatorship, she illuminates the contradictory politics of Bollywood cinematic pleasure for British and South Asian American women, negotiating racialized stereotypes, pervasive misogyny and Islamophobia in Bollywood and Euro-American cultural representations. She argues that transnational popular cinema practice has the potential to produce counter-hegemonic spaces of feminine bonding and homo-erotic feminist solidarity at the margins of diasporic consciousness. In 2019, she researched gender and racial hierarchies in the Silicon Valley tech industry. Previously, as a research scholar at the Beatrice Bain Research group (BBRG), she authored, The Global Beauty Industry: Racism, Colorism and the National Body (2016, Routledge). The book draws upon insights from Black, transnational, and ‘Third-World’ feminists of color and takes an intersectional approach to the politics of embodied beauty. It examines the global expansion of neoliberal consumer culture and the role beauty plays in redistributing privileges and inequalities by reterritorializing nations, cultures and bodies. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Working Lives Research Centre (Trade Union Congress, London, UK), she collaborative researched the history of labor activism of migrant Black and Asian workers in London neighborhoods.

PUBLICATIONS
2018, British South Asian women’s feminist aesthetics in ‘Bombay cinema talk’, South Asian Popular Culture, 16:1, 71-87.

2016, The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism and the National Body. Routledge, Framing 21st Centuries Social Issues.

2007, The Politics of Happiness in British Asian Experiences of Bombay Cinema. Journal of Creative Communications 2 (1-2), 101-121.

1998, Ending Domestic Violence: Report from the Global Frontlines: ‘Chappals (shoes), Sticks and Handbags: Domestic Violence in India. Published by the Family Violence Prevention Fund, San Francisco.