Priyam Sinha

Background

About Priyam Sinha

In 2024, I graduated with a PhD from the Faculty of Arts and Social Science at the National University of Singapore. My research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, production culture studies, social media and Internet studies, gender and women studies, and disability studies, focusing on South Asian contexts. My doctoral thesis is titled 'Disability in New Bollywood: Mapping Production and Circulation of Affect', which unpacks the New Bollywood as a post-1990s phenomenon through the actors, networks and assemblages that produce and consume variants of the disabled body. The questions guiding this multisited ethnographic study are: How do filmmaking practitioners and people with disability distinguish and collaborate their gaze, voice and sense-making of disability constructivism? What is the significance of everyday life in understanding disability in the dynamism of contemporary public culture? To address them, I trace the relational and processual materiality of disability construction by highlighting the myriad labour practices, belief systems, reflexive tactics and preoccupations of filmmakers and consumers. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and an archival study, I foreground the circulations of affect by proposing the framework of a “disability affect.” To explain the multifaceted constituents of disability representation, I examine the situatedness, routineness, gendered labour practices and eventfulness of everyday experiences that influence cinema production and reception. Thereby, it contributes to a broader investigation of the ideational and industrial hybridity, non-linearity, content creation interdependencies, entanglements, and negotiations within the temporality and labour networks of New Bollywood. Some of my work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, South Asian Diaspora, and Economic and Political Weekly, among others. I am also a regular podcast host of NewBooksNetwork. At the same time, I am a recipient of the Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award at NUS (with glowing teaching feedback reports) and have been selected as a Visiting Fellow at Humboldt University (2024) under the Berlin Alliance University Grant.