The Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication Welcomes Three Visiting Scholars

The Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to announce three visiting scholars will join the center this fall.

Adrienne Shaw will join CARGC as a long-term visiting scholar through the end of the spring 2025 semester. Samina Mishra and Sneha Gore Mehendale will spend a few weeks at CARGC as short-term visiting scholars this fall. During their residency at CARGC, Shaw, Mishra, and Mehendale will develop their own research projects and take an active part in the life of the center by mentoring CARGC fellows and participating in center events and research activities.

"We're thrilled to welcome Adrienne, Sneha, and Samina to CARGC in the fall. The professional insights and expertise they have to share will surely enrich the experiences of our fellows,” says CARGC Senior Research Manager, Eszter Zimanyi. “We're extra delighted that media practitioners of Sneha's and Samina's caliber are able to spend time with our fellows, many of whom are producing multimodal and creative research projects. We hope our visiting scholars feel as inspired by their time at our center as we do by having them here."

Adrienne Shaw

Adrienne Shaw is an Associate Professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production, a member of the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication graduate faculty, and an affiliate member of and on the steering committee for the Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies program. Since 2022, she has served on the Interactive/Immersive Media Board of Jurors for the Peabody Awards, and has been a judge for the Gayming Magazine Awards since 2021. She also is a member of GLAAD’s Gaming Advisory Council and a Higher Education Video Game Alliance Fellow.

Shaw is the founder of the LGBTQ Game Archive and was co-curator of Rainbow Arcade, the world’s first exhibit of LGBTQ game history (December 2018 - May 2019 in Berlin, Germany) and co-author of the exhibit catalog. She is also the author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (winner of the 2016 International Communication Association's Popular Communications Division's Book Award). She has co-edited three anthologies: Queer Game Studies (2017), Queer Technologies: Affordances, Affect, Ambivalence (2017), and Interventions: Communication Research and Practice (2018), as well as a special issue in the Journal of Communication on Open Research practices (2021, Vol 71 Issue 5). Shaw was the host and program chair for the 2021 (online) and 2023 (Philadelphia) Association of Internet Researcher’s Annual Conferences. She is also a co-editor of New York University Press's Critical Cultural Communication book series and serves on editorial/review boards for several journals.

Samina Mishra

Samina Mishra is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and teacher based in New Delhi, with a special interest in media for and about children. Her work uses the lens of childhood, identity, and education to reflect the experiences of growing up in India. Her recent work includes the award-winning Jamlo Walks, a picture-book that tells a story of the migrants walking back home during the March 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, Nida Finds a Way, a chapter book for early readers that follows a young girl as she explores the world around her including a citizens’ protest, Happiness Class, a documentary film on the idea of happiness for children, examined through the Happiness Curriculum in Delhi government schools, and Hum Hindustani, an interdisciplinary research project on children and citizenship. She has taught Film in the IB Diploma Programme and at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia. She is also the founder of The Magic Key Centre for the Arts and Childhood that works with children and adults on using the arts in education. The Centre’s recent work includes The Incredible Child, an exhibition emerging from an ongoing arts-based programme for Afghan refugee children at the Simurgh Centre, Delhi, and The Hum Hindustani Poetry Podcast based on the poetry written by children as part of the Hum Hindustani project. To find out more about Mishra’s work, please visit https://linktr.ee/saminamishra.

Sneha Gore Mehendale

Sneha Gore Mehendale is a media professional- turned- academic from Pune, India. Her work focuses on exploring the practices of digital journalists in India; with podcasting being a specific focus area. She draws upon frameworks and methods broadly associated with journalism studies and media industry studies. Her current work is positioned on the intersection of podcasting, media production cultures, and climate change communication.

She has published her research in international peer-reviewed journals like Media International Australia, Media Practice and Education, Media Asia, and periodicals like the Economic and Political Weekly and the Media Ethics magazine. She has also presented her work at the annual conferences of the ICA and the IAMCR.

Apart from this, Sneha is a news verification trainer with the Google News Initiative and routinely trains journalists and journalism students in fact-checking.

Sneha currently works as an Assistant Professor at the Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, a constituent of Symbiosis International University, India. On the non-work front, Sneha is a long-distance running enthusiast, a heritage volunteer, and a mother to an eight-year-old.

About CARGC Visiting Scholar Program

CARGC offers short-term and long-term visiting fellowship positions for a limited number of visiting scholars from institutions other than the University of Pennsylvania whose research aligns with current CARGC research themes. To learn more about the visiting scholar program at CARGC and read testimonials from our former visiting scholars, please visit this webpage.