Nishant Shah

Nishant Shah is the co-founder and director of Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore; Vice-President Research at ArtEZ University of the Arts, Zwolle/The Netherlands; Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MeCS) at Leuphana University, Lüneburg/Germany; Visiting Professor at the Institute for Culture & Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM) at the faculty of Cultural Sciences, Leuphana University; Mentor for the Digital Earth Fellowship, with the Dutch Development Agency, Hivos, The Netherlands and a regular columnist for The Indian Express, India.

His PhD thesis titled The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace builds a framework to examine the technosocial identities that are produced at the intersection of law, digital technologies and everyday cultural practices in emerging information societies like India. Nishant Shah was an Asia Research fellow looking at the cost and infrastructure of building IT Cities like Shanghai. He is the author of a paper titled Whose Change is it Anyway? – Towards a future of digital technologies and citizen action in emerging information societies that seeks to revisit the debates around digital activism and change in the global context. His is interested in critically intervening in debates around Digital Humanities and conditions of change mediated by technologies.

Nishant Shah is on the steering committee of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Project (USA) as well as on the Media Art Histories collective (Latvia). He has been deeply involved with the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium (Taiwan/South Korea/Hong Kong) and is one of the key partners of the global Network of Centers for Internet and Society housed at the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, Cambridge, MA/USA.