Featured AASRN member

Sukhmani Khorana

Dr Sukhmani Khorana (Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland)

The AASRN Featured Member profiles showcase our network expertise and range of research interests. As a research network that is driven by many Early Career Researchers (ECRs, which includes PhD students), we are particularly appreciative of ECR perspectives, enthusiasm, and engagement.

The AASRN Featured Member for the next few months is:

SUKHMANI KHORANA Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland

As part of Professor Graeme Turner’s Federation Fellow project on post-broadcast television across the globe, she is examining India’s 24/7 English-language news networks, and their entrenchment in the nation’s burgeoning middle classes.

She is also currently under contract to edit a collection on “crossover cinema”, forthcoming from Routledge. Sukhmani’s work on a wide range of screen media has appeared in Senses of Cinema, M/C Journal, Metro, Screen Education, Outskirts and Continuum. She was a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore (India) in September 2011, where she also delivered a seminar on the representation of the Indian student attacks in Melbourne.

With a recently completed PhD from the University of Adelaide on Indian-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s “elements” trilogy, Sukhmani considers her intellectual role as that of a mediator between cultural discourses. Her work draws on postcolonial theory and diasporic studies, especially in the wake of globalisation, and she positions herself as a transmedia Indian-Australian scholar-practitioner. Her doctoral project involved a holistic study of diasporic cinema, as well as a manifestation of the same in the making of a documentary about Indian migrants. Along with transnational film and South Asian news media, Sukhmani is interested in ethnic and community media, digital storytelling projects, and postcolonial literature.

Sukhmani has four years’ lecturing and tutoring experience in undergraduate courses on digital media, screen studies, media research methods and short filmmaking. She has also coordinated an honours course on screen cultures at the University of South Australia, and practices blended teaching and learning.

Additionally, she is involved with a number of community initiatives such as international film festivals, refugee tutoring programs, and independent publications.