Ph.D. Candidate Soumya Shankar
Soumya Shankar is a doctoral researcher in Political Science and an award-winning political journalist and long-form storyteller. Her work has been published across print, digital, radio, and television platforms in the United States, Hong Kong, and India.
Her doctoral research examines electoral integrity with a focus on post technologisation integrity trends in Indian elections. Her larger multimodal research draws on mixed methods, triangulating archival and historical analysis, quantitative electoral forensics and other statistical methods, and ethnographic fieldwork. The broader work extends into narrative nonfiction storytelling in the shape of a documentary on the world's largest electoral exercise.
Previous Engagements
In a past avatar, Shankar reported from the frontlines of movements, migrations, policy shifts and electoral cycles for outlets such as Foreign Policy, NBC News, The Intercept, Slate, and The Caravan, among others. She has received multiple awards, grants and fellowships for her work, which has primarily probed the relationship between power and the people through sustained inquiries at the nexus of political power, technology and democratic processes.
Deeply attentive to what lies beneath material structures, Shankar has long pursued the study and exploration of consciousness as personal practice. She has an emerging interest in potential interdisciplinary syntheses between consciousness studies, aesthetics, and the humanities and social sciences.
Research Interests
- Electoral Integrity
- Voting Technology and Behaviour
- Political Institutions • Social Movements and Networked Protests
- Media and Communication Infrastructures • Political Psychology