Pawas Bisht

Dr. Pawas Bisht is a senior lecturer in culture, media, and communications at Keele University, the program director for the MA Global Media programs, and the deputy director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures. He is an accomplished media researcher and documentarian who has previously worked for prestigious organizations in India and the UK (Loughborough and Leicester) (AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia). His study focuses on media and cultural politics' role in public mobilizations of documentary storytelling, cultural memory, and environmental action. The two-year research project, "Storytelling for Environmental Change," is being led by Pawas and is sponsored by the Humanities and Social Sciences Tackling Global Challenges Program of the British Academy, which is supported by the UK Government's Global Challenges Research Fund.

It will use environmental storytelling to address India's catastrophic urban air pollution problem. Several prestigious magazines, including Media, Culture & Society, and Contemporary South Asia, have published his earlier ethnographic work on social movements and memory work in response to the Bhopal Gas Disaster. His films have been screened in art venues in the UK, India, US, and Europe and on Doordarshan, India's national public service broadcaster, Channel 4 (UK), CNBC. They include projects that the Global Environment Facility and the United Nations Development Program ordered. A few recently released movies are "Back to the Drawing Board" (2017), which is a portrait of British designers Pat Albeck and Peter Rice, "Memory Archipelago" (2018), which explores Russian Far North's Solovetsky Islands' politics around Gulag remembrance and "(Not) Acting Our Age" (2019), which looks at aging, theater, and creativity.

Pawas is an external examiner for the Coventry University MA Media Management program and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. Pawas organizes the postgraduate courses "Mediated Communications: Theory & Practice" and "Globalization, Culture & Media," as well as the undergraduate course "Documentary Theory & Practice." If you are interested in researching the following topics: Social movements and cultural politics, environmental politics and media, and media and cultural memory, or Indian media, contact Pawas. He also accepts queries for projects incorporating artistic techniques and film practice.