Supervisors: Dr Emily Harmer (primary supervisor, Department of Communication and Media), Dr Kerry Traynor (second supervisor, Department of Communication and Media), Dr Cat Mahoney (third supervisor, Department of Communication and Media)
Email address: Sreejani.Sanyal@liverpool.ac.uk
Research topic:
Violence against women (VAW) is a major issue which continues to prevail in modern India. The primary reason behind the violence against Indian women is the deep-rooted gender bias in the patriarchal structure of Indian society. Indian women have always been given a lower social status as compared to Indian men. Today more cases of violence committed against Indian women are getting reported by the media and the long-standing social evil of gender bias against women is also being acknowledged by the media and the public. Indian media representations regarding this issue are both positive and negative. Media has often helped victims to come forward as was the case after the wave of the #MeToo movement in October 2018. However, some biases are still present in the reporting of VAW on Indian media. My study discusses these biases and also tries to understand the types of representation surfacing during the COVID 19 pandemic as well as in the #MeTooIndia movement. My study focuses on media representations of two types of VAW: sexual violence and domestic violence. I have focused on representations by the Indian news and print media, and have selected two popular English language newspapers in India, The Times of India and The Hindu. I will be analysing articles published in the online archives of these two newspapers. I also plan to interview journalists working in these two newspaper companies and get their opinions regarding the kind of reporting that occurs, and determine whether their stories match my analysis of the online archives and the content of the literature reviews about this topic.
Research areas:
Violence against women; gender bias against women; feminist studies; news media representations; social media representations.
Academic achievements:
I received a two-year MA Degree in Communication for Social Change from The University of Queensland in Australia (2022), with a thesis entitled ‘Domestic Violence Against Women in India in the COVID 19 Era and the Role of Social Media’. I studied scenarios of domestic violence committed against Indian women during the pandemic and analysed social media’s function in this context. I prepared questionnaires, interviewed respondents, conducted archival research, and performed thematic analysis.