SPP Associate Professor Sahana Udupa gave a talk based on her book, Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics, at the "Ideas from India" conference organized by the South Asia Research Institute at the Australian National University on November 10. She participated in a panel discussion on emerging political and social challenges in India, together with Assa Doron (Australian National University, Canberra), Nivedita Menon (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), Lawrence Cohen (University of California, Berkeley), and Rita Kothari (Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar).
Udupa reiterated the need to document new forms of public participation and interactivity that have appeared in recent times within domains as diverse as media, urban development, education, and formal politics. She noted that scholars should "pay critical attention to these participatory cultures and how they may lead to populism within particular socio-political contexts."
In her book, Udupa studied English and Kannada print news media in Bangalore, India. She revealed "how the expanding private news culture played a critical role in shaping urban transformation in India, when the allegedly public profession of journalism became both an object and agent of global urbanization."