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Assistant Professor Mehak Sawhney’s (she/her) research focuses on environmental media, the blue humanities, sound studies, surveillance studies and media theory. She is currently working on three projects. Her book project,ÌýAudible Waters: Sounding and Surveilling the Indian Ocean, explores the politics of acoustic sensing and the production of underwater oceanic territory in postcolonial India and the Indian Ocean region. It maps the political geography of sound by exploring underwater militarization, oceanic laboratories, marine conservation, hydrocarbon extraction and industrial fishing as sites where territoriality is made and unmade through the deployment of submarine monitoring technologies such as sonars, as well as scientific disciplines such as underwater acoustics and bioacoustics.

Her second project studies the environmental costs of AI, particularly in relation to water. She is exploring questions of hydrocolonialism and environmental justice, as well as the interconnected situated histories of AI infrastructure, cooling technologies and ecopolitical milieu subtending the expansion of data centers globally. Her third project lies at the intersection of sound and AI, with a focus on the history of data analysis and machine listening in bioacoustics, as well as the politics of listening in automated speech recognition and voice analysis.

Mehak has co-curatedÌýCapture All: A Sonic Investigation (2020-2022), a collaborative artistic and research project between Sarai, Delhi, and Liquid Architecture, Melbourne, that explores questions of sonicity and situatedness in the Asia-Pacific region. Previously, she was a researcher at Sarai, the media program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, where her work investigated urban sound and listening cultures. Her published and forthcoming work appears inÌý,ÌýCultural Studies,ÌýDiscourse,Ìý,Ìý, andÌý, among other platforms.

She received her Ph.D. in communication studies from McGill University, where her research was funded by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and the Wolfe Graduate Fellowship. She also holds an M.A. and MPhil in English literature from the University of Delhi. For more information, please visit .

Research Interests:Ìýenvironmental media, Blue Humanities, sustainability, water justice, AI, sound studies, surveillance, transnational media, South Asia, Indian Ocean, Global South, postcolonial studies