Prof. Dr. Sahana Udupa

Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at LMU Munich.

Her research interests include extreme online speech, the politics of artificial intelligence, digital politics, news and journalism, and media policy. She founded the program “For Digital Dignity” with an international network of researchers, policy-makers and civil society groups to dissect the complex relationship between online media cultures and political participation, and to advance critical inquiry on the political impacts of digital media.

She is the author of Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics (Cambridge University Press, UK, 2015) and co-author of Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (New York University Press, 2023). In 2021, the United Nations commissioned her to write a research paper on digital technology and extreme speech. Udupa held the Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard University in 2021 and was awarded the Francqui Chair the following year, in recognition of her contribution to digital research. In 2016, she received an ERC Starting Grant and subsequently a Proof of Concept Grant from the European Research Council for her work on politics and digital media, followed by an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2023. In this new project, she is working on contentious speech on small social media platforms in Kenya, Germany, Britain, and India.

Prior to joining LMU Munich, Udupa was Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the School of Public Policy, Central European University, and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

At CAS she is spokesperson of the CAS Research Group “Below the Radar? Messaging Apps, Encryption and the Enticement of Extreme Speech”.