Media Studies

Lecturer, Ph.D., Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London

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COURSES TAUGHT

• MEDIAST 190: Gender, Race, and National Identity in Global Popular Culture
• MEDIAST 130: Research Methods in Media and Cultural Studies
• MEDIAST 131: Cultural Studies Research Methodology
• MEDIAST 190/GWS111: Transnational Gender and Media Studies
• MEDIAST 113: Media and Democracy
• MEDIAST 199: Supervised Independent Study for Internship
• MEDIAST 175: Reading the Media: Hip Hop, K-Pop, and Latin Telenovelas
• MEDIAST 190: Beauty, Intersectionality and Globalization
• MEDIAST 190: Beauty, Fashion and Globalization
• MEDIAST H194 Honors Thesis Preparation and MEDIAST H195: Honors Thesis

RESEARCH

Critical Feminist Studies – Race, Media, Culture and Postcolonial Studies

Transnational Media Studies- South Asian Popular Culture – Diasporic cinema practices of Bollywood cinema

Critical Beauty Studies – Globalization, Nationalism and Gender relations – focusing on the US, India and China

Political and Public Sociology: Silicon Valley tech industry gender, race, and ethnicity research

BIO

Meeta Rani Jha’s scholarship explores the lived experiences of gender, race, media and decoloniality in everyday cultural practices. She holds a Master’s in Feminist Cultural Studies and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She entered academia after a decade of feminist and antiracist activism in the Greater Manchester area (UK). As an advocate (Black Rights Worker) at Salford Law Center (UK), she coordinated legal rights on racial and domestic violence and organized Black and minority ethnic community organizations to claim state resources and demand access to public services. Her scholarship examines race, culture, media, and feminist studies, focusing on transnational cinema cultures and everyday experiences of narrating migration and “un-belonging.” As a postdoctoral fellow at the Working Lives Research Centre (Trade Union Congress, UK), she collaboratively researched the history of labour activism of migrant Black and Asian workers in London neighbourhoods. In 2019, she researched gender and racial hierarchies in the Silicon Valley tech industry. Previously, as a research scholar at the Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG) in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at UC, Berkeley, she authored The Global Beauty Industry: Racism, Colorism, and the National Body (2016, Routledge). The book draws upon insights from Black, transnational, and ‘Third-World’ feminists of colour and takes an intersectional approach to the politics of embodied beauty. It examines the global expansion of neoliberal consumer culture, and the role beauty (as value) plays in redistributing privileges and inequalities by reterritorializing nations, cultures, and bodies.

PUBLICATIONS

Jha, M. R. (2024). Afterword: aesthetic citizenship and Necropolitics. Citizenship Studies, 28(1), 118–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2024.2363624

Jha, Meeta Rani and Twine, France Winddance, (2019). “Brokers, Boot Camps and Graduate Degrees: Pathways to Technically-Skilled Careers in Silicon Valley.” ISA e-Forum, edited by ISA Editorial.

Jha, Meeta Rani. (2018).”British South Asian Women’s Feminist Aesthetics in ‘Bombay Cinema Talk.’” South Asian Popular Culture 16, no.1, 71-87.

Jha, Meeta Rani. (2016). The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body. Routledge, Framing 21st Centuries Social Issues.

Jha, Meeta Rani. (2007). The politics of happiness in British Asian experiences of Bombay cinema. Journal of Creative Communications, 2(1-2), 101-121.

Jha, Meeta Rani. (1998). Chappals (shoes), sticks and handbags: Domestic violence in India. In Ending domestic violence: Report from the global frontlines (pp. xx-xx). Family Violence Prevention Fund.