About
The Diaspora Screen Media Network (DSMN) aims to explore the exciting developments taking place in Black British and British Asian Cinema and TV brought about by new media and the internet.
The network will bring together creative practitioners, cultural hubs, educators, students and members of the public to create new conversations about the innovative changes in the ways that media is produced, disseminated and consumed.
Please see an outline of what the DSMN is about.
People
Professor Janet Wilson
Janet Wilson is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Writing at the University of Northampton. She has taught and published widely on Australian and New Zealand/Aotearoa diaspora and postcolonial writing and cinema, and recently coedited the Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader (2017). She has also written on British Asian fiction, Asian Australian diaspora writing, and supervised doctoral dissertations that cover contemporary British Asian cinema.
Janet is Principal Investigator of the Diaspora Screen Media Network, founder and coeditor of the International Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Routledge) and series editor of Studies in World Literature (Ibidem Verlag).
Professor Rajinder Dudrah
Rajinder is Professor of Cultural Studies and Creative Industries at Birmingham City University. He has taught, researched and published widely across Black British and British Asian media and representations, and is the founding Co-Editor of the scholarly journal, South Asian Popular Culture (Routledge). Rajinder is Co-Investigator for the Diaspora Screen Media Network.
Dr Meriem R. Lamara
Meriem Rayen Lamara has recently earned her PhD in English Literature, specializing in Gothic Studies and Young Adult Literature at the University of Northampton. She holds a Master’s degree in African, British, and American Cultural and Literary Studies from the University of Constantine, Algeria. Her research focuses primarily on the supernatural Gothic, folklore, and mythology in Young Adult literature. Her adjacent research interests include cultural representation and diversity, Islamic mythology, and North African literature and folklore. Meriem is the Web Administrator for The Diaspora Screen Media Network.
Dr David Simmons
David is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at The University of Northampton. His research interests include Transmedia, Adaptation and Horror. He runs a monthly cult film night at the Northampton Film House and regularly gives talks at the cinema. He is Research Co-ordinator for The Diaspora Screen Media Network.
Professor Dina Iordanova
Dina Iordanova is Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. A native of Bulgaria, she has lived and worked in various multicultural settings that bring together and shape a variety of ethnic groups in unique creative agglomerations, including Austin/Texas, Chicago/Illinois and Leicester/England. Whilst building a new Film Studies department within the fairly homogenous academic context in Scotland, she attracted doctoral students from around the world, and the programme now boasts a diverse array of graduates from countries like Uruguay and Ecuador, India and South Korea, the USA, Spain and Sweden, Romania and Croatia. Dina has published extensively on transnational cinema, Eastern European and Balkan film, film festivals and global film circulation.
Ian Sergeant
Ian Sergeant was a founder member of Black Pyramid Film and Video Project, Bristol. Created in 1993, Black Pyramid emerged due to the underrepresentation of Black and ethnic minority film makers and product in the South West region.
He has an MA in Contemporary Curatorial Practice and is currently a Midlands 3 Cities AHRC funded PhD research student at Birmingham City University, his practice-based research title is Visual Representations and Cultural (Re) Constructions of Black British Masculinities in 21st Century Birmingham, which aims to interrogate notions of masculinities, identities, gender, race, and representation.
Nathan Dodzo 
Nathan Dodzo is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Creative Film, Television and Digital Media Production; with extensive leadership, teaching, broadcast and journalism experience, and the ability and skills to translate these into effective and meaningful learning. He completed his MA in Media Production from Coventry University with Distinction, and has held QTS status for almost two decades. He successfully completed the National Professional Qualification for Senior Leaders and he has also obtained his Fellowship to the Higher Education Academy.
As an international political video journalist and broadcaster, he has produced and edited news packages for various international news agencies including SABC, CBS News (60 minutes), Reuters, BBC World Service, Sky News and ITN. He has also worked on several film, documentary and drama productions, set up his own social enterprise and production and advertising companies, as well as having worked with UNESCO to provide training for new entrants and media professionals on using digital video cameras and editing software.
Network members
Ghazala Butt 
Ghazala Nazir Butt is a PhD student at the University of Northampton. She has completed a thesis in “The Representation of Female Gender Roles in Bollywood and Lollywood cinema” as part of her BA Hons in Cultural Studies. For her Masters’ Degree in Modern English Studies her thesis was “A Re-reading of Hanif Kureishi”. Her PhD thesis is a study of Familial Performativity in the works of Hanif Kureishi. She has also completed CELTA and taught English as a second language to students from a variety of countries. She has presented on Hanif Kureishi at conferences. Her academic areas of interest include Feminist Critical Theory, Gender Studies, Popular Culture, Diaspora, Race and Ethnicity Studies, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, and Film Theory. She has written for The List Magazine as their Indian Cinema correspondent, presented at conferences on the topic of Hanif Kureishi, and enjoys creative writing and fiction. She enjoys the theatre, and is a committed bibliophile, film collector, and ABBA fan.
Keisha Bruce
Keisha Bruce is a PhD student in Black Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include Black popular culture, Black Feminism, Black identity formation, and digital media. Her PhD research illustrates how digital diasporic blackness is constructed, performed, negotiated, and policed by Black women on the Internet. Outside of her thesis, she is involved in a variety of projects that relate to racial and gender inequalities, social justice, Black studies in Britain, and Black archives. She is currently working on an oral history project at Nottingham Black Archives, and is co-founder of , a teaching and learning project that centres the development of a Black studies network for PhDs and ECRs. Keisha tweets at: @keishastweets.
Keisha‘s PhD is funded by the Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership 2018-2021.
Email:keisha.bruce@nottingham.ac.uk
Patricia Francis
Patricia Francis is a filmmaker, producer and director with a background in radio and television broadcasting. She is also an independent filmmaker; Many Rivers To Cross describes the legacy of empire on African-Caribbean immigrants arriving in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and Making Waves explores the social, political and economic impact on individuals growing up Black in Britain.
Patricia’s PhD research interests include feminist studies, Black socio-political issues and the silencing of women’s voices. Her thesis investigates the impact social activism has on women’s lives and explores how insurgency in women fosters courage and transformation. It analyses how women’s activism extends beyond their cause and into their individual lives.
Patricia has a keen interest in social justice and is currently involved in broadcasts that raise awareness of social issues. Her films can be seen here –https://www.youtube.com/user/SyncopateTV/videos
Twitter: @Syncopate_Media
Patricia’s PhD is funded by Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.
Email: patricia.francis2017@my.ntu.ac.uk
Rahul K. Gairola
Rahul K Gairola, PhD (University of Washington, Seattle) is The Krishna Somers Senior Lecturer in English and Postcolonial Literature and a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. He is an author and/or co-editor of five books: (Routledge, 2020), (Routledge, 2020), (Routledge, 2019), (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016), and (Orient Blackswan, 2016). He has published widely on literary and cultural studies, diaspora and postcolonial studies, race and ethnicity studies, the digital humanities, comparative Asian studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. He has held grants and fellowships at the University of Washington, The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, Humboldt University of Berlin, The MacMillan Center at Yale University, the German Academic Exchange (DAAD) at Leipzig University, and the University of Cambridge, where he served as the Washington Fellow at Pembroke College in 2003-2004. In addition to teaching in Western Australia, he has taught at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee, India, and many American institutions including The City University of New York, the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, and Seattle University.
Isabella Skinner 
Isabella recently completed a Bachelor of Arts degree, with a double major in Communication and Media, Film and Television, from the University of Auckland. She undertook a student exchange to Monash University in Melbourne in the first half of 2020 before returning to New Zealand for her final semester. Isabella then had the wonderful opportunity of being chosen as a Summer Research Scholar at UoA, where her research focus was on ‘Media Transformations and Popular Music Archives’. Isabella's contribution to this blog comes from some of the research she undertook during her summer research project, in particular the topics related to British South Asian diaspora and culture seen in various archives and exhibitions.
Nabeel Zuberi
Nabeel Zuberi is Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Auckland. He has written extensively on South Asian and African diasporas in popular music media and cultures in the UK and USA, nationalisms and race in the history and heritage of music, and technology and music. His publications include Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (co-edited with Jon Stratton, Ashgate/Routledge 2014), Media Studies in Aotearoa / New Zealand 2 (co-edited with Luke Goode, Pearson 2010) and Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music (University of Illinois Press, 2001). He is currently writing a book on music, race and media since 9/11 to be published by Bloomsbury. His research interests also include music in the lives of British Asians in the West Midlands during the 1970s. Nabeel was editor-in-chief of Popular Communication: the International Journal of Media and Culture (2013-2016) and now serves on its editorial advisory board, as well as those of @IASPM journal (International Association of Popular Music), Communication, Culture and Critique, CIPHER: The International Council for Hip Hop Studies, Journal of Working-Class Studies, Norient: Network for Local and Global Sounds and Media Culture, and Screen Sound: The Australasian Journal of Soundtrack Studies. Nabeel has also been co-presenter of The Basement, a weekly music show on BASE FM Auckland, since 2004.
Dr. Preet Hiradhar
Dr. Preet Hiradhar is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English and a Fellow at the Centre for Social Policy and Social Change at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. With a background in technology and language learning she researches technology-mediated discourses in linguistic, literary, and cultural texts. Her co-authored book Critical Reading and Writing in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2016) explores power relations and discourses that operate in contemporary English language texts across a wide range of online and offline genres. She is currently working on a monograph based on her recent research on multimodal representations and cultural identities of South Asian diasporas in digital environments.
Ramya S
Ramya S is pursuing a Doctoral programme in the Department of English at Anna University, India. Her research study is on Digital Humanities, focusing on the feminist representation in Born-digital literature especially in detective fiction within the Indian context. She has a Postgraduate degree in English literature and has completed an online course "Feminism and Social Justice" offered by the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Dr Aleks Wansbrough
Dr Aleks Wansbrough is a cultural theorist and media theorist. Starting with his book, Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen: Myths and Allegories in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2021), he has become increasingly focused on how capitalism shapes social media and how cinema can provide political allegories of the tech-capitalist age. He is currently researching screen representations of alternative modernism, such as Afro-Futurism, Indigenous Futurism and Sino-Futurism. He is an editor of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, published by Penn State University Press, an editor and co-founder of The Journal of Alterity Studies and World Literature and is the director and cofounder of the Inhuman Screens Conference, which is held annually at the Sydney Underground Film Festival.
Email: a.ajpopularculture@gmail.com
Partners
Our expanding network includes partners in the East and West Midlands working in the media industries.
DSMN in an AHRC funded project.