Pawas Bisht

Biography

Dr Pawas Bisht is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Communications and Culture, Deputy Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures, and Programme Director for the MA Global Media programmes at Keele University. He is an experienced media researcher and documentary filmmaker and has previously worked for leading institutions in the UK (Loughborough and Leicester) and India (AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia). His research focuses on media and cultural politics in relation to environmental activism, cultural memory, and public mobilisations of documentary storytelling. Pawas is currently leading ‘Storytelling for Environmental Change’, a two-year research project (2021-2023) that mobilises environmental storytelling to tackle the catastrophic challenge of urban air pollution confronting India (funded by the British Academy's Humanities and Social Sciences’ Tackling Global Challenges Programme, supported under the UK Government's Global Challenges Research Fund). His earlier ethnographic research on social movements and memory-work in relation to the Bhopal Gas Disaster has been published in leading journals including Media, Culture & Society and Contemporary South Asia.

His films have been shown on Channel 4 (UK), CNBC, and Doordarshan (India’s national public service broadcaster) as well as in art venues in UK, India, US, and Europe. They include work commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme and the Global Environment Facility. Recently produced films include 'Back to the Drawing Board' (2017), a portrait of the British designers Pat Albeck and Peter Rice, ‘Memory Archipelago’ (2018), an examination of the politics of Gulag memory on the Solovetsky Islands in Russia’s Far North, and ‘(Not) Acting Our Age’ (2019), examining ageing, theatre and creativity.

Pawas is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and external examiner for the MA Media Management programme at Coventry University.

Pawas convenes the undergraduate module in ‘Documentary Theory & Practice’ and postgraduate modules in ‘Mediated Communications: Theory & Practice’ and ‘Globalisation, Culture & Media’.

Pawas welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students wanting to undertake research examining: media and cultural memory; social movements and cultural politics; environmental politics and media; Indian media. He also welcomes inquiries for projects involving film practice and arts-based methodologies.

Supervision

Current PhD supervision:

Lead supervisor

• Memory-work in Hybrid Documentary Films: Negotiating Painful Pasts
• The Algerian War in 21st Century French and Algerian Cinema: Examining Film and Cultural Memory

Co-supervisor

• Contesting Piety: Representations of Indonesian Internet Celebrities on Instagram (completed Jan 2022)
• The Sustainable Art of Plastic: Practice-based Exploration of the Geographies of Plastic Waste (submitted spring 2022)