Pawan Sharma

Pawan Sharma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a filmmaker and visual media artist. His research examines how media infrastructures organize creative labor, public visibility, and cultural memory in provincial India. Bringing ethnographic research into conversation with film and media studies, he studies the relationships among cinema exhibition, informal distribution, regional production, and digital platforms, with particular attention to caste, language, and the uneven conditions of cultural participation.

His dissertation, Infrastructures of Vision: Emergent Media Ecologies in Provincial India, draws on two years of fieldwork in the Malwa region of central India. It follows projectionists, media distributors, digital creators, and small production houses to examine how technological and industrial change enters everyday working relationships. The project asks how regional media workers sustain livelihoods and audiences as the systems of distribution and recognition on which they depend are reorganized. A documentary in development from this fieldwork forms a complementary component of the dissertation.

Sharma’s creative practice includes documentary film, photography, installation, and collaborative public programs. He directed Extraordinary Elsewhere, a documentary accompanying the Rochester Art Center exhibition of the same name, and developed Moving Tracts, an exhibition on South Asian food practices, migration, and sensory memory. As a co-founder and co-convener of Memory, Movement, Montage at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study, he helped organize collaborations among scholars, artists, and migrant communities. These projects extend his inquiry into how experiences become images, narratives, and public records, and into the responsibilities involved in their circulation.

His teaching connects the historical and theoretical study of media with visual analysis and creative practice. He designed and taught Digital Cultures and Storytelling at the University of Minnesota and has taught global studies, Hindi/Urdu, and photography. His research has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of Minnesota’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and the Harold Leonard Memorial Fellowship in Film Study.

Specialties

South Asian cinema and digital media; Media infrastructures and platform governance; Media industries and creative labor; Caste and digital counterpublics; Regional media and provincial modernity; Media ethnography and visual methods; Documentary film and ethics of representation; Migration and cultural memory; Climate humanities and Hindi cinema; Artificial intelligence and media production.

Dissertation research

Infrastructures of Vision: Emergent Media Ecologies in Provincial India

This dissertation examines transformations in media production, circulation, and spectatorship in Malwa, central India. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, it brings together the decline of single-screen cinemas, informal distribution networks, the work of creators on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, and the activities of regional production houses. Across these sites, it asks how caste, language, and local working relationships shape access to audiences and the possibility of sustaining creative work.

The project approaches provincial media worlds as sites from which to theorize changes in global media industries. Interviews, observation, platform and policy analysis, and visual documentation connect industrial arrangements to the conditions under which people make and circulate images. A complementary fifty-minute documentary is in development from field footage and interviews. Advisor: Suvadip Sinha. Expected PhD completion: spring 2027.