Ashwani Sharma

Profession

Lecturer, BA (Hons) Film and Screen Studies

College

London College of Communication

Person Type

Staff

Biography

Ashwani Sharma is a Lecturer on BA (Hons) Film and Screen Studies at London College of Communication.

Interview

Previously Ashwani was a Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London (UEL). At UEL he was also a member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research and had been the Director of the Centre for New Ethnicities Research. Ashwani has been on the Executive Committee of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA), where he co-founded the race, ethnicity and postcolonial network. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Ashwani’s interdisciplinary teaching and research interests include race and audio-visual culture; postcolonial, decolonial and black cultural theory; diasporic and global film and contemporary art; digital media and archives; urban culture and music; racial capitalism and ecology; open access publishing and online journals; radical pedagogy and study.

Ashwani is completing a book on race, diaspora and visual culture with Bloomsbury Academic, examining the political aesthetics of urban time and space. He is the founding co-editor of darkmatter journal, where he has edited a number of special issues including on the TV series ‘The Wire’, and on ‘Post-racial Imaginaries’.

He is the co-editor of Disorienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Music (Zed Books), series editor of Radical Cultural Studies at Rowman and Littlefield, and an international advisor for the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal.

Ashwani is currently on the planning group of the Creating Interference research project and international network at the University of Westminster, where he has curated a film. He is a member of the Black Study Group (London), and is developing an online (sub)urban archival project, Must We Burn Croydon?.

Ashwani writes and performs poetry, and DJs. He has worked in the BBC and independent film in sound, and has been an aeronautical engineer. At present Ashwani is the chair of the management board for Docklands Outreach, a health and preventative social inclusion agency. He has been on a number of management boards including: Rich Mix Centre, Asian Dub Foundation Education (ADFED), East Midlands Arts Film, South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive (SALIDAA), and the Black Media Journal.

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