Dr Sudipta Garai is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru. Her areas of interests include gender studies, sociology of culture and qualitative research.
Maria Kouvarou holds a PhD in Music from Durham University, with a specific focus on Aesthetics/Sociology of Popular Music. She has published papers in Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, Historia Critica, and International Journal of Heritage Studies among others. She has recently completed the research programme Music, dialect, and the re-inventions of folk traditions in Cypriot modernity (MU.DI.RE) (funded by A.G. Leventis foundation) at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Cyprus, where she is also an Adjunct Lecturer. As a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cyprus University of Technology, she examines the relationship between the independent popular music scene of the Republic of Cyprus and the country’s mainstream radio. Her published work has focused on popular music and society, cultural heritage, the public sphere, ideology, identity, postcoloniality, language, resistance, and gender.
Jonathan Lovell is an architectural historian based at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research evaluates the communicative potential of architecture, both as it is represented within media, and as it operates as a medium in its own right. To this task, he has recently completed a doctoral dissertation – Mystic Media – exploring how the artists involved in the Expanded Cinema movement of the 1960s/70s harnessed the combined force of architecture, media, and performance art to evoke the phenomenological and epistemological conditions associated with altered states of being. Chapters of this work have been published in leading journals of architecture and design history. The first takes a journey through the Labyrinth – a multiscreen film projected within a brutalist fortress, built for Expo 67 – which corralled audiences through three unique theatre spaces, each designed to chart the chapters of a human life. The second explored Cerebrum – a hybrid between a nightclub and gallery – which used analogue media and performance art to transport its guests across multiple virtual realities. To explore this expanded approach to environmental storytelling, he has presented his research with scholars of video game design, and now, popular music.
Dr Maya M is a sociologist with over a decade of experience in teaching and research. She serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Work at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru. Her academic interests include education, urban ethnography and indigenous societies.
Mazha S Muhammed is a research scholar at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, and a recipient of the Commonwealth Split-site Fellowship 2024. She is currently continuing her research at the Department of Music, Durham University, UK. Her areas of specialisation include performance analysis, musical discourse analysis, and the analysis of gestures specific to Hindustani music and Thumri.
Yiannis Papadakis is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus. He is author of Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide (I. B. Tauris, 2005, also translated in Greek and Turkish), co-editor of Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History and an Island in Conflict (Indiana University Press, 2006), editor of a 2006 special issue of Postcolonial Studies and co-editor of Cypriot Cinemas: Memory, Conflict and Identity in the Margins of Europe (Bloomsbury, 2014), among others. His published work has focused on ethnic conflict, borders, nationalism, history education, cinema, culture, and language. His recent work engages with issues of migration and social democracy in Denmark and the comparative study of cemeteries in Cyprus, Denmark and currently Japan.
