‘Televisual Pakistan’: A Webinar on BioScope’s Special Issue
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2021-03-23

Abstract
The webinar brings together editors and contributors of BioScope’s special issue on television cultures in Pakistan. Expanding on the notion of television, with its historical antecedents in print, radio, cinema and its contemporary overlaps with new media technologies, the special issue frames the object of enquiry as ‘Televisual Pakistan’ to gesture to the continually intermedial nature of television. A year on since the special issue first appeared, the contributing panelists reflect on their forays into the multi-sited televisual space as an occasion for new methods, diverse positionalities and a desire to produce theory – an empirical investigation into what Pakistan reveals about the mass medium. 

Speakers: 

Aisha Malik is a research affiliate at the University of Sydney in the Gender and Culture studies department where she teaches on Media and Gender. Her doctoral research focuses on Pakistani serial dramas; she conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore as part of her research.

Ayesha Mulla is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research interests in media anthropology revolve around issues of mass publicity, news production, censorship and sensationalism. She is currently a lecturer in Critical Media Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.  

Rafay Mahmood completed his MA in Creative and Cultural Industries at SOAS University of London with a focus in Ethnomusicology and Screen Studies. He is an independent researcher and a journalist who has written extensively on Pakistan’s cultural landscape, particularly film and music industries. He is currently an adjunct faculty at Habib University and culture Editor of The Express Tribune.

Rosie Thomas is Professor of Film at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster. Her early research as a social anthropologist was on the Bombay film industry and, since 1985, she has published widely on Indian cinema. She is a co-founder and co-editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. Her monograph Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies was published in 2013.  

Salma Siddique is the Principal Investigator of a DFG-funded film spectatorship project “Nitrate Cities” at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. In her forthcoming monograph, Evacuee Cinema: Partition Film Cultures between Bombay and Lahore, 1940-1960, she writes the history of Indian and Pakistani cinema together. 

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