Assistant Professor
Media Studies & Film Studies
damini.kulkarni@ssla.edu.in
Damini aims to ground her pedagogy in a belief in value-creating education—one that refuses to treat value as fixed or inherited. She also hopes to encourage students to imagine the “real world” outside the university not as a pre-given against which they must fortify themselves, but as one that can be brought into being through their own creativity and labour. She is guided by the hope that attention itself can be transformative, and that careful reading, watching, and listening remain among our most powerful tools for imagining just and equal futures.
Damini holds a PhD from the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Savitribai Phule Pune University, where her doctoral research examined Indian women’s engagements with cinema on digital screens. This work attends closely to practices of watching—pausing, rewinding, sharing, abandoning—and asks what these gestures reveal about body and agency in a post-pandemic media landscape. Across her scholarship, Damini is drawn to moments where media slip from the categories and roles assigned to them: when popular forms harbour dissent, when song sequences interrupt narrative time, when viewing becomes an intimate, domestic, or quietly political act. Her intellectual commitments are shaped by feminist theory, film phenomenology, and critical media studies, and by a deep belief that teaching and scholarship are forms of care.
Damini’s academic writing has appeared in journals such as Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Film International, Film Criticism, Cinergie, and Economic and Political Weekly, as well as in edited volumes published by Routledge. Alongside peer-reviewed work, she has consistently written for wider publics, publishing essays and criticism in Scroll.in, Himal Southasian, and other platforms. She has written across various registers with the goals of building and articulating theory to and with wider audiences, letting critical thought circulate beyond the university, and making it answerable to the worlds it describes.
At the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, she teaches courses on Indian cinema, film studies, media research, media economics and critical writing. Damini’s commitment to education extends beyond formal classrooms. She has conducted gender-sensitisation workshops for adolescents, curated visual essays for Google Arts and Culture, contributed to curriculum development, and participated in public conversations around cinema, gender, and digital life.
