Email: mehak.sawhney [at] mail.mcgill.ca
Twitter: https://twitter.com/meh_heck
Research Interests: sound studies, environmental humanities, oceanic media, surveillance studies, critical AI studies, media theory, STS, global media cultures, South Asia and the Global South
Bio:
Mehak Sawhney (she/her) is a PhD candidate and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Communication Studies at McGill University. Her doctoral project titled Audible Waters: Sounding and Surveilling the Indian Ocean focuses on the acoustic production of submarine oceanic territory with postcolonial India and the Indian Ocean as its primary sites of analysis. It maps the political geography of sound by exploring military security, oceanic laboratories, marine conservation and fishing as sites where territoriality is made and unmade through the deployment of submarine monitoring technologies such as sonars as well as scientific disciplines such as underwater acoustics and bioacoustics. She also works on the intersection of sound and AI with a focus on the history of data analysis and machine listening in bioacoustics as well as the politics of listening in automated speech recognition and voice analysis.
She has co-curated Capture All: A Sonic Investigation (2020-2022), a collaborative artistic and research project between Sarai, Delhi, and Liquid Architecture, Melbourne, that explores questions of sonicity and situatedness in the Asia-Pacific region. Previously, she was a researcher at Sarai, the media programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, where her work investigated urban sound and listening cultures. Her work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Kalfou, Amodern, Disclaimer, and The Wire. Mehak holds an MA and MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi.
Select Publications:
Journal Issues, Edited
McLean, Laura, and Mehak Sawhney (co-editors). Capture All: A Sonic Investigation, Disclaimer, co-published by Liquid Architecture and Sarai, August 2022.
Journal Articles
Sawhney, Mehak. “Infrastructure of Life: Public Address, Listening and Crowds in the Delhi Metro and Kumbh,” Media, Culture & Society 44, no. 2 (2022): 341-361.
Sterne, Jonathan, and Mehak Sawhney (co-authors). “The Acousmatic Question and the Will to Datafy: Otter.ai, Low-Resource Languages and the Politics of Machine Listening,” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 9, no. 2 (2022): 288-306.
Sawhney, Mehak. “Aqua Audibilis: Sonic Borders and the Making of Underwater Territory,” Special Issue on “When Was the Smart Border?” Cultural Studies (forthcoming Spring 2025).
Public Writing
Sawhney, Mehak. “Premediations of Carcerality: Notes on Targeted Surveillance in Postcolonial India,” Platypus, Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, American Anthropological Association, 2024.
Sawhney, Mehak. “Fuelled by Leaked Evidence and Illegal Surveillance, Media Trials the New Normal in India,” The Wire, 10 October 2020.