Tanvi Kanchan

Tanvi is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, studying queer and trans women’s digital cultures in India.

Tanvi’s doctoral research examines social media's affordances for queer and trans women to politically organise, negotiate identity, build community, and produce knowledge. They are particularly interested in a radical queer politics that deals seriously with issues of gender, caste, class, religion, and Hindu nationalism in the Indian context. At the same time, they explore how social media spaces are sites of (state and corporate) policing, surveillance, disciplining and control, built on extractivist logics of platform capitalism and neoliberal Hindu nationalist ambitions. 

Tanvi holds an MA in International Journalisms from SOAS and a BMM in Journalism from the University of Mumbai. They are part of the CHASE AHRC-funded Digital Studies Collective (DiSCo) and served as Co-Managing Editor for Issue 2 of the DiSCo Journal. They also work as a tutor with The Brilliant Club. 

Tanvi has previously worked as a journalist and communications professional covering gender, sexuality, politics, music and culture, and digital technologies.

• Gender theory
• Queer theory
• Feminist theory and methodologies
• Media studies
• Postcolonial studies 
• Decolonial studies
• Political economy studies
• Digital cultures
• AI
• Internet governance and policy.