The Department of is pleased to announce that Natasha Raheja will join the faculty as an Assistant Professor in Ethnographic Filmmaking and Visual . Raheja is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department. She will officially begin her new role July 1, 2020.
Natasha Raheja is an ethnographic filmmaker and visual anthropologist whose work focuses on the intersections of migration, bureaucracy, and nationalism. She is interested in questions of mediation, mobility, and cross-border belonging. In her ethnographic film practice, she takes an observational approach that foregrounds presence and feeling over explanation. Her long-term ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in Jodhpur, has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. Natasha’s ethnographic film work has been featured in Cultural and National Geographic and her research has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Refugee Studies.
Raheja's films have been screened at colleges and festivals nationally and internationally. Her first ethnographic film, Cast in India, raised questions around the relationship between built infrastructure in New York City and labor infrastructure in Howrah, India in the context of everyday urban objects such as manhole covers. Raheja's current video project visualizes the everyday effects of state forms of recognition on Pakistani Hindu refugee-migrants in India. This work builds on her dissertation, which examined the relationships between nationalistic policy, state machinery, and modes of religio-national belonging in the context of India’s special visa and citizenship regimes for religious minorities from Pakistan. She has conducted collaborative documentary filmmaking workshops with Pakistani Hindu middle-school students to understand and amplify their perspectives on life in India.
Raheja is a graduate of New York University (PhD and Graduate Certificate in Culture and Media); and University of Texas at Austin (Bachelor of Science in Biology; Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies; and Masters of Arts in Asian Cultures and Languages).
Raheja is currently teaching Advanced Documentary Production (ANTHR 4401/7401), and Cultural Diversity and Cultural Diversity and Contemporary issues (ANTHR 2400). She will be teaching Citizenship, Borders, & Belonging (ANTHR 4466/7466) in Fall 20. In Spring 21, she will teach Cultural Diversity and Contemporary issues (ANTHR 2400) and Documentary Production Fundamentals (ANTHR 3110/6110 – PMA 3510/6510).
We are excited to have a faculty member in the Department to teach students about ethnographic filmmaking and to reflect upon how filmmaking leverages important insights into how media are deployed in the contemporary world.
While this position will be homed in , Raheja will contribute to an interdisciplinary Making Media course and a new Media Studies minor.
Welcome, Natasha!
