Shashidhar Nanjundaiah
Dean and Professor
shashidhar.n@mahindrauniversity.edu.in
As an influential educator, editor and commentator, Prof Nanjundaiah considers his calling card to be his ability to integrate scholarly and industry values and bring them judiciously into systems, policies and classrooms. Prof Nanjundaiah has been the director and dean at reputed private media schools in India, where he is best recognized for his progressive reconstruction of academic and pedagogic approaches in a discover-learn-practice framework. His students now occupy positions of repute and influence across the world—from communication heads at multinational corporations to successful communication entrepreneurs, editors to educators.
In the early 2000s, Prof Nanjundaiah’s role as a mass communication educator was pioneering in some ways. As the Director at Symbiosis Institute of Mass Communication (now Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, a college under Symbiosis International University), Prof Nanjundaiah brought in practice-based learning methods for journalism students. Under this initiative, students created a national UGC award-winning documentary on Chambal valley after the bandit Phoolan Devi. A unique social sensitization internship was started, providing students with a balanced understanding of privilege with an understanding of diversity, inclusion and human rights. SIMC was also the first institute in the country to start online admissions processes.
As Founding Director of the Indira School of Communication, Pune, which he started and successfully ran under the privately held Indira Group of Institutes, Prof Nanjundaiah was able to instil many firsts in those times, such as systematic faculty and peer mentoring, and robust student feedback mechanisms. He wove a much-needed research component into mass communication pedagogy.
Later, as the first Dean of the India Today Media Institute, Noida, he transformed into a full-fledged institute under the publicly held TV Today Network under the India Today Group, he carried on some of the foundational changes his team and he had made, while also nimbly adapting to new technological changes.
In his professional practice, Prof Nanjundaiah has held editorial and policymaking positions. He has been the Group Executive Editor of four business and policy magazines in Mumbai, including the award-winning Infrastructure Today and was later involved in systematizing digitized content for the portal under Construction World. He was the New York-based Managing Editor of The Indian Express North American Edition, where he oversaw three editions in the USA and Canada. More recently, he wrote a culture policy and brought internal storytelling systems at Enzen Global, an international utility provider and consultancy.
Ph.D.
Prof Nanjundaiah holds a PhD in Mass Communication and Media Arts from Southern Illinois University.
MS
Carbondale, USA, an MS in Corporate and Professional Communication from Radford University, USA, an MA in English.
B.Sc
BSc in Physics from the University of Mysore, India.
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Publications
Prof Nanjundaiah’s interests lie mainly in the Indian and US contexts of communication policy, including social media policy, media literacy, and media aesthetics. His multiple award-winning research on the political economy of post-liberalization Indian media was one of the early works in that chapter of history.
His recent research is a theoretical introduction to “media illiteracy”, attempting to provoke and destabilize factors of modernity. The research pegs its arguments on the problematics of current media literacy practices. It questions whether such practices are adequately addressing communitarian issues that arise from mediated information and disinformation. It then proposes that news media may intervene in and disrupt the continuity of societies, but also selectively invisibilize various realities. They use aesthetic values to transform incidents into media events and media spectacles, finally rendering them into myths. In this process, they operate on unstable pivots such as public trust and prescriptive narration. As mediated narration became a normative way in which we understand our world, the media construct that world in alignment with the modernization project, glossing over the chasm between realities and mediated narrations. His work is under consideration for publication.
Other:
Prof Nanjundaiah has been invited to speak on prestigious platforms including Government of India’s I&B Ministry and the Poynter Institute’s United Facts of America. He has spoken at several colleges and conducted workshops at schools on media literacy, especially investigating media literacy in the times of the Covid-19 pandemic. As an invited Board Member of the International Council for Media Literacy, the first US media literacy initiative going back to the 1950s, he continues to probe media literacy’s scholarly dimensions through mass-disseminated video initiatives.
He has been on several panels, significantly as a member on the Fulbright Fellowships Selection Committee, on the Governing Council of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), and on multiple UNESCO and US government initiatives pertaining to mediated communication.
Prof Nanjundaiah grew up in Sindri in Jharkhand and Mysore in Karnataka, and also worked and lived in Noida, Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore in India and Virginia, New York Tri-State and Illinois in the USA.
