Ms. Chinar Mehta is a doctoral scholar and Research Assistant, working at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. She has presented at conferences and seminars held by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), and Frames of Reference organized by the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS. In 2021, she was also selected to be part of the Doctoral Colloquium at the annual AoIR conference. As a Research Assistant at FemLabCo, she researches labor conditions in the sanitation sector in Hyderabad. FemLabCo is a research project funded by the International Development Research Centre which research how digital tools can be leveraged by women workers to get better bargaining power in a precarious labor market.
Ms. Mehta’s doctoral research pertains to the people, tools, and practices involved in software development, and what that means for the design new media technologies. For this, she draws from theoretical work in feminist media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. She continues this research at Carnegie Mellon University with Dr Sarah Fox, to get guidance with interdisciplinary research that aims to make meaningful and specific claims about what technologies allow and disallow.
Ms. Mehta received her masters’ degree in Media and Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences at Mumbai. She has received prior training in Information and Communication Technology through her bachelors’ degree from Dhirubhai Ambani Insitute of Information and Communication Technology. She worked as a software developer for 2 years before joining TISS.