Ms. Zahra Rizvi is a Ph.D. Scholar and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research area is an intersection of 21st Century popular culture, literature and media of the United States and the Americas, Urban Studies, Utopia/Dystopia Studies, Youth Activism, and Game Studies. Rizvi studies the political ecology of urban dystopias at this intersection to transform academia in its orientation towards ‘future studies’. Rizvi has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences and has publications in various online and print journals.

Rizvi holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Delhi, New Delhi, where she graduated as a double gold medallist. She is the founding-member of the Indian chapter of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). She was the Ministry of Education (MHRD) SPARC Fellow in Digital Humanities at Michigan State University, MI, in 2020. In 2021, she was awarded the Electronic Literature Organization Fellowship to work on media archaeology and e-lit practices in South Asia. In 2022, she was awarded the International Youth Library (IYL) Fellowship to conduct research at IYL, Germany, and access their resources, archives and database, for her research in Children’s and Young Adult literary practices and communities, youth activism, and ethical and transformative digital futurisms.

As a Fulbright-Nehru fellow at Yale University, Rizvi will further her doctoral research considerations and study urban dystopias, their political ecology, and the global/local/glocal responses to the same in contemporary times, especially from South Asian and East Asian perspectives. The Fulbright-Nehru program enables her to study the planetary flows of being and information that underlie the global dystopian condition in contemporary times and explore and conceptualise ‘better futures’ based on safe and sustainable ethics of care.