About Mohammed Rashid
Hi! My name is Mohammed Rashid (he/they), and I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the Anneberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania.
I completed my PhD in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication from the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas.
As an interdisciplinary scholar trained in Digital Media Studies, Global Media Cultures, and Queer Theory, I position my teaching and research at the interface of global emerging media cultures, comparative media representations of diverse sexualities, and tactical media activism by South Asian queer counter-publics. Three major questions deeply inform my pedagogy and animate my research: 1) How does new and emerging media content represent the local to the global and conversely, the global to the local, acting as elements through which we make sense of the world around us? 2) How do global media technologies and infrastructures facilitate and instantiate new interactions that question binary understandings of gender and sexuality through representation, visuality, and affect? 3) How do multiple publics and counter-publics use emerging media technologies to engage in activism and enact social change?
I am currently working on my first book project titled “Mediated Sexualities: Negotiating LGBTQ+ Visibility in Digital South Asia.” The project takes a media studies approach to critically study Bangladeshi blogging networks, social media sites, online discussion forums, digital archives, and emerging storytelling platforms as affective spaces where Bengali queer sexualities are regulated and negotiated between dominant publics and queer counter-publics.
As a media researcher and queer activist, my areas of interest are decolonial networked media, queer film and media, media literacies and pedagogies, tactical media activism, platform studies, affect studies, and media publics and counter-publics. More broadly, I engage with scholarly traditions of media theory, queer theory, feminist inquiry, post-colonial and decolonial critique, and critical cultural studies. I have presented my research at national and international conferences and have received various awards for my participation and contribution.
I am trained in multiple research methods in the humanities tradition including discourse analysis, textual analysis, and close reading, along with practices in ethnography and qualitative social science that include site visits, participant observation, user experience research, interviews, focus groups, and autoethnography. I speak five languages (English, Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, and Arabic) and this helps in multi-cultural and transnational research settings. I have also been trained in socially engaged art (SEA) and participatory media production and my politically engaged artistic projects have been featured in exhibitions in the United States, Canada, and Bangladesh.
I am currently a member of the Fashioning Circuits Research Collective at ATEC, UTD. Here, I have been working as the Humanities Team Lead for the Migrant Steps Project, along with working on multiple other creative and critical-making projects such as Words Matter. I am also the Co-chair for the Transnational Cinema and Media Scholarly Interest Group (SIG) at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) since I have been elected to the position in 2024. For the SIG, I have been curating a range of book talks and scholarly discussions by Transnational Cinema and Media Scholars from around the world, which can be accessed through the SIG’s YT channel here. I have also previously served as the SIG’s Graduate Representative from 2022–2023, as well as the Graduate Students’ Advisory Council (GStAC) at University of Texas at Dallas from 2019-2021.
I also run a YT channel in Bangla titled তাত্ত্বিকতা (Theories) where I take a public-humanities approach to discuss global media and communication theory and critical cultural theory with a Bangla-speaking audience.