PhD student Shahnaz Bashir has had a busy fall already with an award and an accepted paper in the works.
Bashir has been awarded the Emerging Scholar Award 2024: at the Fifteenth International Conference on The Image: "Images and Imaginaries of Artificial Intelligence" by Common Ground Research Network, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign IL. "Emerging Scholar Awards are given to outstanding graduate students and emerging scholars who have an active research interest in the conference themes. Emerging Scholars perform a critical role in the conference by chairing the parallel sessions, providing technical assistance in the sessions, and presenting their research papers."
Shahnaz also shared that his paper "The Visual Odyssey Regarding Cinema Discourse in War: Kashmir from Entertainment to Erasure" has been accepted to NCA '24, New Orleans. The core focus of this study is to illustrate the power of visual communication in capturing the metamorphosis of a cultural space against the backdrop of regional conflict. Through digital visual ethnography, visual autoethnography, and multimodal discourse analysis, the research delves into a cinema's transformation, showcasing its journey from entertainment to erasure. This exploration serves as a microcosm of the larger Kashmiri conflict, providing a lens through which to view the broader implications of political violence and cultural neglect.