About

Rahul Mukherjee is an Associate Professor of Television and New Media Studies and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His academic interests often explore media’s role within alternative futures for politics and technology, drawing on cultural studies, media theory, and science studies. He has completed his doctoral studies in Film and Media Studies at UCSB, with emphases in Technology and Society and Global Studies. Mukherjee has been a fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Utrecht University, a pre-doctoral fellow at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB, and an Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future Fellow at Cornell University. His research encompasses a wide range of topics including database management systems, advertising cultures of mobile telephony, Bollywood thrillers, chemical disaster toxicity, development discourses, and translocal documentaries. He has contributed to collaborative projects on mobile media practices in India and Zambia, and his work has been published in various academic journals and collections. Mukherjee is the author of the book 'Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty' (Duke University Press, 2020), which discusses debates surrounding radiation-emitting technologies. His upcoming book, 'Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution,' examines how aspirations influence distribution practices and technologies, with case studies spanning informal and formal infrastructures, mobile scams, viral videos, and mobile money movements. At Penn, he teaches courses on televisual representations, environmental media, digital media technologies, Indian cinema, documentary history, and social networks. He is actively involved in various academic initiatives, editorial roles, and special projects related to media power, digital platforms, and Asian media in the global context.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Media studies
• Political science
• Computer science
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Not Mere Paradox: The Digital Dynamics of Middle East

  Global Perspectives · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This is a review essay of Mohamed Zayani and Joe F. Khalil’s book The Digital Double Bind: Change and Stasis in the Middle East (OUP, 2024).

  PublisherDOI

• Evolution of carbon systems vis-à-vis naturally occurring graphene in a graphite–gold interface

  Journal of Earth System Science · 2025-07-10 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Platform capitalisms and platform cultures

  International Journal of Cultural Studies · 2024-01-03 · 63 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article argues for a pluralization of the "platform capitalism" framework, suggesting we should think instead in terms of "platform capitalisms." This pluralization opens the way to a better account of how platforms work in different geocultural contexts, with our focus being on China, India and Japan. The article first outlines several roles the state has taken on in mediating platform capitalisms. We then signal three main axes around which to consider the implications of platform capitalisms for cultural production: state-platform symbiosis; platform precarity; and the informal-formal relation in cultural production. This short provocation, we hope, will help foreground the crucial role of the state in platform capitalisms, such that the state-culture-capitalism nexus might be better acknowledged in research on platforms and cultural production now and into the future. This is particularly important as states themselves increasingly become platform operators.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding Zinc

  2024-04-02 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Zinc (Zn), one of the essential nutrients for animals and plants, is used in various industrial activities like in automobile and steel industry as anti-corrosion material, paints and as replacement of cadmium in batteries. This makes Zn as one of the highly soughed metals by industries. The high concentration of Zn in basalt compared to that of granite with a concentration ranging from 40–200 ppb results as one of the commonly occurring trace elements in the earth's surface. Understanding of ore genesis of Zn-bearing minerals is mandatory for its proper exploration and usage. Zn, a chalcophile element, often occurs along with lead ore minerals and is explored together. Zn mostly occurs in the form of sulphide minerals (sphalerite) with rare occurrence as carbonate mineral (smithsonite) and very rarely as silicate (hemimorphite and willemite). The mineral sphalerite, apart from lead, is also associated with elements such as gold, silver, cadmium, indium, gallium, germanium, copper and tin. Occurrence of Zn as an ore deposit varies widely in ore genesis environments except magmatic deposit. Zn mostly occurs as sediment-hosted, submarine-exhalative deposit (sedex), strata-bound sedimentary low-temperature hydrothermal carbonate or siliciclastic deposit, volcanogenic deposits, contact metasomatism (skarn deposits) and rarely as surficial alteration product in lead ore deposits. The varied range of occurrence of zinc is governed by factors like temperature of hydrothermal fluid, source rock, pH of the fluid, dilution of fluids due to mixing, presence of microbes (in low temperature <150 °C), proximity to the source of hydrothermal fluid (volcanoes) and most importantly the high mobility of Zn. This chapter deals with brief discussion of various ore genesis process of zinc along with Indian and global examples.

  PublisherDOI

• Prelims

  2023-05-10

  book-chapterOpen access

  This book offers a much needed holistic and interdisciplinary perspective on digital politics.Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin stage an engaging conversation between leading and emerging scholars, who examine the history, political economy, and materiality of digital politics.Crucially, they do so from different geo-political, disciplinary, and conceptual angles, which generates vital new insights.And, as icing on the cake, the book offers two experimental research toolkits to explore the histories and social-technical imaginaries of digital politics.In sum, Digital

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Media power in digital Asia: Super apps and megacorps

  Media Culture & Society · 2022-10-14 · 83 citations

  articleOpen access

  Tracing global shifts in ownership and conglomeration in the media and technology sectors, this introduction analyzes the emergence of the 'megacorp' and 'super app' as distinct forms and sites of media power. With a focus on Asia, we argue that the pairing of megacorps and super apps is driving the emergence of powerful digital companies that shape social, cultural, and political dynamics worldwide. Through analyses of companies including Reliance, SoftBank, Tencent, Alibaba, and Transsion, this special issue calls for a renewed engagement with theories of monopoly capital via the megacorp, and accounts of consumer and citizen experiences of this monopoly via a quotidian touch point, the super app. In conversation with scholarship on conglomerates, monopolies, and platforms as key institutional forms of media power, we show that media power in this digital conjuncture operates as much through national and regional differences as through the imperative to achieve a global scale.

  PublisherDOI

• Digital Platforms in Contemporary India: The Transformation of Quotidian Life Worlds

  Asiascape Digital Asia · 2022-07-07 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The introduction to the special issue on ‘Digital Platforms in Contemporary India: Transformation of Quotidian Life Worlds’ focuses on the ways in which everyday interactions in contemporary India have changed since the arrival of digital platforms. Locating these changes within their specific contexts, the essays in the special issue examine the new circulatory assemblages and representational tropes that emerge through interactions between diverse platforms and their various users. In particular, the essays trace the different ways in which bodies, mobilities, and platforms are entangled in everyday life in an unfolding phenomenon. This introduction outlines the new spatiotemporal shifts catalyzed by the platformization of everyday activities in India, drawing connections among the various essays in the special issue. The introduction attempts to map these shifts as part of a two-way process, which acknowledges that the resulting transformations also have the potential for reimagining the existing logic of platforms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Infrastructure

  BioScope South Asian Screen Studies · 2021-06-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mediating Expertise

  2020-02-26 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines how media negotiates and complicates the expert–layperson divide in controversies about health effects of electromagnetic field (EMF) emissions. Due to “uncertain risks” of EMFs, experts (radiologists, oncologists, antenna specialists) themselves are divided and fail to allay public apprehensions about living in proximity of EMF emitting devices. This limitation of scientific evidence in EMF debates, I argue, provides opportunities for anecdotal evidence of “laypersons” to influence public health discourse. Examining “lay” testimonies in television shows and documentary films, I analyze what is achieved politically and epistemologically through the presentation of anecdotal evidence in mediated arenas. While some sociologists of risk accuse the media of causing mass hysteria and health panics, this chapter considers the affective mediations of lay testimonies. Anecdotal evidence privileges lived experience and situated knowledges of affected communities (including “electrosensitives”) coping with environmental effects of EMFs, and media become an outlet for embodied presentations of such evidence. Such emerging mediations of risks provide anecdotal evidence with an affective charge that compels policymakers to consider lay expertise and adopt precautionary principle.

  PublisherDOI

• Book review: Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury and Rahul Mukherjee in Conversation

  BioScope South Asian Screen Studies · 2020-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Adi Kuntsman

  Manchester Metropolitan University

  8 shared

• Thomas Poell

  University of Amsterdam

  8 shared

• Xin Liu

  Qingdao Agricultural University

  8 shared

• A. S. Venkatesh

  Indian Institute of Technology Dhanbad

  4 shared

• Abhigyan Singh

  4 shared

• Fareeduddin

  Geological Survey of India

  3 shared

• Marc Steinberg

  3 shared

• Lin Zhang

  University of New Hampshire

  2 shared

Labs

• Rahul Mukherjee's LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Department of Applied Geology

  Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad

  2018

Awards & honors

• Nicholas C. Mullins award from the Society for Social Studie…