Dr Devanjan Khuntia is a Sociologist with expertise in Media, Social Space, Crime and Deviance. He aims to understand the complex relationship between the neo-liberal global market economy, the formation of social spaces, the political economy of news media in contemporary India and its role in shaping public consciousness. Dr. Devanjan Khuntia has been awarded PhD in sociology from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has an M.Phil in sociology from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English Literature from Delhi University. He is also a trained Broadcast Journalist having served at various National Media houses in New Delhi and has expertise in crime and investigative journalism.
Prior to taking up the current role at the School of Modern Media, UPES, he taught Sociology at Sharda University, Greater Noida, GD Goenka University in Gurugram and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Dr Khuntia has served in academic and research positions such as Research Associate and Teaching Assistantship for various national and international universities such as the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), State & Democracy in Modern India, University of Gottingen (Germany); National University of Singapore (Singapore); Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), and the Research Division on International Migration, Centre for Development Studies (India).
Dr Khuntia has been part of the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) -Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) funded project – Mediatization and Democracy in India (2015-2018) as Senior Research Associate. He has presented research papers at various International Conferences of repute such as PIVOT: Re-Visioning Peripheral Geographies: Strategies for Resilient Urban Development in the Global South hosted by Royal Academy of Engineering, London (February 2021), Reimagining Citizenship in South Asia: An International Conference hosted by University of York (September 2021), International Conference on Xenophobia in Media hosted by Sakarya University, Istanbul, Turkey (May 2022) to name a few.
The cognition of the students is influenced by various social institutions, primarily their family and ethnic community to which they belong. Secondary influences are local/ state governance, polity, religious affiliation, education, and the media. Therefore, all the students are socially different from each other, resulting in corresponding cognition variance. In higher educational institutions students find it difficult to assimilate their social and cognitive variance. To solve this problem, Dr Khuntia has derived his pedagogical approach from the concept of Turiya in Advaita Vedanta School of Thought. Turiya is an element of categorizing human consciousness or cognition. It is the fourth stage of consciousness or knowing.
Dr Khuntia has developed and offered many new courses at an undergraduate and postgraduate level such as Forensic Sociology at G D Goenka University, (Gurugram), Visual Anthropology for Business Management at SOIL School of Inspired Leadership (Gurugram) and Documentary Film Making as a Research Tool; Media and Indian Society at Sharda University (Delhi NCR). He has taught Media and Modernity, Research Methods in Social Sciences, Media Theory, Crime, Deviance, Sociology of Media and Urban Sociology.
Project Title: PIVOT: Re-visioning Peripheral Geographies: Strategies for resilient urban development in the Global South. Partnering Countries: Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, Turkey and India Duration: 1 Year (February 2021 - January 2022) Partner & Funded by: Royal Academy of Engineering. (Project Partners - Anglia Ruskin University, London; Cardiff University, Wales; National Autonomous University of Mexico, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkie, India; Istanbul Technical University; KRVIA, Mumbai; University of Nigeria Nsukka; University of Capetown, South Africa; University of Nottingham, UK.)
Dr Khuntia is currently collaborating with international media scholars to understand global dynamics of Media Construction of Ethnic Identity and relative Social Construction of Citizenship in the Global South. He is engaging in related research studies with scholars from South Asia, Central Asia, South-East Asia and Eastern Africa. One of the research papers, an outcome of this project, in the form of publication is forthcoming in Routledge. Dr Khuntia is also engaged in studying New Populism and Media in India in 21st century. For the same, a research paper is forthcoming in Springer as a publication.