Reality dating shows, gender representation in sports advertising, and games are just a few of the subject areas Teaching Assistant Professor Sreyashi Mukherjee, a media studies and identity scholar, explores in her recent professional endeavors.
Dr. Mukherjee’s work showcases her versatility as a scholar and expert on popular communication. Using her expertise, she brings a critical lens to a wide variety of contemporary cultural phenomena.
“I am very invested in the way that media affects identity and vice versa, media is a circular concept,” Dr. Mukherjee said. “Identity in itself is both shaped by and shapes public opinion and media in general.”
The most recent of these projects, a chapter for the book Sport in Contemporary India: Society, Culture and Governance, titled, ‘Heteronormativity and Female Sport Bodies: A Critique of Sports Advertisement in India,’ expands on Dr. Mukherjee’s dissertation that explored feminine agency in Indian advertising.
“This chapter explores how women are portrayed in sports advertising in India specifically, where female athletics don’t have a lot of support or social interest,” Mukherjee said. “This is not to say that women aren’t or can’t be ‘sporty,’ but I look at what it means to have a ‘sport body’ and who traditionally represents this idea of a female ‘sports body’ in advertising.”
With her expertise on identity exploration and gender representation in the media, Dr. Mukherjee recently appeared on the Beyond Solitaire podcast to discuss sexuality and consent in reality dating shows through the lens of the game studies theory “Magic Circle.”
“During Covid I was watching a ton of reality TV . . . I’m never quite able to turn off my brain while watching, so I started to notice certain trends and concepts of identity, such as race and sexuality, and how these things implicate each other within the reality TV show,” Mukherjee said.
Dr. Mukherjee’s casual watching habits transformed into a project exploring the ways in which these reality dating shows construct worlds separate from reality through games that force the participants to adhere to the rules of these game sets.
“These shows are often competitions, competitions for love,” Dr. Mukherjee said. “If you have a competition then you have a game, you have a strategy, and you have rules. Identity is morphed by rule sets, so participants give up personal leaning on identity to participate within this game.”
Dr. Mukherjee's passion for games and identity exploration within game settings, combined with the opportunity to collaborate with her friend and colleague Dr. Greg Loring-Albright, inspired her to co-develop the game Food For Home.
The game, which is played with a physical set of cards, and has the end goal of players creating a keepsake rather than focusing on winning or losing, is centered around how food is central to people’s personal conceptions of “home.”
“Having had personal experience living in three continents, the idea of what it means to be diasporic and what it means to live outside of your identity is something I am very familiar with,” Mukherjee who has lived in India, the U.K and the U.S, said. “The game plays on the idea that a major way through which people respond to home or ‘homeliness’ is through food, both of which are tied so directly to identity.”
Dr. Mukherjee and Dr. Albright presented the game at the Generation Analog Conference. The game rule set can be found on Dr. Albright’s itch.io website.