Sahana Udupa

Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at LMU Munich, and founder of the Center for Digital Dignity, an international network that brings together researchers, policy experts, and civil society groups to collaboratively imagine enabling spaces of political expression online. She has published widely on online extreme speech, disinformation, AI and content moderation, decoloniality, digital cultures, and platform governance. She is currently setting up a new project on contentious speech on small social media platforms in Kenya, Germany, Britain and India. The project is funded by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant. She has also directed projects on AI and content moderation, and religious politics on social media.  These projects, with a core team of postdoctoral researchers at LMU and a wider, international network of scholars, explore the influence of internet-enabled media on political cultures of networked participations, especially extreme forms of speech and their implications. She has also authored a UN commissioned research paper on approaches to addressing online hate. She serves on the advisory board of MediaWell. She has been named Berkman Klein Fellow (2024-25) and Joan Shorenstein Fellow (2021) at Harvard University, Franqui Chair (Belgium) and International Communication Fellow. In 2023, the article on AI, extreme speech and content moderation that she co-authored with Antonis Maronikolakis and Axel Wisiorek, won the International Communication Association Outstanding Article award.