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 has been named Berkman Klein Fellow (2024-25) and Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University (2021), Franqui Chair (Belgium) and International Communication Fellow. 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 award (2 M euros). In 2016, Udupa received the European Research Council Starting Grant award (1.1M €) for her project on digital media politics. 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. In 2020, she received the European Research Council Proof of Concept award for developing a collaborative Artificial Intelligence assisted process model to tackle online extreme speech. In 2021, the United Nations Department of Peace Operations commissioned her to write a research paper on digital technology and extreme speech, which was published as part of the UN digital transformation strategy for peace operations. She serves on the advisory board of MediaWell, an initiative by the Social Science Research Council. In 2023, the article on AI, extreme speech and content moderation she co-authored with Antonis Maronikolakis and Axel Wisiorek won the International Communication Association Outstanding Article award.