Ashwani Sharma is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK. His research interests include: race and postcolonial audio-visual culture, black cultural theory, contemporary global art and aesthetics, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, globalisation and media communication, urban culture, South Asian diasporic art and music, racial capitalism and Marxist theory, open access publishing, and experimental pedagogy and the university. He is completing a book on racial capitalism, tragedy, mourning and postcolonial visual culture (Bloomsbury Academic).
He has recently written articles on US Black Studies and UK Cultural Studies; the film maker Steve McQueen on racial memory and history; the utopian work of the British Asian artist Chila Burman; on race, Covid, online teaching and the university; and has produced an experimental manifesto on postcolonialism.
He is the founding co-editor of the online journal darkmatter. He has edited special issues for darkmatter on race and the ‘reality’ television show Celebrity Big Brother and the US television series The Wire. He co-edited Disorienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (Zed Books, 1996). He is a poet with a recent joint publication, Suburban Finesse (Sad Press). He has worked as a sound operator in film and television, a DJ, and was an aeronautical engineer.
Previously Ashwani was a Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London (UEL) and programme leader for the MA Global Media and MA Media Studies. Since 1993 he taught in the areas of race and representation, globalization and media, postcolonial cultures, visual and popular culture, critical theory and psychoanalysis and media practice at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
At UEL he was also a member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research (CCSR) and had been the Director of the Centre for New Ethnicities Research (CNER). Ashwani has been on the Executive Committee of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA), where he co-founded the race, ethnicity and postcolonial network. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Ashwani was on the editorial advisory board of Communication, Culture and Critique, International Communications Association Journal. He was on the management board of the East London cultural organization Rich Mix. He was also on the management board of Association of Black Film and Video workshops, and the editorial board of the Black Media Journal, He is an advisor to the South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive (Salidaa), and was on the East Midlands arts film advisory board.
He took part in iniva’s discussion ‘Archives: a work in progress’ on the ‘institutionalisation’ of art and the role of the archive in documenting recent art histories. This event accompanied exhibition: ‘Document / Image/ Memory: treasures from the Iniva Archive’ in 2011.