Biography

Saesha Kini is an Assistant Professor at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India. Trained and experienced in media, marketing, and management communication, her core research interests include fat and body studies, social media studies, and post-qualitative and diffractive methodologies. She explores themes of material-discursivity, intelligibility, difference, visibility, and indeterminacy in the mediated engagements of marginalized identities within India.

Drawing upon new materialism, feminist and fat theory, as well as the conceptual repertories of Karen Barad and Gilles Deleuze among key thinkers, she probes how invisibility and exclusion are reworked and negotiated to resituate bodies within conventionally exclusionary and hostile institutions and spaces. Across published and ongoing projects on fat embodiment in India, fat and physical cultures, plus-size fashion and e-commerce, and the quantified recognition of queer identities, she enquires into the conditions of becoming intelligible, and the limits and exclusions that make and mark these (in)visibilities possible in particular contexts.

Her work more broadly explores the negotiation of social identities in mediated contexts such as Instagram. Through research, consultancy, and fellowships, she has undertaken multiple projects on the mediated practices of children and young people. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as International Journal of Communication and Body and Society, as well as in edited collections on media narratives. She was invited as a keynote speaker at the Fat Move(ment)s fat studies conference at the University of Jyväskylä in 2024.

As an educator in strategic media communication, she teaches courses such as Writing for Creative Media and Branding Strategies at JSJC. Her previous teaching stint was at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Bengaluru campus.