Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), Germany, Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant Project on small social media platforms, and founder of the Center for Digital Dignity, an international network of researchers, policymakers and civil society groups to collaboratively imagine and foster enabling spaces of political expression online.
She has published widely on online extreme speech, disinformation, content moderation, decoloniality, digital cultures, and platform governance. Her latest book, Handbook on Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence (co-edited volume), is now available open access. Her forthcoming monograph is titled, “Divided by Machines: Extreme Speech, Deception and the Limits of Artificial Intelligence” (New York University Press). In a commissioned research paper for the United Nations, “Digital technology and extreme speech: Approaches to counter online hate”, she highlighted global challenges in platform governance and conceptual problems surrounding vitriolic exchange and unverified content circulating on social media.
In 2024, the article, “Ethical scaling: Extreme speech and the (in)significance of artificial intelligence” published in Big Data and Society, which she co-authored with Antonis Maronikolakis and Axel Wisiorek, won the International Communication Association Outstanding Article Award. Udupa is the recipient of Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School, Francqui Chair in Belgium, and European Research Council (ERC) grants. She recently steered an international research group on encrypted messaging and extreme speech at the LMU Center for Advanced Studies. The latest publication in this program is the co-edited book, WhatsApp in the World: Disinformation, Encryption and Extreme Speech (New York University Press). A Fellow of the International Communication Association, she serves on the advisory board of MediaWell at the Social Science Research Council, as well as the editorial boards of several journals.
