Karthika Sasikumar
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Professor
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Current Research Activities
I continue to research and publish on the topic of Indian nuclear weapons policy. My new research is about the intersection of Indian domestic politics and weapons policy. One paper, dealing with the influence of democracy, is in preparation. Another paper, on the representation of national security issues in film, was accepted for a conference that was canceled in spring 2020. I am continuing to work on this project, and am making connections with scholars in other fields who are also interested in popular culture and security in non-Western settings. My intention is to publish an edited volume with their contributions. I have become interested in online pedagogy and am researching techniques for student engagement, and issues of data privacy.
Research Connections to Current Events
As a scholar of international relations, most of my research questions tend to come from crises. My doctoral dissertation was the result of my interest in the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in the summer of 1999. Since then, I have written articles about the doctrines adopted by India and the influences on the framing of nuclear policy in New Delhi. My interests shifted somewhat to questions of immigration and cross-border population flows, as new threats to global security emerged. The importance of national identity and definitions of the ‘other,’ became very clear to me in both research areas. At the moment, I am examining popular culture productions to investigate how these notions are formed.
