Kinjal Dave

Doctoral Student, Communication

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Kinjal Dave is a doctoral graduate employee at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication who is broadly interested in global media, gender, and technology. Her dissertation is an oral history of South Asian women who worked in semiconductor and small electronics factories in the United States, examining the construction of women’s technical work as a way to tell the pre-history of the globalization of labor. Earlier at Data & Society, she served as a research associate for the Media Manipulation and Disinformation initiative, primarily in an editorial and archival research capacity. She also co-authored the primary research output for D&S’s School Choice initiative, a white paper report entitled Spectrum of Trust in Data.

Dave remains active in justice-oriented academic and multi-modal communities with an interest in documentary video work. She served as a graduate mentor for P.O. Box 34, an emergency writing program for incarcerated Philadelphians to document their experiences of COVID. She is also in post-production as a co-director of an environmental justice documentary filmed in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, a project sponsored by Annenberg and Penn’s Center for Experimental Ethnography. Dave holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and political science from Villanova University and has completed the master’s portion of her doctoral degree in communication studies at the University of Pennsylvania.