shahnazbashir.com

My Research

My work bridges critical theory, media studies, journalism, and the humanities to investigate how emerging technologies, visual culture, and everyday communicative practices reshape society. My scholarship spans visual communication, Critical AI, food as communication, and writing studies, with research focused on war, politics, colonialism, popular culture, visual disinformation, writing, food-mediated communication, and the philosophy of technology.

Most of my current work concerns synthetic media and its publics. My dissertation reads eight globally circulated deepfake artifacts across six countries/continents, four platforms, and six years, together with the 5,551 public comments they drew, using a method I developed that codes the visual, auditory, and textual streams of an artifact alongside its audience reception and then brings the two together. One study from this project traces how viewers argue their way toward a verdict, and shows that the cues they trust are rarely the cues detection research assumes they use. A companion study puts the classical semiotic apparatus at risk against the same evidence, and finds that indexicality has not disappeared but migrated, from the chemical trace to the involuntary body, that captions now do the work of fixing what an image is and not only what it means, and that provenance marks operate as symbols masquerading as indices, which is why so few viewers read them.

A second line of my work stays with the photograph/image. Where written records are scarce, destroyed, controlled or forbidden, I read photographic archives as palimpsests of a contested cultural space, following spaces like a cinema across seventy-six years of gathering, ruin, politicization and spectacle. Alongside this I write reflexively about what machine authorship cannot reach.

Going forward, I am extending my method beyond deepfakes to any multimodal artifact that leaves an audience trace, and building a comparative account of how provenance, disclosure, and platform design shape public credibility under very different political conditions.

Publications

1. Multimodal grounded theory method: an extension framework to analyze layered social-media data in the current algorithmic culture (Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology)

2. Snow on the Tongue: Autoethnography’s Epistemological Resistance to AI Authorship (Journal of Autoethnography)

Book chapter

Bashir, S. (2021). Cinema Palladium. In Nachbilder: Eine Foto Text Anthologie (pp. 270–275). Spector Books via Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

Peer-reviewed conference presentations

  • Bashir, S. (2026, August 5–8). Reconceptualizing the Grounded Theory Method: A Multimodal Extension to Analyze the Layered Social media Data in the Current Algorithmic Age. 109th AEJMC Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, United States.
  • Bashir, S. (2025, February 28–March 2). Challenging AI’s creative limits: The epistemological barriers of autoethnography and phenomenology in qualitative research. 2025 International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative (ISAN), USA.
  • Bashir, S. (2024, November 21–24). The visual odyssey of a cinema discourse in war: Kashmir from entertainment to erasure. 110th Annual Convention of the National Communication Association: Communication for Greater Regard, New Orleans, LA, United States.
  • Bashir, S. (2024, October 24–25). Navigating the mirage: Theorizing visual integrity in the age of deepfake images. Fifteenth International Conference on The Image, Interamerican Open University, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 
  • Bashir, S. (2024, May 23–24). Communicative dimensions of food in conflict zones: Tea serving as an act of resistance and compliance. Regional Conference of the International Communication Association, Dijon, France.

Peer Reviewer

  • New Media & Society, “Multimodality in memes,” Summer 2026.
  • Journal of Autoethnography, “AI and autoethnography,” Summer 2026.
  • International Journal of Communication, Special Issue on “(Generative) AI and Disinformation,” Fall 2025.
  • Annual AEJMC 2026 Conference, New Orleans, Visual Communication Division.
  • Annual AEJMC 2025 Conference, San Francisco, Visual Communication Division.
  • 75th Annual ICA 2024 Conference, Australia, Visual Communication Division.
  • 110th Annual NCA 2024 Conference, New Orleans, Visual Communication Division.

Research Awards/Fellowships

  • Graduate School Summer 2026 Dissertation Completion Fellowship Award, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA ($8,000). 
  • Research Enhancement and Leadership (REAL) Fellowship Award (2021–2024), University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA ($20,000).
  • Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council Writer’s Research Residency Award (2018), Winterthur, Switzerland (₣5,000).

Affiliations

  • Member AEJMC.
  • Member International Communication Association.
  • Member National Communication Association.