Two School of Liberal Arts professors have earned major honors for research that explores the deeply uneven dynamics between those who create spaces and those who use them. While a political hearing for a Vancouver pipeline and the use of India’s modernized movie theaters and multiplexes may seem unrelated, both scholars show how the systems behind these sites were carefully engineered with power and control in mind.
Lee Veeraraghavan, an ethnomusicologist and instructor in the Newcomb Department of Music, studies music and sound at the intersection of politics, history, and colonial governance. While conducting dissertation research in Western Canada, she tracked oil and gas pipelines proposed to cross Indigenous lands without consent — even though Canadian law requires “adequate consultation” with Indigenous nations.
While ethnomusicologists are often associated with the study of music, the field more broadly examines how sound organizes in social and political life. From that perspective, Veeraraghavan examined how sound itself was managed during the pipeline approval process. She found that officials could appear to solicit public input while quietly limiting meaningful participation. In one case, activists protested outside a Vancouver hotel while the official hearings took place in a sealed conference room in an entirely different hotel. “Public hearings over the pipeline are taking place — only the public is not allowed inside,” she writes. Instead, “the proceedings are being livestreamed to a hotel two kilometers away.”
Veeraraghavan published these findings in her 2024 American Anthropologist article, “What Is ‘Heard’ at a Pipeline Hearing? The Gerrymandering of Aurality in British Columbia, Canada.” The article was recognized as one of the most impactful contributions to ethnomusicology that year and has since been awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Jaap Kunst Prize, honoring “the most significant article written by members of the Society for Ethnomusicology during the first ten years of their scholarly career.” Veeraraghavan also credits Newcomb Department of Music colleagues Ana María Ochoa Gautier and Matt Sakakeeny, whose scholarship and editorial guidance helped shape the project.
The concept of being “heard,” Veeraraghavan explains, is central to political legitimacy. In a functioning democracy, leaders must demonstrate that they have listened to the public. But by tracing how sound is filtered and managed in the pipeline process, she shows how the appearance of listening can function as a tool of colonial governance.
“I wrote this article in part to get at an experience familiar to most people,” says Veeraraghavan, “where you're explaining your perspective to someone with whom you have a disagreement, and they say, ‘oh, I hear you, I respect you, I'm listening to you,’ — but their subsequent actions show that they have, in fact, entirely dismissed you. Well, there are legal maneuvers by which the Canadian government and oil and gas industry do precisely that.”
Lee Veeraraghavan, ethnomusicologist and instructor in the Newcomb Department of Music.
Across the globe, Tupur Chatterjee, assistant professor of Communication and Asian Studies, has been asking parallel questions about how power operates in built environments.
Chatterjee lived in New Delhi during a transformative period for moviegoing in the city, as the mall multiplex — a shiny icon of globalization — began to replace the crumbling single-screen theaters of her youth. Her first book, Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India, asks readers to rethink Indian film history through the architectures, infrastructures, and urban transformations that made modern moviegoing possible.
The book has now won the 2026 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) First Book Award, an outstanding honor recognizing Projecting Desire as the year’s best debut book in the field.
Through her field work, including archival research and extensive interviews, Chatterjee sought to understand both how spaces are designed and how people actually experience them. At a time when the city still felt “deeply unsafe” for women, these new theaters promised security for a growing female audience. Chatterjee became interested in what it actually meant for women to move through and inhabit these spaces — and whether the promise of safety matched lived experience. That question sits at the heart of Projecting Desire.
“India has one of the world’s largest film industries, and moviegoing is a massive part of public life — so these questions aren’t niche,” Chatterjee explains. “They’re about how millions of people experience cities, and on whose terms.”
Tupur Chatterjee, assistant professor of Communication and Asian Studies.
Like Veeraraghavan, her work revealed that power is not abstract — but something engineered into everyday environments. Chatterjee found that ideas about gender, class, safety, and behavior were quite literally built into the walls: “One architect told me that malls [multiplexes] are designed with so much glass so that women ‘will feel the need to behave better,’” Chatterjee recalls. “That kind of candid revelation — about how gendered discipline is designed into these spaces — is what the book excavates.”
“I want readers to see that cinema is not only a cultural text but also a spatial and material experience,” Chatterjee continues. “By tracing how gender, class, and desire are organized in and through the built environments of cinema, I hope the book encourages us to see media as something lived — as a way of inhabiting modernity itself.”
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