Ms Parinita Shetty

Profile

I have worked with young people and children’s books in India in various ways - as an author, a bookseller in a children’s bookshop, a reading programme developer, and a coordinator of a children’s literature festival. I completed my M.Ed in Children’s Literature and Literacies from the University of Glasgow in 2017. My master’s dissertation was titled Fans, Digital Media, And Critical Literacy: How Interactions Among Texts And Participants In Online Fan Spaces Have The Potential To Develop Critical Literacy. I’m currently a third-year doctoral researcher in the School of Education at the University of Leeds researching intersectionality, critical literacy, and public pedagogy in fan podcasts. I’m passionate about co-creating knowledge, including diverse voices in my work, and making academic research as accessible as possible to non-academic audiences in creative ways. 

Research interests

My interdisciplinary research interests include intersectionality, public pedagogy, critical literacy, digital media, participatory culture, fan studies, online fan communities, fan podcasts, co-creating knowledge, children’s literature, and science fiction and fantasy media. I research fan texts as both a scholar and a fan. Please feel free to get in touch if you’re interested in any/all of these areas. I’d love to chat! 

For my PhD project, I launched a fan podcast called Marginally Fannish as a part of my research methodology. My co-participants and I explored various aspects of intersectionality in some of our favourite media texts and their fandoms. My co-participants and I come from a wide range of worldviews and backgrounds – both marginalised and privileged in different contexts. They included people from India, England, Scotland, the US, the UAE, Israel, Singapore, the Philippines, Greece, Japan, Bulgaria, and Canada. Apart from this international diversity, they also inhabited a range of identities across the racial, religious, gender, sexuality, ability, and age spectrum.

In our podcast episodes, we used the framework of our favourite fictional worlds, characters and events to discuss our real-world experiences and perspectives. Under the broader umbrella of diverse representations in media (and, more commonly, the underrepresentation or misrepresentation of diverse groups of people), we explored issues of race and ethnicity, gender and gender diversity, class, sexuality, religion, regional/national origin, physical and mental (dis)ability, and age. We co-created knowledge through our conversations which drew on our different, sometimes conflicting, opinions. This diversity in perspectives allowed us to expand and challenge our understanding as well as explore the complexities and nuances of the intersectional themes we were discussing.

You can find the podcast and text transcripts of each episode on the website https://marginallyfannish.org/ or listen to it on Spotify/Apple/Google/SoundCloud. 

Qualifications

• MEd Children's Literature and Literacies
• Bachelor in Mass Media (Journalism)

Research groups and institutes

• ICY: Inclusion, Childhood & Youth Research Centre
• Centre for Language Education