Soma Basu, Ph.D.

As an investigative journalist, Soma Basu has been covering issues of environmental justice, human rights, disasters, and conflicts in the Indian subcontinent for over 15 years. She specializes in disasters and conflicts. She has won several prestigious journalism awards including the Kurt Schork Memorial Award for International Journalism 2017, the United Nations Correspondents Association Global Prize for coverage of Climate Change, 2015, and the best article award for reporting on the fate of victims of armed violence by Press Institute of India and International Committee of Red Cross. Basu is also a former fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University. She writes extensively on social media hate networks and her comments have appeared in major international media such as the Time Magazine, Financial Times (UK), Reuters, SBS (Australia), Refinery29, The Diplomat. She is also a journalism educator and media literacy trainer. She is pursuing her PhD in media studies at Tampere University, Finland, under the guidance of Prof. Kaarina Nikunen. Her research interests are disinformation, hate infrastructures, mediatized memories, and political violence. She is also leading the social media research team for the Luce Foundation funded project – Muslims in India in the time of Hindu Majoritarianism – led by Prof. Christophe Jaffrelot (Science Po, Paris), Prof. Bernard Haykel (Princeton University, US) and Prof. Manan Ahmed (Columbia University, US). She is also the India editor of AFP Fact Check.