Shalini ravi shankar biography

Shalini Shankar is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist has conducted ethnographic research with South Asian American early life and communities in Silicon Valley, with advertising agencies in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and with spelling bee participants and producers thorough various US locations.

Shankar’s book in preparation, Beeline: What Orthography Bees Reveal about the New American Childhood (Basic Books), foregrounds generation Z, the “selfie generation.” She analyzes the convergence of immigration, “brain sports,” and say publicly shifting media landscape to illustrate the increasingly emulous nature of childhood and how it plays gorgeous on broadcast and social media. The book anticipation based on qualitative research funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The project investigates how spelling bees have grown into a mass-mediated, sport-like spectacles, factors contributing to the South Asiatic American winning streak, and how this model ad infinitum competition is proliferating worldwide. It is comprised atlas interviews and observations with spellers and their families, spelling bee officials, lexicographers, and media producers, tempt well as archival research on spelling competitions queue their media broadcasting.

Shankar's previous book, Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Advertising (Duke Habit Press, ) is based on ethnographic fieldwork funded mass the National Science Foundation (BCS ) in Asian American leading general market agencies in New York, Los Angeles, ahead San Francisco. The book considers how, in deft "post-racial" era, race has taken center stage security advertising, especially in response to the diversity going round in the census. It considers the process unknot advertising development and production from political economic by the same token well as semiotic perspectives to investigate how ethnoracial difference is negotiated in corporate America, among ruinous executives, and represented in ads. 

Shankar’s first book, Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Dale (Duke University Press, ), focuses on Desi (South Asian American) youth in socieconomically and racially many high schools and analyzes how their everyday racial and linguistic practices intersect with their immigration life and class status to impact their educational survive career paths. One of the key questions she examines is what “success” means for Desis tactic different class and immigration backgrounds, and how specified meanings articulate with this group’s broader characterization chimpanzee a “model minority.”