Shama Patel
Faculty Fellow
Joined Stern 2024
Leonard N. Stern School of Business
Kaufman Management Center
44 West Fourth Street, KMC 8
New York, NY 10012
E-mail sp8533@stern.nyu.edu
Biography
Shama Patel joined New York University Stern School of Business as a recipient of the NYU Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in 2024.
Patel’s research explores how digital media fundamentally alter power dynamics in forming new social identities and reformed subjectivities that galvanize individuals and social movements to drive societal change. A key example of Shama’s research is her doctoral work analyzing the impact of the George Floyd video and how it organized social movements as a digitally mediatized affective contagion at scale. This study demonstrates her interest in understanding the organizing principles behind contemporary forms of activism catalyzed by digital media and how they shape civic and political participation in support of social justice and nature conservation. Her work provides valuable insights into methodological approaches and interpretive frameworks that help unfold and analyze pivotal media events as emergent digital phenomena.
Before joining NYU Stern, Patel has extensive experience leading organizational change at Fortune 500 and entrepreneurial firms. As the founder of Drive Change, she has helped business leaders drive change from ideation through implementation. She has also served in leadership positions at United Airlines, Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers, delivering large-scale systems integration initiatives.
Patel holds a Ph.D. in Digitalization from the Copenhagen Business School, a M.S. in Computer Science from Northern Illinois University, and a B.S. in Geology from Delhi University.
Research Interests
- Digital Media and Media Technologies
- Organization and Organizing
- Affects and Affective Contagion
- Activism and Social Movements
- Digitally Mediatized Social Change
- Digital Ethnographic Methods
Academic Background
PhD, Digitization
Copenhagen Business School
MS, Computer Science
Northern Illinois University
BS, Geology
Delhi University
Selected Publications
Patel, Shama (2023)
The Summer of 2020: Situating Digital Media in Scaling Affective Contagion: A Case of the George Floyd Video
PhD Dissertation, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Digitization, Copenhagen, Denmark
Knudsen, Britta Timm and Shama Patel (2023)
Digital Media Revitalising Colonial Heritage: The George Floyd Video Translocalized in Denmark
International Journal of Heritage Studies 29 (10): 1041–60
Patel, Shama and John Postill (2023)
How to Do a Digital Epidemiography
In An Ethnographic Inventory: Field Devices for Anthropological Inquiry, 1st ed., 62–72 London
Patel, Shama and Mattias Tinghøj Hansen (2022)
Material-Affective Assemblage Thinking in Researching Scalar Phenomena
In International Conference on Information Systems
Patel, Shama, Abayomi Baiyere, and Christian Garmaan Johnsen (2022)
Beyond Practice: Assemblage Thinking in Sociomateriality Research
In European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS)
Patel, Shama and Ionna Constantiou (2020)
Human Agency in the Propagation of False Information - A Conceptual Framework
In European Conference on Information Studies (ECIS)