Making Media, Making Muslimness: Drama Creators’ Pious Identities in the Digital Worlds of Pakistani Entertainment Television
My research traces how creators of Pakistani entertainment television cultivate digital personas centred on Islamic piety. Drawing from ethnographic work in Karachi, Pakistan and online, I focus on digital content produced in conjunction with the serialised television drama industry by individuals in this creative economy. With an interest in Instagram, Facebook, and digital news sites, I examine how individuals’ articulation of religiosity is framed alongside their work in this media industry.
This work is part of research interests that trace how Pakistani dramas and their digital remediations contribute to sustaining piety in Pakistani public culture. The current projects attends to how media personnel embody various forms of piety – through discourse, dress, religious visual culture – and how these shape notions of respectability, celebrity, and success.
In contrast to focussing on explicitly religious media, I investigate the everyday religiosity in media industries and processes of digitalization in South Asian Muslim societies.
Research Results
The fellowship offered the opportunity to advance my central project around the role of religion in shaping online activities of television actors. Framing these actors as social media creators was productive in tracing connections between media forms and the audiences cultivated between discrete media sites. I wrote a paper, nearing completion, that I will submit to Social Media and Society. My time in Bochum allowed me to present this work in the colloquium and at two international conferences – on platform labour and the major European South Asian Studies meeting.
Several notable future collaborations were shaped through these presentations; 1) I co-developed a special issue proposal on “Big Data Audiences,” now accepted with Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies; 2) I was invited to submit a new piece around social media and labour informality in Pakistan to an anthology on Global South media creators.
Presentations
- Valuing Views and Viewers’ Values: transnational audiences, digital platforms, and pious content, Panel: Asynchronous Discourse and the Negotiation of Digital Media, 122nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Society, Toronto, ON, November 15-19, 2023
- Preserving Pious Personas: moral regulation in Pakistani dramas’ digital worlds, European Conference on South Asian Studies, Torino, IT, July 26-29, 2023
- Piousness and Platforms: curating talent in Pakistani TV dramas’ digital worlds, Global Perspectives on Platforms, Labor and Social Reproduction, Amsterdam, NL, June 27-28, 2023
Main Research Topics
- Media Industries
- Piety
- Cross-media
- Digitilaziation
- Publicity
Curriculum Vitae
- 2023 Ph.D. in Anthropology and South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
- 2021 to present Instructor in Asian Studies and Anthropology, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
- 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Digital Humanities. Price Lab for Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania
- 2020 to 2022 Doctoral Research Fellow, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
Publications and Lectures
Publications
Montpellier, E. (2023). Show, Don’t Tell”: pious visual culture in Pakistani dramas. Critical Pakistan Studies.
Montpellier, E. and Max Dugan (2022) Translating Tech: Urdu Social Media Discourse and the Question of Secularism for Postcolonial Digital Humanities. Global Digital Humanities Annual Symposium Proceedings.
Montpellier, E. (2019). Mirāt ul-‘Urūs on the Small Screen: Family TV Dramas and the Making of Pious Publics in Pakistan. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 10(2), 145–163. https://doi.org/10.1177/0974927619901046
Recent/Upcoming Lectures
“Surveilling Saas-Bahu : family dramas, spiritual entertainment, and digital dispossessions,” Biannual meeting of the Society of the Anthropology of Religion — May 2023