Dr Asha Chand

Research Project

1. 2024-2025: Australian Awards Fellowship with a total value of $459,338.80.Titled: Enhancing Digital Media Innovation and Sustainability in the South Pacific and Southeast AsiaAims: To empower participants 12 (6: India, 3 each from Fiji and Indonesia) to address critical development and foreign affairs issues in the countries involved using journalism as an effective tool for improving livelihoods.

Key Publications/Reports

1. 2024 (November): ‘Online Dating: Transformations of marriage arrangements through digital media technologies in Australia’s Indian Community,’ pp. 291-318 of Digital Humanities in the India Rim (Open Book Publishers).My chapter, on online dating, focusing on the ruptures in migrant society in Australia’s political and social landscapes, presents the intricacies of marriage within the Indian diaspora which is Australia’s largest permanent migrant group. This work is an extension of my PhD on marriage, migration and the media and captures how matchmaking works in the digital landscape.
2.  2025 (May) Footsteps in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Issues in Memory and Literary Studies. Below is the introduction to my chapter in this book:Footsteps: This chapter explores the process of meaning making in the life of a Fiji Indian Australian migrant, navigating through multiple existences, not leaving one or arriving at another. Presenting the paradoxical world of forming identities, feeling lost, marginalised, hopeless, and seeking validation for feelings of ambivalence, the subject uses episodic memory as a trigger for this writing and expressions which are autobiographical, narrative, punctuated with remembering, yearnings, hopes and dreams, reflective and reflexive, juxtaposed in a fast-moving world where the past is erasing in fleeting moments of recollections. Standing at a threshold which evokes images of passages, crossings and change, the subject captures lived experiences and choices made in her in-between world of existence. The work exposes the vulnerabilities of displaced migrants living in multiple identities of a globalised world where society experiences a multitude of ruptures which fragment and dismantle some while sustaining others in creative new ways. Native country becomes an evolving fictional construct in this work which is reminiscent of the triadic relationship of fractured memory, desire, and multi-locality. https://go.openathens.net/redirector/westernsydney.edu.au?url=https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-69594-0
3. 2024: Whodunit to Howdunit: Constructive News, Peace, and Solutions Journalism to advance the Pacific way as the Sea Changes,’ pp. 199-218 of Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific (Kula Press/Shhalaj Publishing; June, 2024). 100% my contributionGrounded in reflective practice, my chapter records media history and my time as Chief of Staff at Fiji’s national daily, The Fiji Times and suggests ‘peaceful’ ways to the ongoing social/climate crisis in Fiji. Editors remark: “Chand calls for conscientious journalism that shakes up the flaws in the system of entrenched power. She advocates staid conservatism to bring hope for a better world through community and capacity building. She exemplifies how news media could use constructive, peace and solutions-oriented journalism to create a wave of change to advance the Pacific way.” I met with Fiji’s deputy Prime Minister, Biman Prasad, for further consultations to advance this and other education focused proposals.
4. ‘Panda meets Koala: A comparison of Journalism Education Practices in China and Australia,’ published in the Global Media Journal Australian Edition, Volume 15, Issue 1, 2021 (23 pages). 50% my contribution.This research was in collaboration with Professor Cimei Tang, a visiting fellow from Xiamen University, China whom I supervised. Our article considers challenges of teaching journalism in two culturally and politically different settings, given the seismic changes in news consumption, production, and the surfeit of information. Cultivating storytelling abilities in students using scenarios, simulations, real-life situations, lived experiences, situational and mobile learning, are identified as common approaches to nurturing responsive and responsible journalism. The paper outlines methods of engaged learning activities at WSU, and it concludes by discussing the common meeting points of learning in a changing world where there will be greater need for journalists to present the truth in news through verification and fact-checking, which are common perennial foundations of the craft.
5. Chand A, 2013, Reinventing the media sphere : Fiji Indian voices down under in Bridging Imaginations : South Asian Diaspora in Australia, Sarwal, Amit , India, pp 158-184, [ORS ID: 229835]