Hello! I am Mehita Iqani. I am an academic who is interested in the relationship between consumer culture and the media, in particular the ways in which commercial ethics and discourses are constructed in and promoted by media forms. My work is rooted in a critical agenda that seeks to engage with questions about how power, the public and identity are manifested and negotiated in media texts and systems in consumer societies in late modernity.
I became interested in newsstands while I was researching my PhD, between 2006 and 2009. I did my PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in the Department of Media and Communications under the supervision of Lilie Chouliaraki and Shani Orgad. The title of my thesis was Consumer Magazine Covers in the Public Realm – which was examined by Gunther Kress and Jonathan E. Schroeder in September 2009.
Please visit the Analysis page to see more about things I have written about newsstands.
I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies in the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
My current research is examining the interface of consumer culture and the media in the context of post-Apartheid South Africa. I have funding from the Carnegie Transformation Programme Large Research Grant and Mellon Young Researcher’s Fund (both administered by Wits University) for research on this topic this year.
I am also a founding member of an interdisciplinary, scholarly network for Critical Research in Consumer Culture (CRiCC) in South(ern) Africa.
You can contact me at mehita . iqani [at] wits . ac. za (remove all the spaces and add an at sign – I’m trying to avoid spam).
