BIOGRAPHY

Mallika’s research examines how platform infrastructures and ecosystems shape embodied experiences of health and wellness, drawing on critical media studies, the medical humanities, and science and technology studies. Her dissertation “Racial Trauma and Somatic Healing in Contemporary American Therapeutic Media” studies digital platforms and media objects designed to facilitate healing from racial trauma between 2020-2025, analyzing them as part of a distinct genre of therapeutic media. Building on this work, her current research examines 'digitally reproduced disorders'–conditions that are qualitatively transformed in relation to the sociotechnical assemblages that sustain them. For the postdoc period, she will study how leaky gut syndrome, a diagnosis which has proliferated widely on social media platforms despite little institutional medical recognition, has gained legitimacy and recognition over the last decade. Mallika received her PhD from Indiana University Bloomington’s Media School and was previously a Digital Health Humanities Fellow at the University of San Francisco's Advancing Digital Health Humanities Institute and a research fellow at Indiana University's Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities.