Ramsha Rizwan

Community Bursary Award Holder

Joining us from: India

MSc in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology (2021)

I belong to a small town on the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India. I studied journalism and sociology in my undergraduate at the University of Delhi, India. My classes made me focus on photography as a means of reproduction of an 'immediate reality', giving access to optically mediated narrative capturing the subject of different cultures as real and not textual entities. Thus, placing it in a different realm altogether from other visual mediums, since its inception in the 19th century. I am interested in the medium of photography and visual culture in the Indian sub-continent in context to anthropology. I have been working in media industry for past few years in the field of editing and digital marketing. I chose visual, material and museum anthropology because I wish to understand, how our identities and socio-political subjectivities interacts through photography and other forms of visual culture.

I am passionate about how new media can be used for creating an impact in the world in a creative manner. I am heading a digital media campaign that aims to raise awareness on menstrual hygiene management on social media. I have been working as training and events director at a student newspaper at Oxford where I aim to work to promote student journalism in the digital world. I plan to converge my interest in media and visual anthropology where I hope to do narrative storytelling through creative work.

I chose Oxford for studying this course as it looks at the visual and material world around us through an anthropological perspective combining museums into this nexus. As part of my course, I have received research methods training in working with material world, museum objects, photography, exhibitions etc in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford which has been exciting and extremely beneficial for me.

The St Cross Community Bursary has enabled me to continue my studies at the same time pursue my passion by engaging in these projects that I otherwise would not have been able to do. The bursary has helped me in professional as well as academic development and for that I am extremely grateful. I chose St Cross as my first choice as I wanted to be a part of global student community at College which truly has made me feel like home miles apart from home.

In future, I hope to work towards my interest in media and anthropology and contribute to the community at St Cross.