Tanvi Kanchan

Dr Tanvi Kanchan (they/them) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Wellcome-funded project Medicine without Doctors, where they are working on the LGBTQ+ health activism case study, alongside community partner The Love Tank CIC. They are based the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the Usher Institute. Their research sits at the intersection of queer theory, gender studies, digital media and political economy, and spans India and the UK.

Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, Tanvi was a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London, where they also completed their PhD in Politics and International Studies. Their doctoral research explored social media's affordances and limitations for queer and trans women and non-binary people in India to build community and produce knowledge, examining online and offline structures of caste, religion, Hindu nationalism, and platform capitalism.

Research interests:

• Queer and trans politics
• Queer and trans health and care
• Queer and trans digital cultures
• Political economy of social media
• Platform capitalism and platform imperialism
• South Asian queer theory
• Hindu nationalism, caste and religion

Current projects

Medicine without Doctors: https://www.medicinewithoutdoctors.org/

Noteworthy outputs

Kanchan, T. (2024). ‘“Instagram is like a karela”: transnational digital queer politics and online censorship and surveillance in India’, Communication, Culture & Critique, 17(3), 162–169. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcae034

Gajjala, R., Basu, M., Stanfield, K.B., Kanchan, T., Dasgupta, R.K., Szulc, Ł., Atay, A, and Bayramoğlu, Y. (2026). ‘A feminist critique of cybersecurity: techno-Feminist imaginaries of Vulnerability and Care’, Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 10(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17885