Samiksha Pattanaik is a junior researcher and PhD candidate at CARE, Massey University. Her doctoral research looks at the health experiences and mobile phone usage of India’s ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activists) workers in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through a culture-centered approach (CCA), her research work aims to create an entry point for rural ASHA workers, most of them from marginalised backgrounds, to articulate pandemic communication solutions from below, rather than being passive recipients of expert-driven solutions disseminated via digital channels. Through semi-structured interviews, the CCA will enable the researcher to engage in a dialogue with ASHA workers in order to gain a better understanding of the meanings they ascribe to Covid-19 within their rural context and the role mobile phone plays in this process.

As a community researcher at CARE, Samiksha has worked with communities at the margins in Odisha’s Kandhamal District, which has a high indigenous population. She has conducted in-depth interviews with rural and tribal populations across villages in the Kandhamal district and her interviews have focused on uncovering the health experiences of marginalised communities during the covid-19 pandemic. Her research interests primarily lie in health communication, digital media and gender issues.

Samiksha has also worked with leading news organisations in India, including the Hindustan Times, CNN-News18, Scroll.in and Condenast India. She also worked in public relations in London for two years. She holds a Masters degree in Multimedia Journalism from the University of Westminster. Her dissertation focused on a comparative study of infotainment features in British and Indian health television shows.