Wellcome Grant for Investigation into Digital Technologies and Sexual Health

We are pleased to announce that Rohit Dasgupta, Lecturer in Global Mediaat WSA, has received a small grant from the Wellcome Trust to conduct research related to a larger research grant bid he is compiling.

The project, called 'Mobile-ising for Sexual Health: Digital technologies and Sexual Health Advocacy', is funded by the Wellcome Trust under their Humanities and Social Sciences Small Grant scheme. Rohit K Dasgupta is the Principal Investigator with Dr Paul Boyce from University of Sussex as the co-investigator.

The project will explore emerging digital platforms in India and examine the challenges and opportunities of using mobile and digital platforms for sexual health advocacy amongst gay, MSM and trans communities. It will be for a six month duration beginning May, 2016 during which the co-investigators will live in Eastern India for a period of one month (mid July to end of August) doing fieldwork, observing peer outreach and conducting workshops. They will report on the experiences of NGOs using digital media platforms in developing advocacy and support campaigns and conduct discussions with stakeholders on how to leverage and use digital media for HIV prevention and sexual health advocacy.

The outputs of this project will include a one day symposium in collaboration with the Varta Trust and Jadavpur University; a comprehensive report to feed the information back to the national bodies and public health officials, and a journal article.