Elliot Montpellier

Elliot Montpellier is a Term Lecturer of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. He completed a joint PhD program in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Montpellier’s research is at the intersection of the anthropology of media and religion. He draws on linguistic, digital, and cultural anthropological modes to understand how digital changes are impacting media industries and cultural forms, including political economic and religious life.  

His first book project, tentatively titled Dramatic Surveillance: Pakistani publics, digital enclosure, and the mediatization of pious entertainment television, examines how mass media interactional frameworks in Pakistan are impacted by emergent big data practices and digital distribution technologies. His work analyses how processes of digitalization in South Asia interact with and reconfigure mediatized discourse about piety and morality. This work explores the intersection of Pakistani broadcast media productions, specifically popular television drama serials, and social media, and how these generate new kinds of digital publics. In 2023, he was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, working on follow-up research for the book.

His next project, Ledgers and Lorries: informality, webapps, and the digitalization of ‘traditional’ economies, brings together ethnographic and media history approaches to platform-based technologies’ growing role in practices surrounding the movement of goods, bookkeeping, and everyday devotionalism. Dr. Montpellier examines digitalizing ventures in small-town markets in southern Pakistan, at the intersection of legacy and digital technologies used by workers, small business owners, and diasporic investor-entrepreneurs. The project explores discourses of development, sovereignty, and liberalization and how these intersect with reformist religious debates in reproducing techno-feudal and neocolonial economic structures in Pakistan.

Dr. Montpellier’s ethnographic work is multi-sited and multi-modal, situated between Pakistan,  North America, and the digital spaces where media producers and consumers interact. He connects these overlapping virtual and physical worlds by examining the interplay of media production and reception and the impact of the Internet on shaping digital and pious publics in South Asia and South Asia diasporas.

His work has been published in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies and Critical Pakistan Studies and has a forthcoming chapter in Global South Creator Cultures. He is also currently co-editing a special issue for Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, bringing together ten works from diverse global perspectives on “Big Data Audiences.”

PhD (Anthropology and South Asia Studies), University of Pennsylvania
MA (Anthropology), University of Pennsylvania
MA (Islamic Studies), McGill University
BA (Global Studies & Environmental Health Science), University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Media (broadcast, digital, and convergent); media industries; religion and secularism; visual popular culture; semiotics; digital ethnographic methods; digital infrastructures; platformization, data, and the attention economy; Pakistan; transnationalism across the Muslim world;  South Asian diasporic communities; surveillance capitalism; the ‘War on Terror’; Islamophobia

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Forthcoming (ed. with Jennifer Hessler) “Big Data Audiences,” Special Issue, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

2024    “Show, Don’t Tell”: Pious visual culture in Pakistani dramas.” Critical Pakistan Studies. 1(1): 1-24

2020    “Mirāt ul-‘Urūs on the small screen: family TV dramas and the making of pious publics in Pakistan.” Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies 10(2): 145-163

Book Chapters

Forthcoming   “From Films to Fiverr: Pakistani Creator Labour at the Intersection of Mass Media and Social Media,” in Global South Creator Cultures (eds.) Tuğçe Bidav and Smith Mehta. London: Routledge.

Book Reviews

2023    “Interview with Shannon Mattern on her book A City is Not a Computer, Princeton University Press” CaMP (Communication, Media, Performance) Anthropology (May 2023) https://campanthropology.org/2023/05/15/shannon-mattern-on-her-book-a-city-is-not-a-computer/

2017    Review of The Shi’a in Modern South Asia, Religion, History and Politics, edited by Justin Jones and Ali Usman Qasmi. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 27 (2017): 686-688.

Digital and Public Scholarship

2022    (with Max Dugan) “Translating Tech: Urdu Social Media Discourse and the Question of Secularism for Postcolonial Digital Humanities. Global Digital Humanities Annual Symposium Proceedings.

2020    “Pakistani Vernacular Languages,” Diversity in the Stacks series, Penn Libraries