Atri Mukherjee

Atri holds a MSc in Communication Sciences (cum laude) from KU Leuven, and a triple major (B.A) in Journalism, Psychology, and English Literature. He is affiliated to the SCOM (Department of Communication Sciences) at the VUB. In his Master's Thesis, he investigated the emergence and role of social media influencers (SMIs) as digital opinion leaders, and their effects on political learning and knowledge on adolescents.

Applying a media sociology perspective to the political economy of media, Atri investigates the role of social class and cultural capital as a mediator of political news consumption patterns across four sociodemographics in the Global North and South, and how people employ various dispositional attributes to being an “informed, politically active citizen” as a tool for class distinction and exclusionary boundary-setting between and within groups. Here, he tries to document the behaviors that underline the social and cultural designations of ‘legitimate’ news sources and news topics by focusing on the ways objectified cultural capital manifests itself as civic duty norms, which he hypothesizes may be unequally distributed and utilized in political news-seeking patterns. Adjacently, he is interested in the linkage between such political news-seeking patterns and overall political knowledge acquisition. His methodological focus is both mixed-methods and computational.  

Atri's PhD research is embedded within the ERC-StG project ‘INEQNEWS’ headed by Prof. Dr. Antonis Kalogeropoulos, which investigates various social inequalities turned digital inequalities in the political news consumption patterns across four comparative media markets in Brazil, Chile (Global South), Spain and the United Kingdom (Global North).