Prof. Aanchal Sharma

Prof. Aanchal Sharma has over a decade of experience in the communication domain as an academic and practitioner. She has been teaching and developing courses in the area of strategic business communication, communication and culture, and qualitative research methodologies. Her research addresses issues at the intersection of communication management for social change and gender. As a full-time and visiting faculty, she has taught at leading management and communication schools in India and presented her research work at various national and international forums. Prof. Aanchal pursued her doctoral research in communication studies at MICA, Ahmedabad.

Before joining UPES, Prof. Aanchal was at FORE School of Management, New Delhi, as a faculty of business communication and at Symbiosis International (Deemed University) as a faculty of media and communication. She held visiting positions at IMT Ghaziabad, SRCC New Delhi, SIMC Pune, and Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts, Pune for teaching courses related to business communication and research. Also, she has worked with SBI Card (GE Capital – SBI JV) and Ameriprise Financial India in a communication and content development role. 

Business Communication | Communication Management for Social Change | Gender | Qualitative Research | Netnography 

Prof. Aanchal’s teaching philosophy is grounded in enabling a participatory learning space for students to critically engage in classroom dialogue. She believes in facilitating a knowledge exchange process that is co-created in nature i.e., between the students and the facilitator. For her classes, she uses innovative classroom exercises, pre-readings, case study methods, business simulations, and role plays for effective communication. She believes in a continuous assessment of course modules and uses evaluation methods like quizzes, student presentations, writing workshops, and group projects. Participatory teaching and innovative evaluation techniques, as per her, help students become critical thinkers.

Prof. Aanchal teaches foundational courses on Managerial communication and Written analysis and communication. She has also taught advanced electives in communication management and qualitative research. She helps students understand communication as an important skill in managerial decision-making and encourages them to develop communication storytelling as an aptitude using various written, oral, and visual methods. Additionally, she is interested in exploring how various socio-cultural, regional, and policy-level contexts shape internal and external communication exchanges in an organization. 

A gold medallist at the MA level in Gender and Development Studies from IGNOU, Prof. Aanchal was also awarded a meritorious post-graduate scholarship. She was invited as a visiting scholar at Clark University, Worcester, USA where she developed her doctoral thesis and audited courses on qualitative research and gender studies. She was also selected as one of the participants from India to attend the IAMCR Ph.D. winter school at Jinan University, China, to present her research work. Prof. Aanchal is UGC NET qualified in the discipline of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Prof. Aanchal has been working on various interdisciplinary qualitative research projects. In a collaborative research project conducted at Samastipur Bihar in 2015, she used in-depth interviews to understand how ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activists) use mobile health applications to generate awareness around family planning. In 2016, as part of her doctoral research work, she conducted a prolonged ethnographic immersion with three women’s self-help groups in Uttarakhand to understand their participatory communication landscape. In 2020, she used netnography to study the digital placemaking process of a Facebook community administered by folk artists of Uttarakhand. In her current research, she is interested in studying women’s narrative around the ongoing issue of out-migration from the state of Uttarakhand and women’s access to digital media towards cultural sense-making. Prof. Aanchal uses in-depth interviews, FGDs, participant and non-participant observations, field notes, projective techniques, thematic and content analysis (using NVivo and MAXQDA) as key methods to produce research-based knowledge.