Munira is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Media, Politics and Culture. Her research sits at the intersection of cultural studies, media, and politics, with a particular focus on Pakistan and South Asian media cultures, while also addressing transnational issues of race and gender across diasporic communities and Western democracies. Drawing on citizenship studies, the political economy of media, and feminist theory, she examines the role of media in shaping politically significant debates. Her current work focuses on digital media platforms, including YouTube, X, AI-generated videos, and WhatsApp.

She is the author of Women and TV Culture in Pakistan: Gender, Islam and National Identity (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Dissenting Counter-Publics in Pakistani Social Media and Café Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), which explores how counter-publics have emerged across both mediated and physical spaces to challenge and redefine state-led narratives of Pakistani identity. She is currently leading two research projects: one examining the participation of female politicians across mediated and parliamentary contexts in Pakistan, and another investigating the gendered impacts of climate change in Pakistan.

Munira serves on the editorial boards of Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, and NUML: A Journal of Critical Inquiry. She is the founder of the Counter Research in Media Studies Organized Network. Before joining King's, she was Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies and Associate Director of the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Media and citizenship
• Social Media and Activism
• Political Economy of Media
• Identity Politics in the Global South
• Gender and Climate Politics
• Counter public spheres
• Cultural Industries in the Global South
• Populism in the Global South (South Asia, Muslim countries)
• Women in Politics
• Muslim/South Asian feminisms

Teaching

Munira teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and convenes the MA modules Global Media Industries and Transnational Screen Cultures. She has supervised three PhD students to completion on topics including the representation of women in Turkish magazines, women's political participation in Nagaland, India, and performances of postfeminism on Instagram in the Indonesian context. She is currently supervising doctoral research on the impact of Islamisation on Pakistani artists and on online–offline coordination under surveillance in China's university #MeToo movement.

Munira has been invited internationally as a guest lecturer on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. She has also served as an external examiner for six doctoral theses at leading institutions, including the University of Sydney, the National University of Singapore (NUS), the University of Glasgow, the University of Bath, and the University of Sussex.

Selected Publications

Book

• Cheema, Munira (2018) Women and TV culture in Pakistan: gender, Islam and national identity. London, New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781788311779
• Cheema, Munira (2025) Dissenting Counter-Publics in Pakistani Social Media and Café Culture
  Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN (Electronic)9783032055224. ISBN (Print)9783032055248, 9783032055217

Journal Issue - Guest Editor

• Cheema, Munira (2023) Guest Editor for the Special Issue of Gender Activism in India in Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, Volume 7, Issue 1.

Journal Article

• Cheema, Munira (2025) Under surveillance: How podcasting on YouTube is redefining the media landscape of Pakistan, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 0 (0), 13548565251358024.
• Cheema, Munira (2024) YouTube Coke Studio Pakistan: Negotiating Identity, Blurring Boundaries Online, Media & Society. 5, 4.
• Cheema, M. (2020) Patriotism and Islam on Social Media: How Pakistani publics revisit their allegiance to the state? in Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 13 (2), 155-177. https://doi.org/10.1386/jammr_00017_1
• Cheema, Munira (2018) Talk shows in Pakistan TV culture: engaging women as cultural citizens. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2 (1). 8 1-12. ISSN 2542-4920

Book Section

• Cheema, Munira (2016) Producing domestic abuse in Pakistani television: between commerce, ratings and social responsibility. In: Moseley, Rachel, Wheatley, Helen and Wood, Helen (eds.) Television for women: new directions. Routledge, pp. 183-202. ISBN 9781138914292
• Cheema, Munira (2014) Understanding the gender dynamics of current affairs talk shows in the Pakistani television industry. In: Raicheva-Stover, Maria and Ibroscheva, Elza (eds.) Women in politics and media: perspectives from nations in transition. Bloomsbury, London and New York. ISBN 9781628921069