Sindhu Nepolean

Sindhu Nepolean (She/Her) is a PhD student in the Organizational Communication area in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests lie at the intersection of organizational communication, ethnography, environmental justice, and sustainability, with a particular focus on coastal fishing communities in South India.

Drawing on ethnographic research, her previous work has examined how communication technologies are mobilized in risk communication by and for coastal fishing communities, attending to questions of affect, expertise, and climate uncertainty. Her doctoral research explores how marine fishworkers in South India communicatively organize their everyday socio-economic and occupational lives. Through this work, she is interested in understanding how communities produce and negotiate organizational forms, navigate uncertainty and risk, and enact collective agency in the context of environmental and socio-economic change. More broadly, her scholarship seeks to contribute to organizational communication conversations by foregrounding community-based organizing and knowledge production in the Global South.

Sindhu completed her postgraduate studies at the University of Hyderabad, India. Originally from a small coastal fishing village in Kerala, India, she brings over a decade of experience in grassroots organizing and community-based work with fishing communities, alongside six years of professional experience in media and communication. Her professional journey has taken her through roles as a television journalist, community weather dissemination coordinator, research assistant, and communication consultant for an intergovernmental organization.

Bridging activism, journalism, and scholarship, Sindhu's work is grounded in a commitment to community organizing, storytelling, and the politics of voice and representation. She is particularly interested in how the lived experiences and knowledge of historically marginalized coastal communities can inform broader conversations about organizing, environmental futures, and social transformation.