The UNC Center for Media Law and Policy is pleased to announce the first-place winner of the annual James R. Cleary Prize for the best student-published scholarly articles on media law and policy. The award comes with a $1,000 cash prize.

This year’s winner is Anjali Purohit. She is entering her third year at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she will serve as an Articles Editor for the North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology during the 2025–2026 academic year. She received her undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University, where she double-majored in Sociology with a concentration in crime and criminal justice, and Spanish. Following graduation, Anjali worked for two years at litigation firms in Philadelphia, gaining valuable experience in legal research, discovery, and trial preparation.

Her article, “Love at First Swipe: How Dating Apps Compromise User Privacy and Data Protection,” examines regulatory gaps in U.S. privacy law and the risks associated with modern data collection practices. The piece highlights how dating apps collect and share sensitive personal information, often through vague privacy policies and without meaningful user consent. It also proposes a system where strong privacy settings are enabled by default, and users can customize them to create a personalized profile that applies seamlessly across multiple platforms.

This summer, Anjali is interning with the North Carolina Department of Justice in the Health Services Section. She hopes to pursue a legal career that combines her interests in technology, consumer protection, and public service. In her free time, Anjali enjoys playing piano, exploring local coffee shops, and watching college basketball.

The UNC Center for Media Law and Policy is pleased to announce the first-place winner of the annual James R. Cleary Prize for the best student-published scholarly articles on media law and policy.  The award comes with a $1,000 cash prize.

Rohan Grover

This year’s winner is Rohan Grover, a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His article is titled “Contingent Connectivity: Internet Shutdowns and the Infrastructural Precarity of Digital Citizenship.” While previous research has largely interpreted Internet shutdowns as curtailments of freedom of expression, this article evaluates the implications for citizenship itself by bringing together scholarship on digital governance, science and technology studies (STS) approaches to Internet governance, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. Notably, this article raises the stakes for critical analysis of how authoritarian states approach Internet policy to bridge digital divides—and for evaluating quality and contingency of connectivity experienced by marginalized and peripheral communities.

Rohan’s research explores the politics of technology policy. Specifically, his dissertation project examines the sociotechnical construction of “user consent” in the emerging privacy tech industry, which develops standards for data privacy and, increasingly, AI governance. His ethnographic research draws on science and technology studies, critical data studies, critical policy studies, and feminist and queer analysis of consent to unpack the politics of data governance and privacy law in action.

Rohan’s work has been published in New Media &  Society; Political Communication; Telecommunications Policy; Information, Communication & Society; The Information Society; the Journal of Information Policy; and in conference proceedings for the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). His research has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation as well as academic associations across disciplines such as the International Communication Association (ICA), the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and the American Political Science Association (APSA). His work has also been recognized with two Top Student Paper Awards at ICA.

Prior to pursuing a PhD, Rohan worked as a product manager and data strategist at digital media and advocacy organizations such as HuffPost, MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, Upworthy, and Jhatkaa.org. He received an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and a BS in Economics with a minor in Asian American studies from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.