Pratik Nyaupane is a PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he studies the cultures of datafication, surveillance technologies, and the digitization of public and civic life. As a researcher, Pratik is interested in the stadium as a site of inquiry into our social, cultural, political, and economic relationships with the contemporary surveillance landscapes and the datafied imaginaries of the future. His dissertation zooms in on the 'high tech' features of Los Angeles's newest sports stadiums. As these local landmarks gain global recognition, he explores the discourses of Smart Stadiums entrenched in convenience, safety, and security amidst the realities of surveillance, policing, and logics of inequity.

Additionally, his work on datafication and surveillance extends beyond the stadium boundaries, exploring the epistemic orientations around surveillance and privacy of university students as campuses increasingly rely on automated technologies and datafied policing as an integral component of the modern university campus. In the global context, he investigates how Nepal's National ID project is fundamentally reordering dynamics of citizenship through a biometric data citizenship registry, unraveling ideals of techno-coloniality, technology as development, and cultural identity.

His academic work can be found in the International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Sport Communication, and Big Data & Society and in the edited volumes, Social Issues in Sport Communication and Social Control and Disorder in Football. His scholarly work has been presented at the International Communication Association (ICA), Society for the Social Studies of Science, International Association of Communication and Sport, Surveillance Studies Network (SSN), and the Association for Borderlands Studies, among others.