Description
The proposed study would like to introduce the tradition of public history and its research methods for broadening the research and scope of International Relations (IR). Public history is associated with efforts to discover, preserve, and promote the past through various sites and manifestations available in everyday life to the ordinary people.
The study explores the intersection between IR and public history in the digital spaces by examining the emergence of various public history projects on social media platforms like ‘Instagram’ by focusing on selected public history projects from India and Pakistan pertaining to their colonial past and postcolonial present through archival visual iconography. These visual narratives have been independently sourced and reflect upon discourse surrounding politics, culture, identity, war, partition, diaspora and everyday life. The central question study seeks to answer to what extent has contemporary manifestations of public history in digital spaces challenge the embedded colonial and national representations? And what kind of epistemic knowledge gets articulated through such public history projects in digital spaces?
The scope of the study offers fresh and creative insight to IR scholars in studying and visualizing memory construction in digital spaces. The study will make use of the methodology of ‘Visual Autoethnography.’
