Crowdsourcing the Past: Memory Projects in South Asia (HAP Summer Seminar)

This event will be held on Zoom. Instructions for joining the event will be sent to participants via email the day before the event. Please ensure that you enter the correct email and check your spam if you do not receive the email containing the joining link.

About the event:
Exploring her encounters with crowdsourced platforms whilst researching the development of amateur and domestic photography in the subcontinent, Mallika Leuzinger (German Historical Institute London) discusses how the platforms mobilise visual and material artefacts and a language of civic participation and range from purpose-built websites, Instagram accounts, and Facebook groups. Mallika traces the lives of these picture libraries to think through the will to ‘crowdsource’ the past in order to understand history as an everyday matter.

Mallika joins chair Philip Carter, Academic Director at the Royal Historical Society, to discuss curatorial strategies, demographic entities, funding structures, political ideologies, and concerns about data collection attached to emergent archives.

Mallika Leuzinger is a historian of visual culture and everyday media and technology, with a focus on South Asia. She has worked in the museum and heritage sector in India and Switzerland and, before joining the GHIL, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, the Institute for Asian and African Studies at HU-Berlin, and University of Edinburgh.

This is the last event in the 2025 'History and Archives in Practice' summer series, co-hosted by The National Archives, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Royal Historical Society.

Other seminars in the series are:

• 1pm, Wednesday 7 May: 'VE Day 80: How we remember the Second World War'
• 1pm, Tuesday 10 June: 'Family photography archives'