Project Name
Aurgho Jyoti: “Land, Border, Buildings” (Sep 2026)
Lahore University of Management Sciences
Lahore, Pakistan
2026
The panel included Manahil Raza, Fahad Naveed, Hannuri Lim, and Aurgho Jyoti. Manahil Raza analyzed how VR and holographic installations at Lahore’s National History Museum recalibrate state narratives of the 1947 Partition, showing how immersive design reshapes public encounters with loss, belonging, and national pedagogy. Fahad Naveed reflected on co-curating Separation Geographies, a digital collaborative project by artists in India and Pakistan that seeks to weave together personal, divided histories, and (re)establish partitioned connections. Hannuri Lim reassessed the anthropometric archive of Torii Ryūzō, demonstrating how its high-definition digitization in Korea reveals tensions between expanded access and the limited interpretive engagement that digital heritage infrastructures often reproduce. Aurgho Jyoti discussed the Virtual Kolkata Partition Museum, examining how immersive reconstructions of Bengal’s Partition and migration histories intervene in urban memory and recalibrate the public’s sensory relationship to colonial space. (September 25-27, 2026)
The Association for Asian Studies’ flagship AAS-in-Asia Conference, brought together well known scholars and practitioners from across Asia, West Asia, Africa, and Middle East. With the theme Centering Asia: Refiguring Connections, Recharting Futures, this conference highlighted Asia’s significance as a region of both continuity and reinvention. The panel examined how digitization and immersive media are transforming the practice of public history, particularly in contexts shaped by border-making and divided pasts. Bringing together work grounded in Pakistan, India, and Korea, the work demonstrates a wide methodological spectrum, from VR-based curation and collaborative digital humanities to archival forensics and immersive urban memory studies, while highlighting how digital technologies produce new modes of witnessing, affect, and historical argumentation.