Lead supervisor:
Dr Galina Miazhevich 
Other supervisor(s):
- Prof Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
Start date: October 2026
Award: General
Subject Pathway:
Journalism, Digital Media and Democracy
Thematic Cluster:
Rights and Governance Cluster
In partnership with:
Reassembling the Past, Reimagining the Nation? Digital Memory, Decolonial Claims and Islamic Heritage in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan
The project examines how digital platforms’ users in Kazakhstan reinterpret the Soviet past and debate national belonging after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The research focuses on who has the authority to interpret the past, on what grounds, and on how the affordances of languages and platforms influence the visibility and recognition of competing historical narratives.
The empirical part covers three areas of public debate from February 2022 to December 2023: historical parallels prompted by the invasion of Ukraine; debates about Soviet monuments and the renaming of public spaces; and 31 May, the day of remembrance of the victims of political repression and famine. The project also examines how memories about Soviet repressions on religious belief and practice and Islamic heritage are included in these processes.
Methods include digital ethnography, critical discourse analysis (CDA), visual analysis and semi-structured interviews. Publications by Telegram and Instagram users in Kazakh and Russian, along with reactions, are analysed.
The conceptual centre of the project is digital decolonial memory, a space where the authority of interpretations of the Soviet past is debated. Digital reassembling is considered a work analytical term that explores how people select, combine, and rethink archival materials, family memories, and cultural symbols. The research tracks how, through these practices, claims to mnemonic authority are formed and how they are accepted, questioned, and rejected.
The project doesn’t assume that digital reimagining of the past automatically leads to decolonisation; it asks under what conditions these practices can debate dominant historical interpretations and when they produce new forms of exclusion and inequality. The findings will contribute to deepening understanding of the correlation between digital memory, decoloniality, platform power and national identity in post-Soviet societies.