22 May 2025
10:00–11:30
Our presentation addresses an assignment we designed for our inter-institutional course collaboration between Literary Studies classes on Partition Fiction (FCCU) and the literature of exile and migration (FUS). The assignment focuses on the digital representation of the Partition of India, and requires students to develop interdisciplinary thinking, combining history, literature and digital studies. Students, in groups of 4-5, were asked to select and examine example texts from a broad range of publicly-available online sources, such as online archives, social media, films, blogs and digital storytelling platforms, as well as to generate AI responses based on prompts, with the aim of sampling a cross-section of narrations and descriptions of Partition in different realms of the digital space. Within their selected sources, students identified what is included in the narrative and what is missing in order to analyze bias in the shaping of digital public memory. Each group then created a poster, using tools like images, charts and quotes to demonstrate their findings. The posters were presented by the students in an online session including both classes, and students were asked to reflect on lessons we can learn from Partition’s data-selective misrepresentation and on how Data Colonialism continues today and affects communities and the representation of events past and present. Our takeaway for other AMICAL institutions is the adaptability of this type of assignment and its steps to other contexts, in its emphasis on building awareness in students on the way in which digital content is curated and filtrated, and on supporting them in being able to identify and articulate digital bias.