A Graduate Study of the Khajistan Digital Archive
by Khajistan Cultural Desk
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A master’s thesis titled Archiving the Peripheries has recently been published at Danube University Krems in Austria. The 122-page study takes Khajistan's archive of images from the region as its central case and looks at the archive in relation to archival theory, visual culture and the political histories of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.
Images from the Khajistan archive.
The researcher interviewed Khajistan’s founder, Saad Khan, and examined the Khajistan manifesto alongside the archive’s Instagram output. Rather than treating the project as a social media account with a following, the dissertation approaches it as an archive in formation, shaped by both material preservation and digital circulation.
Images from the Khajistan archive.
One of the stronger observations in the study concerns absence. In much of the region, official archives have been built around state priorities and elite narratives. What falls outside those frames often disappears. The thesis suggests that Khajistan turns toward that remainder. Its subject is not only monuments and public figures but working-class aesthetics, domestic interiors, bodies, rituals, jokes, dissent and performance.
Images from the Khajistan archive.
The physical side of the archive, the Toshakhana, is not incidental. It houses Pakistani film memorabilia, Islamicate Judaica, censored Urdu, Farsi and Arabic magazines, and American and local war propaganda. The thesis acknowledges this material base even as it focuses its analysis on Instagram.
For the empirical section, the author collected 596 screenshots from 232 Instagram posts published over a period in 2025. Each image was coded and reviewed through a structured content analysis. Similar posts were grouped rather than counted twice. Videos were treated by subject. Over time, patterns began to surface. Recurring themes included masculinity and self-presentation, religious ritual, regional symbols, humor, domestic life and intimate scenes. The point is not that these themes are surprising, but that they are treated as records.
The study spends time on method. It separates the question of who produces an image from what appears in it, how it travels across platforms and how viewers interpret it. This distinction allows the author to look at Khajistan as more than a feed. It becomes a space where production, circulation and reception intersect.
Images from the Khajistan archive.
The role of the image itself receives particular attention. Khajistan relies heavily on visual material and rarely frames posts with explanatory text. The dissertation reads this not as minimalism but as a way of allowing images to stand as primary documents. Meaning is not fixed in advance. It emerges across audiences.
The instability of platform-based archiving is also addressed. Khajistan has faced account suspensions and deletions over the years. Visibility can be reduced without explanation. The thesis treats this as part of the archive’s operating conditions rather than an external inconvenience.
Images from the Khajistan archive.
At the same time, the study notes that the archive is not entirely diffuse. Submissions may come from the public, but final decisions about what fits within what is called the “Khajistan gaze” rest with the founder. The dissertation considers questions of consent, recontextualization and sustainability without resolving them neatly.
Images from the Khajistan archive.
Since the thesis was completed, Khajistan’s digital material has expanded beyond Instagram. The archive’s growing repository is now available at:
Read the full study, Archiving the Peripheries, here.
