Research on Khajistan: A Master’s Thesis
by Khajistan Cultural Desk
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We will be periodically sharing academic and independent research that engages with Khajistan. The first example is a master’s thesis titled Archiving the Peripheries, submitted at Danube University Krems (Donau-Universität Krems), Austria.
The dissertation runs 122 pages and takes Khajistan as its central case study. It situates the archive within broader debates in archival theory, visual studies, and the political history of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. The study includes a semi-structured interview with Khajistan’s founder, Saad Khan, along with analysis of the Khajistan manifesto and the archive’s digital output.
The author distinguishes between Khajistan’s physical and digital components. The physical archive, the Toshakhana, is described as housing Pakistani film memorabilia, Islamicate Judaica, censored Urdu, Farsi and Arabic magazines, and American and local war propaganda materials. The thesis, however, focuses primarily on the Instagram archive for analytical purposes.
For the empirical section, the researcher compiled 596 screenshots from 232 Instagram posts published between March 27 and June 10, 2025. Using an ethnographic content analysis approach based on Krippendorff’s framework, each image was treated as a unit of analysis. Similar or repeated images were not double-counted, videos were coded by subject, and promotional posts were separated from community-sourced material. Coding categories were developed inductively through several months of engagement with the dataset.
Themes identified in the analysis include self-presentation and bodily display, masculinity and gender performance, regional and national symbolism, ritual and religious imagery, political commentary, humor, domestic interiors, and intimate scenes. The study argues that these recurring themes reveal how everyday social media imagery functions as archival material.
Methodologically, the thesis applies Gillian Rose’s framework for visual analysis, distinguishing between four analytical sites: production (who creates the image), the image itself (its composition), circulation (how it travels across platforms), and audiencing (how it is interpreted by viewers). These are examined across technological, compositional and social dimensions. The author also draws on Michel de Certeau’s theory of everyday practices to describe Khajistan’s presence on Instagram as operating within, and negotiating with, platform governance and moderation systems.
The dissertation notes repeated account suspensions and deletions, addressing the instability of platform-based archiving. It also discusses curatorial authority, observing that while Khajistan receives community submissions, final decisions about what aligns with the “Khajistan gaze” remain with the founder. Ethical questions around consent, recontextualization and contributor representation are also considered.
Since the thesis was completed, Khajistan’s digital repository has expanded beyond Instagram. The archive’s growing corpus is now accessible at:
For those interested in reading the full study, Archiving the Peripheries is available here:
