Abstract Book of the 6th World Conference on Media and Communication
Year: 2025
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Digital Resistance and the Politics of Erasure: Mapping Student Activism Across Pakistan’s Peripheries
Minahil Mahmud
ABSTRACT:
This paper examines how university students across Pakistan navigate and resist political repression in both physical and digital spaces, revealing how communication technologies are reshaping contemporary activism under conditions of censorship and surveillance. Based on fourteen semi-structured interviews and a twelve-person focus group conducted from June-August 2025 across Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Gwadar, and among diaspora students and civil society actors, the study traces how provincial hierarchies—between Pakistan’s political “center” and “periphery”—structure patterns of resistance and erasure. In Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where militarization and racial profiling dominate campus life, students use social media platforms such as X and Instagram to document state violence, mobilize solidarity, and sustain what I term digital everyday resistance. In contrast, students in the urban centers engage in more symbolic, campus-bound forms of expression. Through qualitative analysis and archival research, this project highlights how digital communication serves as both a space of exposure and control, simultaneously empowering marginalized voices and rendering them more surveilled. The paper concludes by proposing the creation of a digital archive of Pakistani student activism—a living repository that resists collective forgetting and asserts visibility against systemic silencing.
Keywords: Activism; censorship; digital media; everyday resistance; Pakistan