The Looking Glass

The Looking Glass is a multimedia ethnographic research project under the ambit of the Education, Justice, and Memory Network (EdJAM). At the core of the project is a framework that explores power and gender as a category of analysis of the world around us. We applied this theoretical framework to case studies of the lived experiences, heritage, history, and violence of different minoritised and marginalised gender communities in Pakistan to understand the use and abuse of power. To do this, our project emphasises participatory research methodologies, multimodal outputs, and the greater idea of reclamation of narratives. To this end, we explore the following themes and relationships in our work:

• Power and its presentation in private and public spheres;
• Gender as a negotiation of power;
• Visibility and its relationship to violence, particularly the violence of omission;
• Post-colonial perspectives on reading indigenous diversity and heritage; and,
• Language as a tool for creating and reinforcing power dynamics.