Researchers Sandra Manickam, Lise Zurné and Charlotte Bruns of Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication organise the symposium "Visual Legacies: Colonial Photographic Archives and the Self" on Wednesday 12 November 2025 at Erasmus Educaton Lab (Polak Building). The event is funded by the ERMeCHS Research clusters VISUAL and GFCP.
- Date
- Wednesday 12 Nov 2025, 15:00 - 17:00
- Type
- Symposium
- Spoken Language
- English
- Space
- Education Lab
- Building
- Polak Building
This symposium is dedicated to exploring the intersections between colonial archival photography and contemporary identity formation, with a focus on postcolonial and diasporic contexts. By examining how colonial-era visual materials continue to shape understandings of self and other in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, the event addresses both historic and contemporary photography not only as a record but also as a means of memory, negotiation and reclamation.
How visual culture shapes identity
The first presentation by Dzifa Peters draws from a project which investigates how visual culture, particularly photography, shapes identity in relation to postcolonial circumstances, migration and intercultural polarities, with a focus on identities in West Africa and its diaspora, especially Ghana.
The female figure in Southeast Asia and Muslim worlds
The second presentation by Nurul Huda Rashid centres on representations of the female figure in Southeast Asia and Muslim worlds. By engaging the image in colonial archives and search engines, annotation as pedagogy is designed to reconfigure ways of looking at archival and algorithmic images. As both speakers combine scholarly and artistic research in their work, the event also highlights the potential of combining scholarly analysis and artistic intervention to critically engage with and transform inherited visual legacies.
The two presentations will be followed by a panel discussion, in which the two speakers will be joined by Sandra Manickam, Lise Zurné and Charlotte Bruns.
Afterwards, there will be drinks at Erasmus Paviljoen.
About Nurul Huda Rashid
Nurul Huda Rashid is a researcher and visual artist. Her research examines the algorithmic circulation of Muslim women images on global search engines. Bridging perspectives from visual and archival methods alongside feminists and decolonial theories, Nurul activates through annotation as pedagogy. This is mapped in photographic works Editing Hijab/Her (2016) and unknown woman/perempuan kami (2021), and in lecture-performances such as Women in War (2016-ongoing) and Nodes (2022). Her recent work membadan/mengatur (2024) expands on annotation as pedagogy through new stories and batik as approaches of bending colonial time. Nurul is currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Leiden University.
About Dzifa Peters
Dzifa Peters is a German Ghanaian visual artist and researcher. She holds a PhD in Culture Studies from Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Lisbon) and Justus-Liebig Universität (Giessen). She is a junior researcher at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC) in Lisbon, and a research fellow at the Postdoc-Fellowship Program Integral Human Development (DHI) at Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Her research fields include postcolonial and decolonial studies, migration studies, memory studies, performativity studies, and visual culture studies. She also includes art-based research into her scientific work by using hybrid methods in which her artistic practice becomes part of knowledge production and scientific endeavours.
