HEI: Abertay University
Project Title: Extended Reality as Counter-Narrative: Nubian Forced Migration and Decolonising Digital Heritage
What was your research about?
Forced migration in the Middle East North Africa region (and beyond) has displaced millions as dominant nation-state narratives and legislation destroy cultural heritage sites, erasing the experiences, memories, and traditions of marginalised communities from history. Traditional archives that attempt to reclaim these histories often perpetuate colonial knowledge structures while failing to represent the embodied, affective dimensions of displacement, cultural loss and recovery. This thesis investigates the possibilities of digital cultural heritage and the narratives of forced migration, which are often at odds with dominant colonial and nation-state narratives. New media art practices and immersive XR (extended reality) can function as a counter-archival platform for representing contested heritage from decolonial perspectives.
Through practice-based research, this thesis develops and analyses two XR experiences: ‘The River People’, exploring Nubian displacement and submerged heritage caused by the Aswan High Dam, and ‘The Narrative’, excavating colonial histories embedded in Glasgow City Chambers. Re-framing curated archival materials, these XR game experiences present participatory, multisensory narratives. The research synthesises remediation theory (Bolter & Grusin) and Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman) to theorise how XR might play a future role in mediating memory and culture, both material and non-material.
This thesis makes three key contributions: 1) a practice-based methodology for ethical heritage representation under postcolonial constraints 2) demonstration that XR counter-archives can represent fragmented, non-linear memory while resisting extractive or spectacle treatments of trauma and 3) a novel theoretical synthesis of remediation and OOO for XR heritage applications. The research critically examines XR’s risks — including ‘empathy machine’ rhetoric and trauma commodification — and proposes design strategies embracing opacity, temporal complexity, and ontological plurality. Ultimately, the research establishes that XR, when grounded in critical theory and ethical reflexivity, offers bounded but powerful possibilities for diversifying heritage representation and foregrounding once-marginalised voices.
