Amanda Burgess | Mediating memory: Remembering Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki through amateur tourist photography on Instagram
Amanda Burgess | Mediating memory: Remembering Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki through amateur tourist photography on Instagram | University of Groningen (Sandwich PhD with Macquarie University, Sydney) | Promotor: Prof. dr Susan Aasman | Daily supervisors: Dr Rik Smit (University of Groningen) and D. Jane Simon (Macquarie University) | 1 April 2024 – 1 April 2027 | a.l.burgess[at]rug.nl
Instagram is frequently used by tourists to share experiences at memorial sites around the world. Traumatic moments in history are acknowledged and remembered on Instagram through selfies and self-portraits, built environment photography, videography and Carousel posts also known as “photo dumps” where several images or videos can be shared at once. Through content analysis, I propose to compare Instagram posts shared in 2025 across three popular World War II memorial locations: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In doing so, I seek to address the following research question: How is the memory and built environment of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented through amateur photography on Instagram? My aim is to understand how Instagram is used to remember and memorialise these events through amateur photography, videography, post captions, emojis and hashtags.
The PhD project will expand on my Master of Research thesis (completed at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia), which analysed over 500 Instagram posts shared at the 9/11 Memorial. Despite personal photography being permitted in most visitor guidelines at memorials, social media posts – including selfies – are widely considered to be disrespectful. My research found that selfies and self- portraits constitute only 10% of content shared at the memorial. I argued that these posts should instead be considered as part of a broader, nuanced act of witnessing that allows people to connect to places of trauma and that a focus on selfies alone is reductive. In this project, I aim to test these findings across these three new case studies.
