Hirah Azhar began her AHRC Collaborative Doctoral project "Manufacturing reality in the war of narratives: Islamic State photo propaganda, British military influence operations, and public perception" in February 2022 in partnership with the University of Southampton.
The project examines the IWM’s recently-acquired born digital collection of Islamic State images and Ministry of Defence photographs between 2013-2019, to explore how the two opposing sources of influence shape public opinion.
This includes examining the impact of increasing digitisation on conflict imagery, exchanges of influence between imaginary and manufactured war stories, the evolving role of the war photographer, the increasingly precarious balancing act between censorship and the rising democratisation of information, and the impact of social media on the production and dissemination of influence campaigns.
Hirah is presently working with the Research Software Group at Southampton to use their High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities to extract embedded text from the collection of Islamic State images at IWM. She is also part of 2023's AHRC TV PhD cohort.