Featured Member
- iSchools News
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Issue #11
Hassan Asif
North American Region
Canada
University of Toronto
Faculty of Information
iSchools member since 2005
Hello Hassan! Please tell us a bit about you!
I am a PhD candidate in Information at the University of Toronto. I was born and raised in Pakistan and have spent most of my adult life moving between different cities and countries for study and work. I now live in Toronto with my family, where I divide my time between research, teaching, and running after my one-year-old daughter.
My work sits at the intersection of digital media, religion, and everyday life. I am interested in how people use phones, laptops, and platforms to record, edit, and share sound and images, and how that activity shapes how they understand themselves and others. Much of this takes place in very ordinary places, such as homes, studios, mosques, and streets, rather than in large organizations alone.
Before starting my doctorate, I studied Communication at Northwestern University and Museums and Gallery Practice at University College London. I then worked in museums, heritage organizations, and education in Pakistan and the Gulf region. Those roles involved collection digitization, exhibition design, and training programs, and they taught me that technologies and archives are never neutral. They direct which stories become visible and how people can claim history.
Across these experiences I have come to think of myself as an interdisciplinary scholar of digital cultures, who is most at home when moving between different kinds of material, methods, and communities and trying to understand how media practices make and remake social life.
You are a PhD candidate at the iSchool of Toronto. Can you tell us why you chose Toronto's iSchool for your doctorate? What makes your iSchool special?
I came to Toronto’s iSchool because I needed a place that treated information, media, and culture as deeply connected rather than separate topics. The Faculty of Information brings together people who work on archives, libraries, information science, critical data studies, user experience, and media theory in the same building. That mix allowed me to pursue a project that moves between studio practice, platform infrastructures, and questions of ethics and authority without needing to choose only one angle.
The iSchool is also strongly tied to the wider university. I was able to complete a collaborative specialization with the Centre for South Asian Studies alongside my doctorate in Information. This structure matters for my work, since it lets me think about digital technologies within specific regional histories, languages, and politics, instead of only in abstract terms.
Another reason I chose the iSchool is the way it encourages students to connect research with community work. Through the program I have been able to interact with archives and public facing projects across campus. These links have shaped how I think about knowledge production, public engagement, and the responsibilities that come with studying digital cultures.
What makes the iSchool special to me is this combination of breadth and trust. Faculty members are comfortable supervising projects that involve ethnographic fieldwork, technical systems, and cultural theory at the same time. My peers come from many countries and disciplines, so any idea I bring to class or to a reading group is quickly tested against very different experiences and questions. That environment has been central to how my work has grown.
You have a collaborative specialization with the Centre for South Asian Studies as your doctoral research examines media remix processes and the corresponding impact of digital media archives on the identities of Muslim content creators in Pakistan. Could you tell us a bit more about your research? Why did you choose this topic?
My dissertation studies how Muslim producers and performers in Pakistan use digital tools to rework devotional sound and images, and how this activity shapes ideas of piety, authority, and belonging. I focus in particular on na’at, a form of poetry and song in praise of the Prophet Muhammad that is central to public religious life in Pakistan.
I look at what happens when this devotional genre enters home studios, television production houses, and online platforms, where it is recorded, edited, and remixed using digital audio workstations, plugins, and archives of older recordings. I am interested in small technical decisions, such as choices about tempo, reverb, pitch correction, and framing, and how producers explain and justify those choices in ethical and theological terms.
A key part of the project is the idea of digital archives. Many of the younger producers I work with build their sound and style from collections of past performances stored on hard drives, phones, and platforms such as YouTube. These collections act as living reference points for what counts as proper, beautiful, or permissible. They also frame how producers imagine continuity with the past and how they locate themselves within the wider Muslim community.
I chose this topic because it brings together several long-standing interests in one place. I grew up in Pakistan listening to devotional media alongside global popular culture, often on the same television channels and tapes. Later, working in museums and heritage spaces, I became very aware of how choices about what to record and preserve shape collective memory. The current moment, where relatively low-cost digital tools and platforms are transforming religious media practices in Pakistan, felt both personally familiar and intellectually urgent. It offered an opportunity to think carefully about how very local media work engages with global infrastructures and debates around religion, technology, and power.
In 2021/2022, you received an iSchools Research Grant for your project: “Remixing the Sacred: Digital Media Practices and Alternative Muslim Modernities in Pakistan.” Please tell us more about that project. What were the biggest challenges you had to face?
The iSchools Research Grant supported the early fieldwork and design for my current dissertation. I set out to understand how small studios and media collectives in Lahore and Karachi were using digital tools to imagine different ways of being modern and Muslim at the same time. The grant allowed me to spend extended periods in specific sites and to test and refine methods that combined ethnography with attention to technical systems.
In practice this meant mapping devotional media locations in both cities, spending long hours in home studios and at gatherings, and observing how audio and video moved between phones, computers, and platforms. I carried out in-depth interviews with producers and performers, as well as technical walkthroughs inside digital audio workstations where they explained their projects step by step. The grant also covered local research costs and made it possible for me to build the relationships and trust that this type of work requires.
One major challenge was ethical and relational. Many of the groups I worked with come from communities that are politically sensitive or have felt misrepresented in national and international media. It took time to explain my aims clearly, to discuss risks, and to agree on how their stories and practices would be described in my writing. I needed to create ways for collaborators to give feedback and to withdraw material if they felt uncomfortable.
A second challenge was practical and technical. The studios I visited often ran on unstable electricity, pirated software, and improvised equipment. These conditions are central to my argument about media practices, but they also shaped my fieldwork. Power cuts during interviews, uneven internet access, and the constant repair of devices and cables became part of the research environment and required flexibility on my part.
A third challenge was conceptual. I wanted to avoid repeating familiar stories that frame people in Pakistan as simply behind or as passive users of imported tools. The grant gave me time to sit with this tension and let the fieldwork push back against those narratives. It helped me begin to see producers and performers as theorists in their own right, whose practical decisions and explanations offer important insights into media, authority, and truth.
You have worked and studied around the world in the US, the UK, Pakistan, and Canada. When you think back on your time in these countries, what were the issues that people were most concerned about in their everyday dealings with information? Do you see similarities and differences?
Across these different settings I have seen people worry about some very similar things, even though the infrastructures they use are quite different. Questions about whom to trust, how much information is too much, and who is left out of official records appear in very different conversations, whether someone is a curator, a student, a parent, or a small business owner.
In Pakistan, everyday concerns often begin with uneven access. Many institutions and households deal with unreliable power, limited bandwidth, and fragile hardware. In museums and heritage spaces, for example, staff struggled to preserve and share collections with modest budgets and aging equipment, even as there was strong public interest in history and culture. In everyday digital life, people rely on low-cost phones, shared devices, and ad hoc archives, which makes questions of language, class, and religious authority part of every information decision.
In the United States, during my studies and early research work, the conversation often assumed stable infrastructures and focused more on platform design, algorithmic curation, and representation. People were concerned with how social media and search engines were shaping public discourse, amplifying some voices, and making others less visible. There was also a strong emphasis on individual privacy, data collection, and the power of corporate platforms.
In the United Kingdom, where I studied in museum and gallery contexts, everyday information issues were closely tied to questions of heritage and institutional responsibility. Decisions about what to catalogue, how to describe contested histories, and how to address collections rooted in empire shaped most projects. The challenge was how to open archives and exhibitions to a wider range of communities without repeating older patterns of exclusion.
In Canada, through work with archives and data initiatives, I see similar themes expressed in a different key. There is ongoing concern with decolonizing data, with building community archives, and with designing systems that respect both professional standards and local priorities. People ask who writes the descriptions, whose categories are used, and how those choices will matter for future generations.
The common thread in all these places is that information is never just a neutral resource. It is always linked to power, infrastructure, and identity. The differences lie in which constraints feel most urgent day to day, and which institutions people see as responsible for addressing them.
If you could give just one advice to future information scientists, what would it be?
If I had to give one piece of advice, it would be to keep your work with technologies as close as possible to the people and settings where they are actually used. It is very easy to fall in love with clean datasets, clever models, and elegant interfaces. Those are important, but they only matter if they make sense in the messy, constrained, and meaningful situations where people live and work.
This means spending time outside the lab and classroom. Sit with someone as they search for a document on a slow connection, fill in a form in a second language, or edit a video on a borrowed laptop. Ask what feels easy, what feels risky, and what feels important in those moments. Let those answers shape the questions you ask and the systems you design.
It also means becoming comfortable moving between fields. The most pressing problems around information do not fit neatly inside one discipline. They involve history, law, design, politics, and everyday life all at once. You do not need to be an expert in everything, but you do need to be willing to listen across boundaries, to translate between technical language and lived experience, and to recognize when other kinds of knowledge are needed.
Information scientists who can combine careful technical work with that kind of grounded curiosity will be better placed to help build infrastructures, policies, and tools that serve the communities they touch.
Thank you very much, Hassan!
Featured Members is an iSchools Feature series spotlighting members of iSchools who are part of the development and organization of thought provoking projects or conferences. Please contact admin@ischools-inc.org in case you would like to be featured as well.