Mobile environments: Moving local histories into the bigger picture

Historical scholarship is shifting in the digital age, unsettling how "knowledge" in all its guises fits into the global picture. World historians can tap into these social changes to tip the balance of power towards the custodians of history and their descendants. This participatory politics is crucial to contemporary local communities and the kinds of "memory work" that occur across socio-cultural and intergenerational boundaries. Scholars have intervened in these increasingly "mobile" environments to reshape future directions in world history for public consumption. I argue that while the power balance often favors the global, the local is not always simply a passive victim of globalization. This paper describes an attempt to move academic history into popular space, inadvertently unleashing some of the global/local tensions that exist at the community level. It reveals how the local can reject global forces and redirect the public gaze to its own unique concerns and cultural differences. Forming part of a broader global movement, this phenomenon characterizes the shift from official to non-official sites of knowledge. This shift offers vital (yet sometimes unseen) links to alternate forms of remembering historical experiences.