Tibetan Social Media as a Source for a Understanding and Teaching Social and Political Change in Tibetan Communities

2008 was a watershed year for Tibetan communities both within and outside of China. Ongoing social and political movements since have demonstrated the long-lasting consequences of the protests and riots of 2008 as a key moment in the history of Sino-Tibetan relations and modern nation state making.  A key difference between social and political movements in Tibetan communities before and after 2008 has been the availability of social media for disseminating information about key events and participants and their motivations and experiences. This paper will explore this social media as a historical source for understanding social and political change among Tibetan communities in the present in both the study and teaching of Tibetan history. I will focus on blogs, micro-blogs and videos as source material for representing the different parties involved in these movements, and delve into how these technologies are mobilized to form on-line communities unbounded by nation state borders that include Tibetans in China, India, Nepal, the U.S., Europe, and beyond, as well as sympathetic and unsympathetic Chinese and foreign audiences. I will then move onto the potentials for incorporation of social media materials into the classroom, citing examples from my own classes where Twitter, Youtube and blog posts containing essays and poetry have allowed for students to obtain an unprecedented level of engagement with course materials through actually participating in their creation. In doing so, they disrupt the historical archive created by these materials, as they become part of these events and conversations, rather than observers in the aftermath.