From online to offline: Getting ready for in-person fieldwork through social media ethnography

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant emphasis on finding solutions to continue academic research in light of closed borders. The inability to travel has prompted academic researchers to reconsider their approaches to fieldwork, with a particular focus on utilizing modern technology effectively to conduct accurate ethnographic research even while working remotely. This has entailed navigating the vast expanse of the internet carefully and acquiring additional tools in the field of ethnography. The primary concerns surrounding conducting remote fieldwork and ensuring the proper selection of data can be summarized by exploring strategies to overcome the challenges imposed by restrictions, as well as leveraging modern technology to study distant cultures without compromising comprehension. Taking into consideration my research on the Japanese experimental noise music scene and the necessity to collect information about the response and activities of these artists at the brink of the pandemic, I challenged my need to collect data by practising through the internet and modern technologies new ways to undertake ethnographic research through distance. In this sense, social networks demonstrated how modern ethnographic methods can be effectively applied to conduct functional social media ethnography, mitigating the challenges brought about by physical distance constraints. Specifically for my research, Reddit’s feature of organizing communities into subtopics named “subreddits” provides me with the possibility to keep in touch with reliable users and information by selecting specific subreddits related to Japan and music topics (e.g. “r/japaneseunderground”, “r/noisemusic”). Along with the existing literature and the constant online research for news related to my project, social media ethnography played a functional role not only in collecting relevant data but also in providing me with more clarity about how to further move my fieldwork once I can travel to Japan. By emphasizing the potential of social media as a valuable avenue to enhance research strategies in times of crisis, this paper aims to consider how online fieldwork created to overcome the impossibility of fieldwork travel can result in a profitable social media ethnography not only to collect data by distance but also to gain appropriate preparation for following in-person fieldwork by relying on our primary findings. By retracing step by step my research project on Japanese noise music, I will explain how undertaking online research provided me with further ideas to achieve more findings and add clarities to my research intent once I had to switch to offline fieldwork

Interconnected Security: Non-State Informal Policing in Africa

The paper examines the role of non-state informal policing in Africa's crime prevention frameworks across multiple scales, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, state-level dynamics, and community initiatives. Using Nigeria as a central case, with comparisons to Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, and South Africa, the study explores how corruption, weak institutions, and insufficient resources have predominantly contributed to the rise and continued reliance on non-state actors, such as community policing groups, vigilante organisations, and private security firms, to fill critical security gaps left by the state. Employing a historical and qualitative approach, the research traces the evolution of governance and security from pre-colonial times through the post-independence era, analysing data from historical documents, scholarly literature, and case studies. The findings reveal the complex interactions between state and non-state actors, offering insights into hybrid security governance and its implications for sustainable development in Africa. This study highlights the importance of a multi-scalar approach to security governance, providing valuable strategies for improving security in contexts of state fragility

Artificial Intelligence and the Militarisation of New Media in Egypt: Challenging the Role of Technology in Resistance

This paper explores the transformative role of technology, focusing on its dual capacity to both empower resistance and reinforce state control. It contrasts the potential emancipatory capacity of social media with the emerging usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on its deployment as a surveillance technology in Egypt. In this context, its role highlights a contradiction, whereby technology that once enabled democratic participation during the 2011 thawra (‘revolution’) now threatens to undermine it. Drawing on Virilio's concept of "polar inertia" this analysis argues that the influence of AI on public discourse exacerbates entrenched power hierarchies, particularly highlighting the growing integration of military forces into governance structures. It foregrounds the significant ethical and political dilemmas posed by such dynamics, expanding the discourse on AI's implications within authoritarian contexts. Moreover, it underscores the need for adopting rigorous policies to promote equity and inclusive technological advancement

Introduction to ‘Islamic politics and the imaginative: intangibility and critique’

This introduction examines the theoretical and methodological challenges of studying imaginative elements in Islamic politics while proposing new frameworks for understanding intangible realms in political formation. Moving beyond traditional approaches that either dismiss imagination as irrational or reduce Islamic politics to textual analysis, we argue for engaging with imagination as a critical interface between material and metaphysical domains. Drawing on recent anthropological scholarship on affect, dreams, and aspirations, alongside classical Islamic concepts like takhayyul, this special issue offers novel approaches to studying Islamic political formations. The collected papers demonstrate how imagination operates as both a realm of critique and a space for political becoming while challenging established disciplinary boundaries between history and anthropology. By engaging with diverse forms of knowledge production – from classical Islamic scholarship to contemporary political movements – this issue contributes to broader discussions about decolonizing academic knowledge while avoiding the trap of reifying new canons. Our intervention suggests ways to understand Islamic politics beyond Eurocentric preoccupations with liberalism and secularism while maintaining critical perspectives on power relations within Islamic traditions themselves

GVCs meet robots: smiling, smirking or flattening? The case of the automotive value chain

The paper contributes to the fast-growing literature on the structural dynamics of digitalization with a focus on robotization, and its heterogeneous diffusion and impact along and within global value chains. Specifically, building on an innovative granular analysis of the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) dataset, we provide new empirical evidence of the disproportional distribution of robotization across countries, sectors and along different stages and production functions of global value chains (GVCs). Moreover, with specific reference to the automotive sector, we identify some features that characterize industrial robots’ adoption across different applications and along different stages of the automotive value chain. Such characteristics are also assessed through a sectoral case study analysis based on primary data collection conducted in the automotive sector in South Africa

Afterword: Replenishing Geographical Thinking on Depletion through and of Social Reproduction

“Replenishing Geographical Thinking on Depletion through and of Social Reproduction” contributes to the growing interdisciplinary debates on depletion. It does so through analyses of the everyday rhythms of life by investigating the relationship between production and reproduction to understand the labour that goes into the maintenance of life and experiences of depletion, as well as strategies to measure and reverse it. I reflect on the different papers and suggest that this excellent Symposium is an important contribution to the study of depletion and opens up avenues for further explorations of the concept