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Facilitated by technological advances in cameras, printing methods and equipment, photojournalism blossomed throughout the world during the interwar period. It offered readers insights into the contemporary world, providing access to diverse peoples and remote locations through a combination of photographs and text. Japan was no exception. However, unlike Europe or North America, where the primary medium for disseminating knowledge through images was photo magazines or newspapers, in interwar Japan it was mass-market women’s magazines that popularised the practice of using images to convey information within society. This paper specifically examines representations seen in a particular photo-article genre known as the “life pictorial”, published in the best-selling women’s magazine Shufu no tomo (“Housewife’s Friend”). The analysis of these articles demonstrates how they contributed to the circulation of an imagined geography in 1930s Japanese society by presenting an image of a utopian multicultural Japanese empire that covertly intimated a distinct social, ethnic and racial hierarchy. Furthermore, this analysis explores how the magazine guided and shaped its readers’ visual literacy by training them in how to “read” these photo articles, in a time before state censorship became fully entrenched.

This text examines how ethnic activism in Nepal developed a political language that stressed local particularities and engaged in politics of difference while seeking to address audiences across the globe. It is argued that a language of ethnicity evolved in a series of translation acts. Looking back at long histories of oppression and marginalisation, members of ethnic groups – in Nepal as elsewhere – seek to reassert themselves by engaging in public representations and by creating a common ground in the framework of global ethnic activism and hence global normative horizons. While moving between local, national and global audiences, ethnic activists transport and mould meanings, creating a common denominator for a semantic field that is intelligible to the widest possible diverse audience. Translation is viewed here as a complex exercise: moving back and forth between local, national and global forums of communication and engagement while adopting, rejecting and shaping the means of expression and the related knowledge repertoires. These acts can engage with and react to meanings created within fields of power seen as oppressive or enabling. By deploying a wide-ranging repertoire of narrative figures, such political communication aims at capturing, channelling and expanding public attention.

This paper examines a series of refusals to admit Indian immigrants into North America in the early twentieth century and the resulting protest movements in Canada, the US mainland and the Philippines. By examining these events, the study aims to enhance our comprehension of Indian immigrants’ agency in shaping their interregional mobility and connectivity. Indians repeatedly faced de facto exclusion from these places, but they devised strategies to facilitate migration, and in response, Canadian and US authorities tightened control, leading to further resistance. Throughout these cycles of restriction and resistance, Indian migrants combined the knowledge and experiences acquired in Manila and North America, countering immigration policies and strengthening interregional connectivity. Understanding the interregional connectivity among Indian immigrants is key to understanding why Indians from different regions were actively involved in the anti-British Ghadar movement and the Komagata Maru incident. This paper focuses on the agency of Indians in Manila and examines the reasons behind their engagement in these events.

The main inhabitants of Byans, Chaudans, and Darma, three adjacent Himalayan valleys in the Mahakali (Kali) drainage system, call themselves ‘Rang’ in their own languages. Their homeland, which has long constituted part of the extensive frontier between South Asia and Tibet, has been politically divided between Nepal and India for nearly two centuries. Even though the Rang have maintained their socio-cultural unity across the international border, the Rang in India and the Rang in Nepal have had to deal with different minority policies and discourses, coping with various ‘foreign’ ethnonyms as well as meta-level categories like ‘scheduled tribe’, ‘jan(a)jāti’, and ‘indigenous people,’ as most Rangs live as citizens of either one of the two states. Primarily based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Darchula district in Far Western Nepal and elsewhere, I discuss in this paper how Rang in Nepal have coped with changing institutional frameworks and discourses on minority populations on both sides of the Mahakali or Kali River.

This research note is based on work in progress relating to the relevance of translation and semantic framing for the public perception of newly introduced concepts. The article traces trajectories of public perception of the concept “sexual harassment” in different countries. It sheds light on the role played by the translation words that were chosen to introduce the concept into societies where it was not yet established as a term denoting a violation of women’s rights and a serious offence. The term “sexual harassment” was coined in the United States during the 1970s and was subsequently adopted in various parts of the world. Two societies in which the term was adopted in transliteration and translation are Japan and Egypt. In the case of Japan, the term was introduced during the 1980s, yielding the transliterated Japanese loanword sekushuaru harasumento, later abbreviated to seku-hara. It became a buzzword, yet with a less serious nuance than the English term originally aroused. Egypt adopted the term in the 2000s, translated as taḥarrush jinsī in Arabic. The translation word taḥarrush jinsī was strategically selected and subsequently framed so as to denote a serious offence. Examined through an approach known as the “cassette effect”, the comparison of the two cases suggests that the process of framing the meaning of terms and concepts by social movements and advocacy groups is highly significant for their public perception.

War-Khasis, who live in Bangladesh, earn their subsistence from the production of pan (betel leaf), which is cultivated in the forest. By exploring the betel leaf cultivation practices of War-Khasi farmers, the types of knowledge they mobilise to grow betel leaf successfully, and how they acquire these forms of knowledge, this ethnographic study draws attention to the collaborative, multi-­layered and temporal dynamics of agricultural knowledge. Betel cultivation, far from being an independent human enterprise, is a collaborative and relational effort involving multiple species. The War-Khasi word sumar, meaning to cultivate and to take care, exemplifies the relational aspects of farming through multispecies collaboration. Although pan can grow naturally in the forest, cultivating betel necessitates the mastering and mobilisation of complex agricultural knowledge, as well as physical dexterity. Throughout the life of a farmer, such knowledge forms are in constant flux. The intergenerational transmission of agricultural knowledge, the adjustment of knowledge to the seasons and changing circumstances, the revision of knowledge as life experiences accumulate, and the transformation of the self during the effort to become a good farmer reveal movements of knowledge with different temporalities.

The state of knowledge production and circulation – or what is framed as “relevant” knowledge within academic cultures of learning and teaching – is intimately tied to the global concept of what is “marketable”. Closely associated with this are opportunities for teaching and research funding, graduate scholarship awards, the employment of research and teaching staff and curriculum design. In Asia, the corporatisation of universities and their departments intensified in the 1990s and early 2000s. This stemmed from a complex interplay of historical and structural conditions and pressures, including the colonial legacy of cultural, intellectual and economic dependency. In this paper, the author argues that what is necessary in these contexts in Asia, in line with the call for what are now broadly termed “alternative discourses” from scholars such as Syed Farid Alatas and Vineeta Sinha, is the teaching of a social science tradition created and expanded by scholars who are guided by the selection of problems and relevance from within. In broad contours, alternative discourses refer to the theorising and conceptualisation of social science in Asia and elsewhere that emerged from dissatisfaction with mainstream Euro-American-oriented models, research agendas and priorities. More specifically, the article interrogates the focus on teaching and pedagogy, which has, among other things, resulted in a displacement of attention from issues that should be of crucial consideration to Asian societies.

This IQAS special issue on “Knowledge on the Move” critically examines the circulation of knowledge in Asia, seeking to understand what kind of knowledge moves, where and when, and why and how it does or did so. It addresses the dynamics of global epistemic frameworks, intellectual problematisation, and everyday knowing, emphasizing that knowledge systems connect people across nations and regions. The issue discusses diverse knowledges that foster connectivity and explores the boundaries and limitations that arise. Translation becomes essential in making knowledge "move" and convey meanings effectively. While some concepts from the West have been introduced in Asia, criticisms of unidirectional flows persist in global academia. The articles present rich research results, providing insights into the circulation and construction of connections across Asia, encouraging further discussions on knowledge movement and the concept of Asia itself.

Since the call for papers for this Special Issue less than two years ago, the world has faced a stream of existential challenges, with the background drumbeat of environmental catastrophe(s) and geopolitical tensions growing ever louder. At this moment of unprecedented global challenges, it is increasingly apparent that the sphere of international politics and government, to which citizens would turn for action, is itself also displaying a deep crisis of structural dysfunction. The growing influence of China appears to be both a contributing cause and partial effect of the perceived international vacuum of the multilateral action needed to prevent and respond to such a serious moment of planetary crises. The burning question of the age arguably concerns how China will use, expand or lose its remarkable sources of economic, political and technological influence in this system crisis scenario while attempting to stabilise (or at least not upend) its own economic and socio-political conditions in the process. How will China actually go beyond China? And what world – what world order, what planet and nature, what globe-spanning sociotechnical systems – will this singularly important but not yet well-understood phenomenon create? This Special Issue opens up this agenda, presenting a series of insightful papers across a range of empirical sites that illuminate not only that profound change is underway with the (uncertain) rise of China and the global reach of its infra­structural projects amidst planetary phase shift, but also how that is currently unfolding.

During the global COVID-19 crisis, China has portrayed itself as a “champion of multilateralism” – defending UN institutions and its own multilateral initiatives in a variety of spheres. China’s approach has, however, often been criticised for undermining multilateralism through its use of multilateral platforms as arenas to contest US leadership. This paper examines the official Chinese discourse on multilateralism during the COVID 19 crisis in the years 2020 and 2021 in light of Beijing’s multilateral diplomacy in the Global South, exemplified by the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and the China-CELAC Forum (China–Community of Latin American and Caribbean States Forum). The authors argue that China’s growing multilateral engagement must be understood in the context of a multilateral system that was already in crisis before the pandemic due to its inability to resolve major global challenges. The term “multilateralism” is essentially used by Beijing to discursively oppose “unilateralism”. While its active multilateral engagement may be able to prevent and resolve major global crises in the future, Beijing’s approach offers limited multilateral spaces for deliberation and contestation by weaker states and non-state actors.

This article reflects upon the author’s long fieldwork experience on party politics in the hybrid political regime of Turkey. It illustrates the ethical and practical challenges that the political context poses for research and elaborates on two interrelated issues. Firstly, the observations and findings that researchers may obtain and present in such a polarised and semi-authoritarian setting can be remarkably different from the expectations of the research participants. This poses a challenge to the principles of not doing harm and of informed consent, and requires researchers to negotiate these principles in order to convey meaningful research outcomes while being uncompromising with respect to the principle of anonymity/confidentiality. The other dilemma is that, in settings where politics imposes itself on bureaucratic and legal institutions as well as on the economy, researchers may find themselves in extremely vulnerable positions before powerful research participants. To what extent should the researcher tolerate being treated badly and how should the researcher deal with such contexts? In this article, the author proposes that Max Weber’s recommendation in his article “Science as Vocation” – to avoid extremely politicised positions – still remains relevant in ethical and practical respects.

In the comment “Critical Research Ethics as Decolonial Praxis” Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo emphasises the importance of critical research ethics in decolonial praxis within academia, highlighting the harmful effects of irresponsible and extractive scholarship that perpetuates epistemic violence and injustice by disregarding non-Western epistemologies, knowledge-makers, agency, and history. The author argues that confronting the embeddedness of knowledge production in imperial, colonial, and patriarchal ideologies, practices, and histories is crucial for engaging in a rehumanising and redistributive academic praxis. June Rubis continues the discussion, pointing out the limitations of superficial attempts to decolonise academic institutions, which often exclude Indigenous voices and fail to confront ongoing colonial violence. She suggests that a more meaningful decolonial project requires remaking relationships towards liberatory justice, including ethical collaboration and accountability with the communities researchers work with. Antony George Pattathu concludes that decolonial praxis and ethics must address colonial continuities and complicities and work towards preventing their perpetuation in research. He focusses on the roles of rehumanising and of Whiteness in decolonial praxis, critical research ethics, and the importance of the emotional dimension involved in decolonial debates.

The perspective of time towards migration and displacement has emerged as a key research interest. However, less attention has been granted to the role that time plays in shaping methodological and ethical considerations in research settings. This paper develops this point by reflecting on the authors’ research process with older East Timorese adults living amid ongoing displacement conditions for over two decades in West Timor, Indonesia. Examining their ageing experiences provides insight into what it means to live through displacement over time and space. However, older people are among the groups of displaced populations considered most vulnerable, requiring the researcher to consider particular methodological sensitivity. This paper argues that understandings of time, reflexivity and the ways lives are linked in relation to people’s later-life experiences in exile can provide useful tools for dealing with ethical and pragmatic dilemmas.

Ahsan Kamal is Lecturer in Pakistan Studies at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, teaching courses in research methods, social theory, social movements and water politics. They work with activists and communities on issues of land and water commons in Pakistan. Their PhD dissertation in Sociology was written on the death and defence of the Indus River in Pakistan. One of their most recent publications, co-authored with Christopher Courtheyn, is “Research as Action and Performance. Learning with Activists in Resource Conflicts”, published in 2021 in The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography. Andrea Fleschenberg talked with Ahsan Kamal on action research, research ethics, and critical decolonial approaches to research and teaching.

At a time when a global pandemic has disrupted lives to a large extent across the globe, doing research has become ever more complex, challenging and uncertain. Such unexpected shifts in the dynamics of research, resulting in unpredictable consequences, have prompted the author to further reflect on her positionality as a researcher writing LGBTQI history. In this paper, the author joins scholars who propose self-reflexivity as both an analytical and ethical tool in understanding volatile research contexts. In gender and sexuality studies much has been written about the importance of self-reflexivity in understanding the impact of researchers’ social and epistemic locations in knowledge production. The paper argues that self-reflexive practice is especially important in studying the histories of gender and sexual identities in a multiply colonised society such as the Philippines. The author reflects on her own identity and its continuing impact on her research process. Through a decolonial lens, she uses the Filipino psychological concept of pagkatao and unpacks its multi-layered meanings as selfhood, humanness and human dignity – three crucial elements in writing the history of identities.

In the wake of the US-led and Pakistan-allied “war on terror”, residents in Northwest Pakistan have faced inconceivable structural and physical violence, in ways that pose ethical challenges in ethnographic writing and research. Over the last few decades, militancy, banditry and overall insecurity have hampered relief efforts in the area and significantly weakened basic infrastructure. In this article, the author illustrates how an initial security plan to undertake fieldwork research in this “volatile” region proved somewhat irrelevant because of her positionality, gender and race/ethnicity. The author explores the implications of these dynamics in contexts characterized by unequal gender relations and strict gender segregation. In addition, undertaking empirical work in the context of epistemological frameworks in a region that has been subjected to active conflict, militarised operations and a singular representation in the global and local media, poses other ethical challenges for anthropologists searching for new areas of study and decolonised models of representation. This paper reiterates the importance of a reflexive approach of ethics that acknowledges the interpenetration of race, gender and the thick web of relationships in the production of knowledge and is, at the same time, respectful of cultural specificity.

This paper chronicles my fieldwork among Muslim queer people in Indonesia. The ethical thrust of “following the heart” lies in the continuous reinvention of research devices in order to keep up with what we feel during, before and after fieldwork, how we are affected by encounters with others, and how others are affected by us. This idea of “following what the heart tells one to do” can be traced back to the old opposition between body and mind, where the head is thought to be rational and cold, and the heart is considered to be emotional and warm. Here, I truncate the metaphor’s dichotomous meaning and discuss the potential values of applying it as an ethics of doing affective ethnography in vulnerable settings. Anthropological knowledge production in vulnerable contexts is not only about providing careful interpretation and representation of the affective experiences of our research participants, but also about making ourselves affectively vulnerable as researchers. This ethics is both a method and a source, remaining existentially inscribed into the researchers’ embodied realities and continuing to shape our academic practices and everyday livings.

Research ethics is integral to the entire process of knowledge production: from conceptualising and designing a research project and gathering, analysing and managing data, to writing and other forms of representation and engagement. Yet, there is often a lack of attention given to research ethics pedagogy and praxis in various academic institutions. With a focus on research ethics in volatile contexts, this special issue aims to provide various perspectives on research ethics from scholars positioned within a particular discipline, such as anthropology, political science, history, sociology and area studies, among others, as well as those with an inter- or transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing from concrete research experiences and how they have dealt with ethical dilemmas as well as critical reflection and framing of research ethics, the contributors offer ways to think through the relationships between research ethics, power, violence, inequalities, institutions and pedagogy in various volatile research contexts and institutional frameworks.

The article explores the field research experiences of two women researchers who navigated patriarchal social dynamics in Pakistan. We use respectability as a lens to explain how we established ourselves in our research contexts and how we negotiated our positions. Drawing on extensive fieldwork for our PhD studies, we show the moral conundrums of constantly moving on a spectrum of being both a “respectable” woman and a “woman researcher”. We had to navigate both identities carefully to access research respondents and build rapport. This meant at times adhering to patriarchal gender norms, while in other situations, willingly or unwillingly, transgressing them. We show that we had to constantly mediate between professional goals, personal and social norms and values, and our own wellbeing. We thereby seek to contribute to discussions on the vulnerability of researchers and the ethics of care.

Hansjörg Dilger is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin with a specialisation in critical medical anthropology and the anthropology of religious diversity. His research has a regional focus on Tanzania and South Africa and migratory contexts in Germany. He was a visiting professor at the University of Vienna and visiting fellow at the University of Witwatersrand (both in 2014) and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Florida (2005–2007). Between 2015 and 2019, he was President of the German Anthropological Association (GAA): in this capacity, he and the GAA board pushed toward the firm integration of ethical reflexivity in Social and Cultural Anthropology in Germany. Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo talked with him about research ethics and the role of professional organisations and academic institutions.

In his comment “Keep Research Ethics Dirty!” Martin Sökefeld questions the growing trend of routine procedures of ethics reviews in Germany. His discontent centres around two reasonings. First, he contends that the standardised ethics review is designed to protect institutions but is less effective at protecting subjects of research. Second, the “ethical clearance” granted by institutional reviews rarely solves the real ethical issues and dilemmas during fieldwork. Martin Sökefeld ends his essay with resistance against the “purification” of institutional reviews and politics of research. Tabassum Fahim Ruby builds on Sökefelds contribution and further discusses shortcomings of ethical clearance typical for social sciences research with a focus on the standards formulated by the United States Institutional Review Board (IRB). Chien-Juh Gu adds to the discussion examples from her submissions to the Human Subjects Institution Review Board (HSIRB) at the Western Michigan University. She then contests Sökefelds's second point that uses dichotomous notions of "pure" versus "dirty" in perceiving research ethics.

As the climate crisis intensifies, overlapping with the emergence of a lethal virus, and a planet poisoning economy, questions regarding thinking-and-doing transition become increasingly urgent. In this article, we explore the concept of “ecological civilisation” (EcoCiv) as a productive conjunction of Chinese concepts and ways of thinking that precede China’s encounter with Western modernity, and their re-reading and revision from a post-Western modernity lens. China’s role in any possible global transition to sustainability is unquestionably central – yet curiously neglected in transition studies. At the same time the official project of EcoCiv is in fact emerging as the very opposite of its proclaimed spirit. The article offers a reconceptualisation of shengtai wenming (ecological civilisation) as a paradigm shift to life-ising the economy (and society) instead of economising life. From this altered perspective, the article presents and discusses preliminary evidence of a largely neglected, but potentially significant, bottom-up, extra-state dynamism in contemporary China that entails both elements and principles for a genuinely ecological, trans-modern civilisation. It concludes with reflections on the resulting change in agenda, not least for transition studies, outlining a set of four principles of doing shengtai wenming – i.e. of life-ising transition.

It has been more than two years since the publication of our jointly written book, China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. Since then, multiple developments have confirmed and strengthened our core thesis that China’s “ecological civilisation” framework and programmes serve not only to achieve lower carbon and other environmental goals but also to strengthen the hand of the state over individuals and communities – and even to help export the state’s model of authoritarian governance. This short essay is intended to update this argument and to provide an overview of recent developments with respect to China’s carbon policies, pandemic response and international investment on the Belt and Road.

Connectivity and fragmentation coexist as two interlinked discourses on the relationship between infrastructures and societies. In response to the Digital Silk Road initiated by the Chinese government, Chinese companies have built numerous digital infrastructures globally. Simultaneously, China’s government seeks to strengthen domestic internet governance through laws and administrative regulations, such as the Cyber Security Law. This paper utilises the interpretive framework of “sociotechnical imaginaries” to explore the controversial tension between digital fragmentations and connectivity in cyberspace along technical, institutional and political dimensions. Scrutinising two cases studies – New IP and smart city – the study finds that China’s approach to infrastructuring cyberspace can be best understood as selective connectivity. China not only integrates into global cyber infrastructures to enhance its technological and regulatory capabilities, but also attempts to reshape global cyberspace governance to strengthen its political structures and enhance digital autonomy, seeking a balance between digital sovereignty, regime security and economic development. However, selective connectivity brings its own complexities and drawbacks.