Paper short abstract:

Based on research methodology developed for the study the Rojavan Women's Protection Units (YPJ)'s social media, I show how anthropology has the unique potential to contribute to understandings of both alternative future ways of being, and test some of the crucial ontological theories of our time.

Paper long abstract:

The Kurdish revolution in Rojava Northern Syria, and its all-women militia known as 'Women's Protection Units' (In Kurmanji: Yekîneyên Parastina Jin or YPJ), present us with two core research challenges. Firstly, they have secured space for their revolutionary politics to decidedly rupture the fabric of dominant social understandings. Secondly, it is a prime example of the increasingly common fields of precarity and unreachability with which the modern ethnographer must contend, problematising ethnographic tradition. This area, I believe, provides an example of fertile ground in which anthropology can provide understanding of alternative possibilities for a 'politics of hope'. This is through its methodological capacity to understand 'difference' arising from transformative projects, in ways that theories for understanding dominant political realities may be limited. This contribution has a seemingly unlikely marriage to the emerging field of non-emplaced virtual/visual ethnography. Here, the anthropology of 'futures' and the anthropology of 'presents' (or 'presence'; the essence of 'being here') meet on the precipice of the discipline's radical new frontier: the experiential plane. This plane connects the philosophy of the existential turn with the methodological developments arising from the spatial and sensory turns. Reflecting upon the methodological lessons taken from research into the YPJ's self-documentation in social media, I argue that not only can these intersecting developments strengthen anthropology's ability to contribute to political research, but it allows the discipline to provide a unique, material application and testing of modern philosophy's most significant developments in ontology as they relate to agency, revolution, rupture and 'event'.