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Abstract

After six years of on-and-off fieldwork on the ground in XUAR, most researchers lost access to the region amidst a government crackdown on indigenous religious and cultural praxis and a campaign of racialised mass incarceration. A big part of the government's strategy was to seek to control the narrative about the region by blocking information from getting out and creating a massive stream of propaganda material. The XUAR scholars community reacted to this in various different way, relying on online material and the diaspora and becoming more invested in political and ethical questions around colonisation, forced assimilation and trauma than had previously been the case. Within this frame a group of researchers tried to distill the lessons learned and the methodological adaptations into a methodological approach called "Remote Ethnography," the description of which is currently being edited into an open source handbook. In global environments where ever larger areas are becoming more difficult to access, security threats and surveillance are ever present in research, control of information and research has become an increasingly potent tool in geo-politics, a majority of researchers around the world do not have the resources to travel to their regions of interest due to global inequality and international law and institutions are being dismantled as we speak this methodological approach derived from the changing circumstances in XUAR is gaining in relevance for Central Asia and the world.