Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)

Summary

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Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode Title: Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State" (punctum books, 2024)
Air Date: February 3, 2026
Host: Jolin
Guests: Dr. Lisa Min, Dr. Frank Bille, Dr. Charlene Makley

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Overview

This episode explores the recently published anthology Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (punctum books, 2024). Host Jolin interviews editors Dr. Lisa Min, Dr. Frank Bille, and Dr. Charlene Makley about the origins, intentions, forms, and political implications of the book. The conversation examines how redaction, typically perceived as a statist tool for censorship and control, can also function as an artistic, affective, and generative practice within scholarship and activism—particularly in politically charged or authoritarian contexts. The editors reflect on their fieldwork in North Korea, Russia, China, and Tibet and discuss the messy realities of self-censorship, complicity, and the creative possibility of “writing in the negative space.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins & Inspiration for the Anthology

[04:37–08:16]

• The idea for the book emerged from a 2019 Berkeley workshop focused on the ethics and challenges of fieldwork in Russia, China, North Korea, Tibet, and Central Asia.
• Dr. Lisa Min brought attention to writing and researching in—and about—North Korea, highlighting the limits of vision and the difficulties of bearing anthropological “witness” in such spaces.
• Redaction arose as a resonant metaphor—not simply as a practice of concealing information for safety but also as an aesthetic and intellectual strategy for navigating censored and ambiguous realities.
• Dr. Frank Bille described how the project expanded from a narrow anthropological focus to a multidisciplinary exploration, ultimately embracing poems, maps, memes, experimental forms, and visual elements.
• The project was further shaped by remote collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic and a follow-up virtual workshop where participants experimented with “erasure poetry” and other acts of creative redaction.

Notable Quote

“Redaction was an interesting modality for me because upon my return from fieldwork, each time I would be writing these notes...of all the things that I wanted to say that I had thought to say, but could never manage to do so.”
— Lisa Min [08:23]

2. Expanding the Concept of Redaction: Beyond State Secrecy

[11:14–24:56]

• Redaction, in this anthology, is redefined as a broad, multimodal practice that transcends its typical association with state secrecy and FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) blackouts.
• The editors asked contributors to experiment with form; for example, white pages and AI-assisted pieces (sometimes running afoul of print-on-demand algorithms), redacted indices, and poetics.
• Redaction is considered not merely an act of hiding, but of highlighting, revealing, and generating meaning in “negative space.”
• The book's structure (essays from anthropologists, geographers, artists, activists, interspersed with visual art and epigraphs) embodies this notion.

Notable Quote

“Redaction...is a form that is faithful to that kind of politically charged context, not only in North Korea, but...it can be formalized in other places as well.”
— Lisa Min [10:47]

• On the ‘index’ of the book:

“It’s not really usable as an index because a lot of it is kind of blacked out or whitened out...the index is another contribution in the form of...an erasure poem, I guess.”
— Frank Bille [21:37]

3. Politics & Ethics of Redaction: Who Redacts? Why?

[28:29–39:11]

• Redaction is both a statist tool and a survival strategy for individuals; it is something “everyone is engaged in,” not just authoritarian states.
• The contributors avoid framing redaction solely as an obstacle to transparency or democracy, instead mining its generative potential for new political and ethical “third spaces.”
• The act of redaction is fraught: it can be subversive or complicit, protective or revealing, highlighting what it tries to obscure.

Notable Quotes

“If we’re already engaged in [redaction] anyway, perhaps we could enlarge the scope in which that happens...to create another kind of space, a third space, where we have new possibilities for thinking about politics in general.”
— Lisa Min [28:32]

“So in these contexts, there are always dissidents, activists, artists who are playing with redaction practices in a kind of deadly cat and mouse game.”
— Charlene Makley [33:42]

• On the IRB and institutional forms:

“Self-censorship...forced upon me by the institution...The open secret...if you're doing research on statist practices or the state...then you’re not doing human subjects research. In order to pass as somebody who has been verified, you have to self-censor, you have to just speak the language of that statist practice.”
— Lisa Min [61:06]

4. Redaction as Method, Form, and Aesthetic

[40:03–57:02]

• Redaction permeates both ethnographic practice and academic writing: anthropologists must weave together field data in ways that both protect interlocutors and inevitably subtract or occlude truth.
• “Third space” emerges as the zone where affect, uncertainty, and creativity thrive, rather than frontal truth-seeking.
• The editors describe "self-redaction" and "self-censorship" as necessary skills both under overtly authoritarian regimes and within Western institutions.
• Several moving examples—including Dr. Min’s “Letters from the Depthless Deep” and Makley’s redacted season’s greetings from Tibetan officials—are shared.

Notable Quotes

“In anthropology, we use redaction all the time…you remove the names of people…you merge two informants into one fake person...You even kind of recreate a narrative. You redact all the kind of the messiness. You kind of smooth it out and make it look like…there was all this strategy, but very often there wasn’t.”
— Frank Bille [41:03]

“The greatest possibility for [my book] lies in the dispersal of its mode of reading, not in her writing of it.”
— (quoting Solmaz Sharif), Lisa Min [43:48]

• Dr. Min reads a redacted letter (see Memorable Moments below).

5. Self-Redaction & Complicity in Knowledge Production

[54:37–65:16]

• Contributors reflect on the ambiguity and ethical bind of self-redaction—in fieldwork, writing, and even publication. For some, redaction is protective; for others, it is imposed, erasing even the right to authorship.
• The practice is widespread, as both a survival tactic and an ethical necessity, and is complicated by institutional requirements (e.g., IRBs) as much as by authoritarian states.
• Surveillance, predictive technology, and future-proofing research (anticipating censorship or risk for participants) are now global, not just “over there.”

Notable Quotes

“You expect people to tell you about their lives, but at the same time you have to be secretive about your own. So you break that sense of trust because people understand that you’re hiding things.”
— Frank Bille [57:02]

“So as ethnographers, we’re always already redacting and we're always already pivoting among various politics and...duplicitous maybe also.”
— Charlene Makley [65:04]

6. Moving Forward: Resonance and Future Work

[70:02–80:44]

• Dr. Min is editing a companion volume, North Korea Seen and Unseen, exploring similar themes of partial vision, sight, and ambiguity.
• Dr. Makley is working on an Annual Review of Anthropology article about the impossible possibilities of ethnography under new authoritarianisms, as well as a deeper historical project on the Panchen Lama.
• Dr. Bille reflects on switching to more open or “safer” sites for fieldwork, but notes that restriction and the need for redaction is everywhere. The book inspired him to experiment with more personal and hybrid forms of academic writing.

Notable Quotes

“The way this book has inspired me was to try to write in a different way…it’s been more like a personal journey...to write differently. So not so much about the topic, but the form. The form has been very inspirational.”
— Frank Bille [78:44]

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Memorable Moments & Quotes (with timestamps)

• On Artistic Experimentation and Algorithms
  “We wanted like a series of white pages...it was basically not possible because it was triggering the system. We had to trick it by adding a little gray dot somewhere on the page so that the machine would not see it as white and then we'd be able to print it…We were kind of redacted by the machine as well.”
  — Frank Bille [17:24]

• On the Materiality of Redaction
  “Even in this podcast, the thing I think we're struggling with is, well, how to convey...the sensuous immediacy with which certain images come to you from the page...this visibility that is always partial can't quite be conveyed in certain forms.”
  — Lisa Min [15:57]

• Redacted Letter Reading [excerpt]:
  “Dear comrade. Years since we saw one another. The Laibach concert. A blurry photograph. A book, our faces. You, I missed you. Bullshit. Not a possible thing to say. How I'm sorry, Dear comrade. Midnight, drank too much Pyongyang, lost track of time. The guard, the gate, the yelling, the van, a curfew. You didn't tell me and I didn't ask smoke.”
  — Lisa Min (reading) [43:48]

• On the Perils and Paradoxes of State Power
  “Before you'd have the sense of, this is redacted, we need to uncover it. But then...the Trump administration...actually unable to do that, and people kind of making fun of it...You expect that to be a mark of proper rule...So there's really kind of a mark of power, I guess, that you fight against, but also expect from the rulers.”
  — Frank Bille [34:15]

• On Critique of Liberal Transparency
  “There’s a critique of Western liberalism that’s built into our approach…radical Black theorists, Native American theorists…they’ve all been arguing about…the bankrupt nature of Western liberal arguments about democracy and transparency.”
  — Charlene Makley [39:11]

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Structure of the Book & Contributors

[18:40–20:36]

• 16 short essays by anthropologists, geographers, artists (some experimental, some co-authored, some anonymous for safety)
• Interspersed human artists/activists: poets, photographers, performance artists
• AI-generated art and playful interventions (Trump’s windmill speech “redacted” as a poem, for example)
• Objects addressed: FOIA documents, redacted letters, censored/digital texts, erased poems, hidden internet profiles, visual art interventions
• Index-as-erasure poem, “redacted” or “whitened out”

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Final Notes & Access

• The book is open access and can be downloaded for free online, though print copies offer a more tactile engagement ([81:01]).

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For Further Engagement

• Dr. Min’s forthcoming edited volume: North Korea Seen and Unseen
• Dr. Makley’s work on ethnography under authoritarianism; historical research on the Panchen Lama
• Dr. Bille’s exploration of hybrid, personal-academic writing forms

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This episode is a vital listen for scholars, artists, and anyone interested in the paradoxes of knowledge, politics, vision, and the power and poetics of what is left unsaid.

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Transcript

[A]

Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jolin and I'm your host for this episode. I'm here with Dr. Lisa Min, Dr. Frank B. And Dr. Charlene Makeley to discuss their new co edited anthology, Writing in the Negative Space of the state, published in 2024 by Punctum Books. Lisa Min is an anthropologist working on the relationship between visuality and politics in and out of North Korea. She is currently affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin where she will be teaching a course on the cult image. Her two book projects begin by opening up the place called North Korea as a question and provocation for doing and writing anthropology. Dr. Min contributed a chapter to Redacted called Letters from the Depthless Deep. Next. Frank Billet is a cultural anthropologist, geographer based at the University of California, Berkeley where he is Program Director for the Tang center for Silk Road Studies. His core research focus is on borders, space, sovereignty and materiality. Dr. Billet contributed a chapter in Redacted called In the field Lies, Silences, Half Truths, and finally. Dr. Charlene Makeley is Elizabeth C. Ducey professor of Anthropology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work has explored the history and cultural politics of state building, state led development and Buddhist revival among Tibetans in Amdo, Southeast King he and Southwest gu provinces. Since 1992. Her analyses draw especially on methodologies from linguistic and economic anthropology, gender and media studies, and studies of religion and ritual that attend to the semiotic and pragmatic specificities of intersubjective communication, exchange, personhood and value. Her second book, the Battle for Fortune, State Led Development, Personhood and Power among Tibetans in China, published in 2018 by Cornell University Press and the Weatherhead East Asia Institute at Columbia University, is an ethnography of state local relations in the historically Tibetan region of Rib Gung, southeast Kinghe Province, in the wake of China's great Open the west campaign and during the 2008 military crackdown on Tibetan unrest. In today's book redacted, Dr. Makeley contribute contributed a chapter co written with Daniel Dunrup called Condensed Meanings Redaction Dialogues on Ethnography in Occupied Tibet. So thank you all three of you, for joining me in conversation today.

[C]

Thank you. Thank you for inviting us.

[D]

Yes, great to be here.

[B]

To start our discussion today. I'd love for each of you to situate yourselves as researchers and to explain how this book project came about. I would particularly like for you to give our listeners an idea of what intellectual genealogies you take inspiration from in your work and what general questions you are trying to respond to in this collection.

[C]

Okay, maybe I can start if that's okay with you guys. Yeah, sure. So the idea for the book, which was actually not the book yet it was just a conversation, was a workshop organized here in Berkeley in 2019. I was, as somebody who works on Russia and China, I was wondering about the ethics of continuing to do work, ethnographic work in those places particularly. I was really concerned about China and what was happening in Xinjiang. And so there was this opportunity to invite people from the region because my centers really focus on Eurasia, broadly construed. So I invited a few colleagues, including Charlene and Lisa, to discuss the challenges and also possibilities maybe of doing field work in places like China, Russia, North Korea, Tibet, Central Asia and further field. And as we were discussing our own experiences in the field, Lisa mentioned some work she was doing on a text that was a redacted text. And immediately, I think the idea of redaction kind of resonated with many of us. We thought that's a really interesting, really interesting concept to explore for many reasons, one of them being, of course, the importance of keeping our informers and interlocutors safe. So we have to deal with some forms of redaction, like removing their names, changing their identities, or changing the place we're talking about. And also, of course, places like China and Russia in particular, and re. North Korea, maybe even more. There's also. We have to engage with reductions of the state by the state. Right. So what is said and what is not said. So this was kind of something that kind of, I don't know, kind of triggered a lot of thoughts at the workshop. And then we continued talking about this, Lisa, Charlie and I. And then I think the second element of that was Charlene talking to us about texts she had read, redacted texts written by. Authored by artists and poets. And that's kind of really made us think more broadly about the idea of reduction, not just as a technique of the state or response to it, but also as an aesthetic, a form of aesthetic in itself. So, yeah. So then the book became, from what we kind of imagined at first, being more narrowly kind of focused on anthropology and ethnography became something much bigger, something kind of multidisciplinary, multi. I mean, we have, you know, we have poems, we have maps, we have memes. So we really kind of embrace the concept and. Yeah. So I'll let my co editors continue this, the reflections on this. But, yeah.

[D]

Lisa, do you want to. Should I talk.

[E]

I'll talk a bit about how I got to redaction in the first.

[C]

Yeah.

[E]

And some of the things I was reading and thinking about in terms of trying to do work in North Korea, which is a very particular kind of site, especially for an anthropologist, where you have to be there, and there are certain conventions to what seeing and observation are when it comes to research methodologies. So kind of the biggest barrier I faced when trying to get to North Korea or find funding to work in North Korea or investigate if anthropological work is even possible. The biggest question was, well, can you even see anything there? And so vision and visuality became the central question and the problematic I was grappling with. And then after having made several trips there, I realized, in fact, of course, there is seeing, but it's not the kind of seeing that's a given. And even when you return and write about that experience, you know, how can I translate that into something, into a kind of metaphoric space? And so thinking about various ways to do this, I was experimenting with different ways of writing with a workshop within a workshop context. And one of the tasks for the week we were writing was redaction. So we were just kind of picking various forms through which to write everyone's projects. And redaction was an interesting modality for me because upon my return from fieldwork, each time I would be writing these notes, I would be writing letters, essentially, of all the things that I wanted to say that I had thought to say, but could never manage to do so. And the afterlife of that, I think, is what I put into the redacted letters you see in the volume. And so, I mean, if I were to describe redaction in visual terms, it would be, you know, something that is grainy as opposed to fine grained, Something that feels like it's in a corridor or an alley where there are certain contours, but a lot of it, the specificities of it are not there. So how to enter into a space like this where the state is omnipresent, but yet there is still a kind of intimacy built into that space. So reduction, I think, is a form that is faithful to that kind of politically charged context, not only in North Korea, but, you know, it can be formalized in other places as well.

[D]

Yeah, I'm glad this is Charlene. I'm glad Lisa started with that because that really is the spark of this book. We began to, through Lisa's experience, we began to sort of think about redaction in a much more capacious way than maybe mainstream notions of the term would suggest coming out of, say, American reporters and activists trying to get their hands on, like Freedom of Information act kind of trying to get their hands on so called redacted documents. So we have Joshua Craze's piece where you have these massive redactions of blacklining which you associate with the authority of the state. But Lisa's kind of provocation made us start to think about redaction. Is this kind of that grainy space of the negative space or positive absences of what is left behind when redactions happen. And that's what Joshua's piece sort of follows his journey as well, to thinking about redaction in this light, I think. Lisa, you said that Joshua Craze's work was very influential for you as well. But he talks about what he called the visible invisibles in redacted work. And so that really inspired me for thinking about my work in Tibet. But in terms of the whole book, we began to think about redaction in this much more capacious way. We actually, I don't think Frank mentioned the workshop that we ran. After the original Berkeley workshop, we had an online. Yeah, right. Which was fabulous. We invited more people than just had been at Berkeley. I think about 24 people came and we played with redaction and we introduced the concept of redaction or erasure. Poetry, where we had been inspired by a variety of poets and artists, were working with the kinds of redactions that Lisa's talking about, of where you intervene in official or legal documents in some cases, but in other cases, just sort of, I don't know, banal texts to erase aspects of the text in order to kind of reveal remainder texts that say something about that absent, grainy presence behind it. So we have lots of examples of that we could talk about. But. So in the workshop, we were trying to get across that sense of this more capacious sense of. Of redaction for people, that it's not just about a practice of concealing and revealing, where we kind of. We're all about discovering the truth underneath the black lining, but more about this kind of pervasive, constitutive, multimodal practice that all of us are complicit in, I suppose. I don't know. Did that.

[C]

Right. I know, actually, it's true. And we had these exercises where people. We'd kind of break them up on, like, zoom rooms, right. And people would create something, create a redacted text. And it was really interesting because people thought of it in very different ways. Right. And there was a lot of aesthetic elements in it. And I realized I was terrible at it. Mine was absolutely terrible, very pedestrian. And I really thought, I cannot do this. It's like. It's really interesting, but it's just. It's not easy. So I think we want to give recognition also in the book of the beautiful kind of aesthetic and artistic way people have engaged with action. So it became something really much bigger. Yes. And I guess the aesthetic kernel was also in Lisa's work, because Lisa is very artistic, if you write in a very different way. Right. Not just. Not in a flat. Flat academic way, but much more artistic. So I guess. Yeah, that was the. Yeah. So, yeah, I think it was a really. It's been a really interesting project. And we. We did a lot of it remotely as well. Right. We were meeting on Zoom, the three of us, and discussing things and sharing text with scene and. And every time we uncovered more.

[D]

Yeah, sorry, this is Charlene. This was unfolding before and then during and after the pandemic. And so things were heating up globally as well as we were exploring this work, and it was expanding as we went, and it was. Yeah, it was quite a journey.

[E]

If I can just add one more point before we move on, I want to speak a little bit about the visual dimension, because I think in the second workshop that we held where we were Doing these kind of formal experiments together collaboratively in small groups. What Frank was just mentioning about how the formal and the image, all of those things really came to the fore for us. So even when we're thinking about redacted poetry, the formal element, the image element, the visual, can't be removed from that. And, you know, even in this podcast, the thing I think we're struggling with is, well, how to convey, you know, Franck's pink, or how to convey the sensuous immediacy with which certain images come to you from the page. So that was something we talked about before this meeting is the way in which this visibility that is always partial can't quite be conveyed in certain forms. Like you need all of these other sensory dimensions to get that across.

[D]

And Quantum Press was very generous in allowing us to experiment with form in this text. I don't know if we had to. There were a lot of difficulties in that process. I don't know, Frank, if you wanted to mention how we had to trick the algorithm and even to print this thing.

[C]

Yeah, we had certain ideas about what we wanted to do visually and the press was on board with that. But certain things that we were technologically hindered from doing because we wanted like a series of white pages. Like, I think we had thought about like eight pages, white pages, one after the other. And it was basically not possible because it was triggering the system. And it was, you know, we had to trick web. I mean, it was, it was. I think we could just do two white pages and that was it. So we had to trick it by adding a little gray dot somewhere on the page so that the machine would not see it as white and then we'd be able to print it. There was a lot of elements like that. The title on the page, on the COVID page is redacted. And the machine could not read that. So it's like, where's the title? And they would not print it. So we had to add the word redacted somewhere on that cover in order to trick the system and be able to have the COVID we wanted. So there was a lot of interesting aspects. Yes, we were kind of redacted by the machine as well.

[B]

Go ahead.

[D]

I just wanted to say quick, just in terms of the whole of the book, it consists of 16 short essays by a variety of anthropologists, geographers and other artists. Some are quite experimental, some are co authored, some authors, names are redacted or pseudonym to protect themselves. And then we ended up interspersing those pieces with a variety of epigraphs from all kinds of voices and interspersed those with nine human artists and activists, photographers, poets, performance artists. And we played with other surprises like so called AI art. And there's Trump's windmill speech, redacted by Frank as a poem. So there's kind of, I don't know, humorous or satiric aspects to his interventions as well. And our authors and scout people are working in many, like, diverse places all over the world, including the US when.

[C]

Actually the reduction I did for that poem was not exactly reduction in the way we would imagine it. It was basically deciding where I would go to the next line to create a poem. So basically it was just kind of a hard return, was my redaction. So it's kind of a. Not a form of reduction we would think of, but he actually changes the text from kind of a. A blobby flow into kind of a poem that would have form, so adding form to it through these hard returns. So that's another way of imagining redaction. It can be done in so many different ways. Right. Not just removing black. And if somebody wants to talk about the index as well, or how we came to that. No, I don't know, Charlene or Lisa. I'm talking a lot, Alec.

[E]

I can talk about that, Charlene. So the index was redacted. Well, we came up with an index and we came into conversation with another scholar named Anjali Nath, who recently published a book about foia, the Freedom of Information Act. And in a sense we wanted to create. We had a rough sketch of an idea of archiving certain types of redaction that she has encountered. And so the index serves as a kind of way through the book in a very redacted way. Not necessarily in the way of locating certain words directly, but as a kind of meandering through different forms in which reduction has been encountered. Yeah, I mean, do you want to add anything, Frank?

[C]

Well, yeah, so it turned from. I mean, it's not really usable as an index because a lot of it is kind of blacked out or whitened out. I mean, she uses different. I think she used four different types of reduction that she encountered in her work. Right. It could be white boxes, it could be just kind of white text, or it could be black text. So she uses those different things to create. To create. Basically, the index is another contribution in the form of. I mean, a contribution in the form of an index. Right. Or an erasure poem, I guess.

[E]

Yeah, kind of, yeah. An archive, an archival image document of.

[C]

What redaction can be of what official redactions have been. Right. In the context of the U.S. i guess. Yeah. The different forms of redaction that are being used by the state. Yeah, yeah. So there's kind of all these kind of different layers in this book, which I think is something that we really enjoy. Right. I mean, we thought, also using ChatGPT as an author, and we realized that there were constraints that sometimes could not carry out the task because of the prompt we were giving. So there was certain things in its algorithm that would stop it from actually producing the text. So we thought, well, let's use that, because that's another form of self reduction by the algorithm. So there's kind of all these kind of different layers of reduction throughout in the bios, in the index, in the text itself. I've used it in images in my chapter as well, reducting out members of my family. So I think there's a lot of little kind of Easter eggs throughout. So you kind of hope people will have fun with that. And look at all these kind of different, surprising usage of production.

[D]

Yeah. Just to make the overall point that how pervasive and constitutive redaction is in this more capacious way that we're talking, and multimodal, cross visual, textual.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely.

[C]

And I think the press. Yes, sorry, go on, Jonah.

[B]

No, no, go ahead.

[C]

No, I was saying that the press was great and we. But we had to push back sometimes for certain things. Right. We. The fact that we wanted the title itself to be redacted, it kind of creates issues as well, because then if it's cited by other scholars, they would have to redact it. Right. So they'd have this. You would have this kind of black marks, kind of having a life of its own and being. I mean, I. In my second. The book I wrote up to this, I cite this one. So there's redaction. Is there? Because it's in the title. This section in the title. So there was. They were very. I think they were great. I mean, the press was great because they were like, really. They loved the project and they could see what we were trying to do, and they really tried to make it happen, which is really awesome, I guess, because the fact that it's a small press, they were more flexible than maybe a larger one.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So they're more happy. They're very happy to be experimental in terms of the size also the color. The color was absolutely used to, you know, absolutely essential. Yeah. So I think the whole thing, the form and the content, the whole redaction kind of encompasses all of that.

[B]

Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you all for that. Certainly the multimodality absolutely comes through in the book. And the interdisciplinarity, I don't even want to use that word. But effectively it is also that also comes through. It's very, very fun to go through the book and really tumble across artists playing with some of the concepts that you are are talking about. I mean, a lot of the, the topics of these chapters are not fun topics, but you, there's a real sense of you really get really deep into this subject in a way that I had truly never really thought about. Anyway, I also, it makes me think that this book is timely in a sense, because currently we hear a lot about redacted documents being released. And this book is because it complicates a lot of what we might hear sort of in mainstream media discourses or even just every day talk about those documents, about redaction in general. And so I really appreciate how deeply you all kind of dig into this topic. So to continue, I wanted to quote you from the book's introduction. You say that the book brings, quote, brings together a collection of essays from anthropologists, geographers, writers, artists and activists that explore redaction in politically charged contexts where conventional methods of fieldwork, writing or activism break down. And to give our listeners a sense of the many different objects that the authors of the different chapters are playing with and redacting and unredacting. That includes, as you all mentioned, foia, Freedom of Information act documents. That includes redacted letters, censored messages, disappeared and imprisoned people, partially erased poems, redirected attention, redacted redactions and other state propaganda, unsecret public secrets takes a pretty important place in this book. Even Europe's General Data Protection Regulation is redacted. In one chapter. There are digitally blackened photos of mulberry trees, which makes me think to reference, as you mentioned, Charlene at the beginning before pressing record. The climate here redacted our conversation today as right before we pressed record, I lost all power and light. There are also in the book manipulated dictionary columns, selective presentations itself, and hidden Internet profiles, among other objects of redaction. So to continue, I'd like to start our discussion of the different pieces in the book, different chapters, with a question about the politics of redaction. In the chapters you contributed, can you each give us a sense of who claims the capacity to redact and in what ways? And then considering the book overall, I'm curious how this assemblage of Texts might open up new possibilities for thinking about the politics of redaction.

[C]

Who wants to start?

[E]

I have an example from North Korea, so I'll begin there. So you asked who claims the capacity to redact and in what ways? I think one of the things we were kind of wrestling with in this volume and bringing it together was that in fact it begins as a status practice. But we are all enveloped in that world in some way. And it's a mode of survival, but it's also a mode of creation and manipulation and recreation and deconstruction. And if we're going to be doing it anyway, if we're already engaged in it anyway, perhaps we could kind of enlarge the scope in which that happens. So I think in a sense it was a way for us to reinsert ourselves into the political context in which we work in another way. So, you know, although it's not a collaborative work, for me, in the case of North Korea, it was a way in which to reclaim a certain kind of space where the goal isn't. The end goal isn't to uncensor or stand in opposition to the state, but to create another kind of space, a third space, where we have new possibilities for thinking about politics in general. Not necessarily the politics of redaction because they're already written into the mode, but just the political itself, which we tend to think about in terms of location. Totalitarianism is a thing of the Cold War, or authoritarianism is a problem over there. Authoritarianism pitted against democracy, socialism versus capitalism. All of these things we wanted to deconstruct in a way in this other space produced by redaction. Yeah, I think I'll stop there for now.

[D]

Yeah, I could take off from there. This is Charlene again. Yeah, thinking about your question about, you know, who. Who claims the capacity to redact. It just brings up what. What Lisa was talking about in terms of how to say that the negative space in which we all have to participate and be complicit even as we try to protect ourselves and our interlocutors. The way that we tried to tackle it in our co written piece was that we decided to write an experimental collaborative piece in which we alternated sharing reflections on the political and ethical complexities of our fieldwork in Tibetan regions of China under tightening authoritarian rule, especially post 2008 when there was this brutal crackdown on Tibetan protests. So many Tibetans injured and killed. And Starting in the 2000 and tens, an unprecedented spate of immolation by fire protests by Tibetan at least 160 to date continue to stay has created such an intense, under Xi Jinping's kind of tightening authoritarian rule, an incredibly difficult space for any kind of expression. So thinking in that context of like, who's claiming any capacity to redact is a really fraught thing. To claim that publicly is even more fraught. So I was just thinking, you know, first and foremost, as Lisa's saying, it's the central state claiming that capacity as a capacity of its biopolitical or necropolitical power. It's in the prc. My sense as a media scholar and scholar of political economy. It's avant garde in taking onto itself the biopolitical right to censor, to redact all domains of life online and offline. But one of the insights that came from our collaborative work on this piece for me, again, but I think it just came home to me in a more embodied way, is that the state is not, of course, one entity or thing, but a practice and a way of life. So that we were kind of coming to grips with how officials and citizens and researchers across the country are both self redacting and working to redact others as a kind of, in some ways, conscious and unconscious agents of state. There's a scholar, Margaret Hillenbrand, who calls the PRC a cryptocracy in a recent book. So the public secret is really rife in the prc. Everybody knows, but you can't say in very explicit and public ways. But claiming the, the capacity to redact is something that everyone is engaged in.

[C]

Right?

[D]

So in these contexts, there are always dissidents, activists, artists who are playing with redaction practices in a kind of deadly cat and mouse game. We talk about that in the Tibetan context, in Tibetan terms, which this Tibetan poet and satirist calls condensed meanings, where you play with semantics to get around redactions, but ordinary folks are redacting all the time, right? And so it's that we were kind of grappling with our own complicities together in that collaborative piece. So that's all I'll say for now.

[C]

But yeah, and I. So there's something that doesn't appear in my piece, but something I've been kind of thinking about is that the way we would see the state using redaction, it's also a certain. There's also a certain skill, I would say, or maybe a claim to.

[D]

A.

[C]

Particular claim to power. Like I'm thinking about what happened in the first Trump presidency, where some documents were redacted, were redacted wrongly. They were not properly redacted they had basically somebody addressed, I think it was in Word document, they had highlighted in black thinking of the reduction. The only thing you had to do was just copy the text, put it in any other application, and you would see all of it. So there was also the sense that the state is not skillful enough, is not proper enough to be able to redact. So you had this sense that before you'd have the sense of this is redacted, we need to uncover it. But then you have a second, you have then the Trump funeral administration who's actually unable to do that, and people kind of making fun of it. So it's like you, you, it's not that something that you've, as a, as a, an individual, you fight against the reduction of the state, but at the same time you expect it and you expect that to be a mark of proper rule. Right. You know, you'll be able to do that. So I thought that was kind of interesting that there's not only the desire to remove these redactions or to uncover the truth, but also kind of expecting the state to be able to do it, you know, So I thought it was really interesting. So there's something that we, so there's, there's really kind of a mark of power, I guess, that you fight against, but also expect from the rulers. Right.

[D]

They just did that again, by the way.

[C]

I know.

[D]

Inept.

[C]

Yes.

[E]

And there's.

[C]

So you have all the kind of Epstein files reduction when you redact certain names, you redact the Republican names, you don't redact the Democrats. You know, you kind of, There's a way to play with that. Right. And for me, what was really interesting and then comes in my piece is the. What you redact by redacting something, you highlight it. Right. So you, if you didn't redact anything, maybe there's so much data, you might not see it, but the fact that you redacted, then you, you, you point to it, right. And by doing that, you kind of highlight it. So I, that's what I wanted to play with in my own contribution. It's like the, the tension between hiding and actually highlighting. By highlighting what you hide, you just make it more explicit.

[D]

What I also took from this and from the intro to the book was the implications of all this. Is this moving away from any notion that this critique that we're trying to make or the practices we're advocating, kind of engaging with, moving away from the idea that this is about preserving or protecting democracy or transparency. I'm putting Scare quotes around all of those or the objective truth with a capital T. Right. That this is more about rethinking all politics beyond Cold War polarities and the conceit of that kind of liberal progress and moral authority around truth and freedom and transparency. There's a critique of Western liberalism that's built into our approach. I don't know, Lisa, if you wanted to say anything more about that, but.

[E]

Absolutely. And anytime we come to this topic, I always think about the example you use, Charlene, about your student in a class, in an ethnography class. And faced with the challenge of writing an ethnography because there are so many complex moral ethical questions within this political climate we're finding ourselves in. You know, maybe the best we can do is to write an ethnography of our pet, you know, our cat or something like this. And I think in the face of that kind of hopelessness, we wanted to see for ourselves as well, but also to show that, you know, in fact, there's so much more we can do and we can learn a lot from artists that have been thinking visually in embodied ways all along, which is not historically what anthropology has taught as a discipline, a methodological discipline.

[D]

And by the way, my student, in the end, she wrote her senior thesis about her cat and decided in the end that she couldn't actually ethically study her cat. But the last thing you said, I just wanted the idea that people have been doing this all along and in multiple multimodal ways, for me, was a great revelation to bring in the aesthetics and the formal politics of artistic interventions as well, but also kind of realizing, at least in my own work, that this is not a new critique or approach that especially in critical race theory and radical black theorists in the us, Native American theorists, they've all been arguing about these kinds of politics, but also the kind of bankrupt nature of Western liberal arguments about democracy and transparency.

[B]

Yeah, thank you for that very full answer. My next question, actually, I think you have all three already touched on it and sort of answered it in some way or another. But maybe I can use it to ask you to develop a little bit more this idea of the third space of redaction and practices of redaction that are not only statist practices and where that might bring us. And so I'm curious if you could, if all three of you might talk about what practice of redaction consists of, as we might, we being maybe scholars, we might typically think of it and how this collection specifically complicates our understanding of where a redaction occurs the where. Yeah. So if you could. If you could develop this idea of third space, that would be excellent. If anybody have an idea, an example. Excuse me.

[C]

Okay. I think as. As we started discussing this idea of redaction, where it really kind of became kind of evident to me, and I guess that's probably how it led to writing. To my writing of the piece was like in. In anthropology, we use reduction all the time. We expected it, right? You just. You go to the field, you talk to lots of people, you get information here. They're like you. You come back with a mountain of data, and then you have to make sense of it when you write it. So you remove the names of people because you want to protect them or you don't want to. You know, you. You don't. You don't want them to. You don't want to make it public, or you merge to informants into one fake person, or you. You even kind of recreate a narrative. You know, it's like you, very often, you. I mean, it was case. In my case, definitely, and I think in a lot of people, I spoke. I speak to you. You go to the field with some kind of rough idea what you want to do, and you collect bits and bobs from, you know, different things. And then you come back and you create a smooth narrative as if you had the question from the beginning. So you redact that as well. You redact all the kind of the messiness. You kind of smooth it out and make it look like if you went to the field, you had this great idea and you spoke to these people, there was all this strategy, but very often there wasn't. It's just who you happen to talk to, who introduced you to whom and where you were at that particular time. So I think this form of untruth in some way, I mean, we come back to write about something that is supposed to be a true account, but actually there's a lot of elements of untruth in it, in the way we describe it, in the way we relate it. It's really kind of fundamental to it. So I think I was really interested in that particular tension between the two, the truth and untruth. The untruth that you commit in order to kind of create a bigger truth somehow. So, yeah, for me, that was. That could be kind of the kind of third space that you have to navigate. And I was. That's anywhere. It's not. I'm not even thinking in particular in difficult places to work in, but any kind of. Any kind of research. You have to do that, right? So there's even more intense in. In places like Russia or China or North Korea. But this is something that we always do. So there's always this kind of third space at the core of our work.

[D]

I'm thinking, oh, go ahead, Lis.

[E]

Well, I was wondering if I could read something. I could read both of the letters from my piece and then I there into the question. So I wrote many of these letters, but I ended up just putting in, you know, including two in this piece. And I wrote it formally as a letter, and then I would take a Sharpie and cross things out. And I tried to reproduce it into my Word doc. And that's how they come across on the page. Black, a black background with white letters coming to the surface. Dear comrade. Years since we saw one another. The Laibach concert. A blurry photograph. A book, our faces. You, I missed you. Bullshit. Not a possible thing to say. How I'm sorry, Dear comrade. Midnight, drank too much Pyongyang, lost track of time. The guard, the gate, the yelling, the van, a curfew. You didn't tell me and I didn't ask smoke. So I wanted to read this to think about this idea of third space. And I also want to think together with Solma Shadif, who is a poet we drew a lot of inspiration from. I mean, even her writings about reduction were very powerful for us. But in an interview she gave about, I think her first poetry collection called look, which is where we got the poem Letters from Guantanamo, is also included in this collection. She says about this book that the greatest possibility for it lies in the dispersal of its mode of reading, not in her writing of it. So I think for me, that really resonated because it's this idea of I wrote this letter, I redacted it. It comes to the reader in a particular form. There's no grammar, there's no order. You can read the words in any way. You don't even have to read the words. You can just glance at it and see one word. And I think that was what was interesting for me in trying to make image of certain kinds of embodied experiences in the field, is that it's not immediately tied to meaning or value and you don't immediately have to ascribe a context to it. And yet it does something. And that's third space, right? Like if we're thinking it through, Roland Barthes, for instance, it's an image that's not immediately pinned down. And so the where of redaction, I guess, that is the. Where creating a space that has that kind of capacity.

[B]

Yeah. Thank you for that.

[D]

Yeah. I'm just, I just wanted to say, like, you performing those poems was so effective, so emotional. Like it's, it jumps off the page in a way that I think they need to be performed. Just. I, yeah, it. I was like, I can't. I don't. It's an inchoate experience to, to hear a redacted poem letter like that in the context that you're talking about. I will just say, yeah. And in terms of the third space too, I come from a linguistic, anthro and semiotic sort of material. Semiotics, critical semiotics approach. And when I think about the third space in all of this as well, I'm thinking of the inchoate space between and among people in which we're actually generating our lives in very unexpected ways and in very embodied and multimodal and visual and oral ways. So that space is also the third space, but it's also absolutely constitutive of our very possibility for existence. And so I too, was really drawn through Lisa's work to Somaz Sharif's erasure poetry. And also Doris Cross, the painter who was pioneering in doing erasure poetry. We have her featured on the COVID of the book where she had this dictionary columns series where she redacted Webster dictionaries, but now mundane, supposedly official language to produce these incredibly powerful poems and subtexts or stories about the words that are being used. I actually, for the first time read it out loud. The one that's on the COVID I won't hear because it's long, but I realized just how powerfully she was telling a story about violence and also shouting out to and gesturing to Edgar Allan Poe with the raven. There's a raven as well as a snake. So yeah, that sort of engagement with the text can be also the third space that is unexpected and very emotional and affect laden. So this is what I was trying to grapple with in the collaborative piece I did with Donyu Dondryp, where the whole thing started, because I created two versions of erasure poems that I shared with him. And then he commented and created his own Erasure poems. And we were both grappling. So instead. So we flipped the script from what Lisa was doing. Writing your own letters for me. I was grappling with the letter coming from an official public security source to the local population. And then I commented on his. And I created a new erasure poem based on what he was talking about. And through that generative process, we actually came to settle on a new theme about the multimodal redaction of land and the dispossession that's at the heart of Chinese settler colonialism in Tibetan regions. So I just. Our dialogue started with this bright red 2008 New Year's season's greetings letter that I had secretly plucked from the recycle bin at a print shop in the Amdo Tibetan town where I lived. And it was totally unguarded, and it was all the local officials work, and it was where, like local officials own redactions were happening as they were kind of anxiously trying to please their superiors. They were like Crossouts and edits. But this security letter, it was sent by the local Communist Party committee to all security officials in the county. And there, of course, was a subtext. It was, in fact, a warning to be prepared to crack down on Tibetan protests in the coming year, because it was 2008 and the Central state was gearing up to host the Beijing Summer Olympics. But the letter itself was couched in the warm affect of season's greetings for the New Year. And it was a bright red flyer. So red is the color of joy and collective celebration in China. So I wanted to intervene in those letters that I had myself not written, thinking about so much Sharif and Doris Cross's work. So I just ended up creating two versions of redaction letters, erasure poems of the. Of that letter I called One Light and One Dark or One Shadow. So I blacklined different characters and phrases in each of the versions to come up with two different remainder texts that separated out the cheerful affect from the subtext of the letter, which was brutally strengthening military control. And that, of course, the crackdown, of course, happened just a few weeks later. So it turned out to be true. And then I grappled with the translation politics of the whole thing, because I translated those versions of the erasure poems into English and thought about what I was redacting in the process of translating, so how I was actually inadvertently or consciously reframing as I translated and what I left out by translating it. So where adaction recurs is all in that third space of grappling with that generative process. I had no idea where all that was going to go.

[B]

Yeah, thank you very much for those examples, for the reading. I. I can just say, in my experience engaging your texts, Lisa and Charlene, just in relation to those examples was also one of I would. I read the text, what you said about your letters. And then having read the letters I would had to come back to the text.

[C]

There was this.

[B]

So it was this very recursive reading process for me just to share my own experience of that. Anyway, just to also give our listeners another reason to get their hands on this text, which you really have to grapple with in a, in a very almost visceral way to, to, to get in, to get something out of it. I think you'd have to. You. It invites you to. To work with it. And I also read some of these poems aloud. I think, in fact, Lisa's just to myself, because I think that it produced something different in terms of what exactly you were saying about them. Lisa. But I won't say more. I'd like to perhaps move on and talk about one theme. Maybe we can call it that or a practice that several of the contributors to the book, especially the ethnographers and Frank, you just mentioned this talk about, is the idea of self redaction or self censorship, especially in the context of ethnographic contexts. So my question is, how do various experiences, self experiences of self redaction in your three pieces interface with and help us move beyond the stale binaries of contemporary political realities, as you three call them, Ford's New Aesthetic and political possibilities. And here I recognize that the question is kind of vague, but. And you all have also already touched on it, but it's this idea of self censorship that I'd like to hear more about. I'd also like to know how your specific analyses of the different open secrets you encounter in your research might be theoretically generative for other anthropologists. If you could talk a bit more about that specific topic as well, that'd be great.

[D]

Well, I could. This is Charlene again, bring up my colleague Donald Dundrup's really moving concluding thoughts in our piece on self redaction and the politics of fear in Tibet that all minoritized folks in the PRC but many others have to deal with. And he's just very open about the process that he has to go through in thinking through what are the stakes of anything that I say in the context that I say it for my family, especially for my friends. But in the end, he ends with a very hopeful kind of sensibility about looking to the example of Tibetan and other activists for hope and the commitment to keep expressing. And he says, singing even as one has to protect oneself. So I take from his ending point there that that third space is not necessarily, as Lisa was saying, hopeless or bereft or, you know, a place of absolute negative. I don't know, self effacing, but it can actually, it is actually potentially generative and hopefully a couple other pieces in the book, I was thinking of the redacted authors whose names are redacted Kashmir under Indian authoritarian rule. They talk about like Frank just talked about how we as ethnographers have to always redact ourselves in so many ways. And that border on untruths. Right. But they also talk about state officials there and Kashmir as what they call para ethnographers or surveillers. Right. Which they say makes collaboration with locals highly, highly fraud and dangerous. And so they're constantly ending up self censoring or they say taking, taking refuge in abstract jargon, playing with semantics to keep the para ethnographics practices of the state at bay. So they say collaboration here in Kashmir is marked by suspicion in all directions, with all participants in the ethnographic encounter attempting their own redactions and suspiciously attempting to read through others redactions. Because I thought that was an interesting insight into that messy, complex, ambivalent third space.

[C]

Yeah, well my, my own piece deals with self redaction in a way that's more, I don't know, I, I, I think it's still coming from some place of privilege because it's a kind of, it's just a way of protecting myself in the field. But you see the contrast with people working on Kashmir, for instance, who are in order to publish, they had to read like their names, it wasn't just a cosmetic thing, they really had to. So it comes to the point of not being able to claim authorship through the book because they're nowhere mentioned, they've produced a chapter and they cannot be acknowledged. Right. I don't know to what extent they can actually even have it on their cv. Your own co author, Charlie is a pseudonym, was also uncomfortable writing in their own name. We have also another co author of Darren Byler who also could not, could not. You know, so it's all these kind of levels as well of we have to also maintain their anonymity as editors. Just like when we were writing to the group, what is there some people we had to put in BCC categories so that other people would not know who they were. Right. So you have to be very careful about how to maintain the anonymity through the book and in conversations. And for them, for these people, it's an essential self preservation tactic. I mean they have to do that. In my case it was more like the difficulty of being open when you do field work and all the benign and routine and redaction that you have to do that. It has an impact on the kind of relationship that you create with your interlocutors because you have to hide yourself in some ways. So then you kind of twist that you expect people to tell you about their lives, but at the same time you have to be secretive about your own. So I think again, people get a sense of, well, I mean, you kind of, you break that sense of trust because people understand that you're hiding things. Right. So it creates a very difficult, kind of a difficult situation for, for me, I mean, I, I, I found it really kind of a challenging having to, is asking people to tell me about their life and then hiding my own. Right. And, and then realizing at the end that actually nobody was fault because the fact that you hide things, you, you highlight it. Right. So this, if you don't answer certain questions, you're basically saying, well, I'm not answering that. It's like when, you know, claiming the, what do you call it? You claim the, the fifth. What was it? Claim the fifth. Yeah, you play or whatever. Exactly. So it's the same. So by saying that, you're saying, well, I don't want to answer, therefore maybe I am guilty. Right. So the idea that if you have nothing to hide, you're going to be open. So by creating that, you highlight, you highlight some things. And that's what I would try to do also visually in my own chapter, by highlighting in pink what I was trying to hide. Right. So, yeah, yeah, so I, I, yeah. Lisa, your turn. Yeah, I think I got lost in my thoughts.

[E]

Yeah. I wanted to touch on the, the institutional review board and that process and the way it kind of, you know, seeks to safeguard the way in which research, human subjects research is conducted. And my personal. So, okay, so one usually thinks of self censorship as a practice that you do in a field that's authoritarian, let's say.

[D]

Right.

[E]

That's maybe a conventional way we would enter this idea. But I want to talk a little bit about my experience of self censorship, perhaps, or self redaction, but not chosen by me. But that was kind of forced upon me by the institution, the IRB that I had to work with. And so when I would try to describe the nuances and the settings with which I was actually working in the field, there are no categories it is eligible to an institution such as the irb. And so what ultimately I ended up having to claim is that I did not conduct human subjects research, and therefore I'm exempt from that entire process. And so just this idea. So how do I want to put this? The open secret or perhaps loophole to this institution is that if you're doing research on statist practices or the state, which is some kind of abstract entity, then you're not doing human subjects research. And so in order to pass as somebody who has been verified, you have to self censor, you have to just speak the language of that statist practice, this other statist practice, let's say. So for me, I just thought that was an interesting encounter for the way it's not actually about protection, it's just about, you know, towing the party line, saying the right words.

[C]

So I think, I think in the US you have much more. Yeah, it's because I did my PhD in England. It was, we also had this ethical things to think about, but it was much less formalized and, but I also had to kind of disregard them because it wasn't really making sense to me. You know, I, I, in order to. Because I did some, when I did my research in, in Russia, I didn't go, I went with the tourist visa, I didn't go as a researcher. So I was really, I wanted to go under the radar. But also when I was doing my PhD on Mongolia, there was all these kind of formal, kind of, you know, questions that you have to, I mean all this kind of, you have to go through. And I realized that actually my research was not going to be, I was not going to get a lot of my information through questionnaires and question. It was more about the unsaid that was interested in. Because when people, I was asking about the, I was looking at the relationship between Mongols and Chinese and there was a lot of discourse that was racist coming from Mongolia. But if you were asking people specifically about it, it would be very guarded because they felt it was something unsavory, they want to talk about it. So in a way it's like I could only get this information when people were less guarded. So, you know, you, you sometimes, you cannot go through, so you cannot go through the, the formal system. Like I'm going to ask people. I'm gonna. Because in England that's what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to. If you have questions, you're supposed to tell people I'm interviewing for you for this. This is what I'm kind of looking for. But by doing that I was kind of making it impossible for people to talk because they become very guarded about it. So it was more about listening and rather than actually questioning. So yeah, see, so that's like another form of redacting your. I mean that's a kind of similar to what you're saying. It's like this, this, you kind of go through this. The system that is not geared towards your own research. Right.

[D]

So as ethnographers, as ethnographers, we're always already redacting and we're always already pivoting among various politics and duplicitous maybe also.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, it's, it's again, it's not just redaction, it's not just a tactic of the state, but it's also something you have to do and something that I found really interesting when we had this first workshop and we had somebody who said, well, when we, okay, I'm not going to say her name, but she was, she was saying when she was doing research in on Central Asia, she was aware of what could be said, what could be written about what could be asked. But she was also attentive to, she wanted to future proof a research as well. Not just think what can be said today, but also what might be. What would I be able to say later? What if, if somebody says something now, will they get in trouble in two years, three years down the line? And it's something that we're seeing here in the States, right? These are some things that you could say that you can no longer say or you're not quite sure. I. So I think we also have, we people have become attentive to that. Not about getting in trouble now, but maybe getting in trouble later. So yeah, whatever you say that's on the record, you have to be careful. I was also surprised by, and I was like at the beginning of 2025, a scholar was telling me, well, when he speaks at home with his family about certain topics, he actually switches off any kind of listening devices like his phone or everything. And I think that's crazy. That's happening in the States. And so early in this current administration, people are also kind of thinking about the future. Think what you're saying now is okay, but if I'm recorded, am I going to still be okay in two years or three years? Right. Having said that.

[D]

So it's interesting to think about that like a kind of mirror image or reflection of a kind of algorithmic biopolitics now, which is predictive, Right. The claim that you can predict in Xinjiang, for example, we can predict the terrorist in the non terrorist. Right. We can predictive policing now, which is being used in the States in part because of Technology transfer from Israel and China so that we ourselves are drawn into that kind of paraethnography. Right. Constantly trying to. In anticipatory forms of compliance, to redact ourselves. Yeah. And to get at that, you know, the whole old school ethnographic IRB for version of empirical research, let's just interview people and ask them questions. Just won't fly. It just doesn't. It never. Never worked. Right. It never worked. I think we were all also influenced by Mick Taussig's work. I love the quote that was used in the intro to the book about being like the crab scuttling sideways in order to get at these processes. Can't go frontal, like you're saying, Frank. You can't just go ask people. But that requires this much more kind of attunement to all this multimodal stuff that's happening in ambivalent ways. Right. And so there's lots to be learned with that kind of listening. But also what Lisa's saying about being attuned to the visual, the embodied, the gesture. Yeah. There's an art, there's a poetics to this politics that we're trying to center in this book.

[F]

Kids, they grow up so fast. One day they're taking their first steps and the next they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes and their princess dress is two sizes too small. And their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore. But don't cry because they're growing up. Smile because you can profit off of it for real. There are a bunch of parents on Depop looking for the stuff your kid just grew out of. Download depop to start selling.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And Charlene and Lisa, do you think we're. By having done research in those kind of places, we're more ready now. Have we acquired some useful skills to deal with, like a more global. Global forms of censorship?

[D]

I wonder sometimes.

[E]

Oh, I don't. I don't think I'm ready to face it. But I think at least we have some tools that we've tried out that might help articulate those experiences.

[B]

Well and that actually segues very beautifully into my final question. It's not even really just a question, but. Yeah. To finish our conversation, I wanted to provide the space for each of you to comment on how the topics covered in this book might resonate with anything you are working on now or plan to work on in the future to the degree that you can talk about it.

[E]

So I'm working on a book. It's an edited volume in which I also contributed. It's co edited with Hoon Song and John Lee. And it's a book about North Korea called North Korea Seen and Unseen, so you could see where there might be a parallel. So if I could put a plug in for this work, which is in the works. It's an edited volume, but after we compiled the essays together, we asked three other scholars, working not necessarily in North Korea or about North Korea, to read some of the conversations, the internal workshop conversations, as well as the pieces. So to kind of just read the work as a whole, to see what they would see, to make visible certain things about North Korea from this other perspective and this other one and this other one. So in a sense, it's a kind of assemblage of gazes. It's an assemblage of things seen and unseen. You know, an image that would echo. That is Jane Jin Kaisen from the redacted volume. It's the image of the red acrylic.

[D]

Boxes.

[E]

Shown by a red light. So it's this idea of from a place in which you stand, from a particular location, you can only see certain things. So the image is always partial. So I wanted to kind of put this idea to work to see if North Korea as a particular research site or object or a place we think about could also be constructed in this way.

[D]

That's really cool. I can't wait to see that. See it. And from my own perspective, I recently returned to. Is it Jane Kyson?

[E]

Yeah, Jane Jen Kaisen.

[D]

Kaisen's piece. And it's an exhibit. And looked at the list of objects that she had gathered under that rubric, and it was really powerful. It tells the story in its own right. Yeah, I'm grappling in my work very, very related to all of this. I haven't been back to Tibet since 2018, because after that visit, I decided it was just too politically dangerous for my interlocutors for me to be there. I'm so physically. How to say I'm a beacon light as a tall white woman from the US that I just can't hide in any way, shape or form. And I just bring. I'm a liability. I'm a walking liability. That's how I feel when I'm there. Other people have made other decisions about going back, but I've decided that I'm not. So I'm grappling with what to do in the meantime. One of the pieces that comes out of this project for me is the Annual Review of Anthropology article I'm working on. On the, what I call the impossibilities, IMS in parentheses of ethnography under authoritarianism, where sort of exploring recent methodological debates about the ethics and politics and poetics of ethnographic practice in what people are calling an era of new authoritarianisms and the rise of populist movements worldwide. So it's been really edifying to sort of gather up and imagine curating the wide variety of voices as people grapple with these very issues in all around the world. It's sobering to see what people are dealing with in all continents of the globe. So that's the project that will, let's see, it's in process. So it's probably a year from now. And then the other piece is the, the research I'm doing on the 10th Panchen Lama, who is kind of the second in the Buddhist hierarchy to the Dalai Lama, an incredible kind of culture hero figure for many Tibetans who produced this petition. Probably the only person in the PRC's history to directly critique central leaders in a massive 70,000 character petition unveiling the public secret of the atrocities that happened during the Cultural Revolution and before among Tibetans. He was imprisoned for 14 years for that and tortured, et cetera. But he came out of prison in 1980. And so my project with Tibetan collaborators has been a look at his, how to say, tours of his home counties when he was, he got a call him the post prison tours. He was like a rock star when he came out with these massive, like crowds. And he did a lot of advocacy until he died in an untimely way of a heart attack or people say he was poisoned. So I've been working on that for years. We did oral histories. We have about 100 recorded oral histories that we did that a Tibetan colleague and I did. But then he did secretly got them out of the country. So I've been working on all that. So the next piece from that I'm calling Necropolitics and Sino Tibetan Relations. The death of the 10th Panchen Lama. Just part of a larger international project on death and dying under military occupation. So it's not easy stuff. When I say that to people, their eyes just glaze over. But yeah, that's what I'm working on right now.

[C]

Yeah, that's a kind of feel good theme. Yeah. But for me, I think this book redacted, corresponded with a time when I, I was becoming more and more uncomfortable about doing research in either Russia or China. And Russia has become impossible. And in China too, I mean, this is possible, but it's something I was kind of uncomfortable with. I thought, well, maybe I want to do research in a place where I can be more open. Now, the irony of this is, like, maybe this space is. That kind of are disappearing. I. I don't. I feel there was also some. I was. We were before in a situation where we could go to certain places that we would disagree with politically. We would do research there and then come back, and then kind of there was this kind of insulation from this, right? So it was like, we can complain about certain things that are happening on home ground, but when it's elsewhere, it's like, okay, we could just separate that. We could put that in a different box and just do the research there and then come back and, you know, so I don't know. It was something kind of. I wasn't very happy with this kind of setup. I felt it came from really kind of again, again, a place of privilege. It's like, okay, you know, I can come back and I'm safe. I can do whatever I want, and it's okay. Now that the, you know, we. We are encountering kind of not the same, but kind of similar problems in terms of what we can say and how. And the kind of research we can do and what is valued, what is not valued, I think where the situation has changed. So I saw my idea of, oh, I don't want to do research over there, because it's. I don't agree with that particular system. And so we kind of. Now, in a way, kind of the.

[B]

Whole world is open.

[C]

We can go anywhere. The new places where I'm gonna do research are probably gonna be just as problematic in that way. But. Yeah, so what I've. What was really, I think the way this book has kind of inspired me was to try to write in a different way. It was the first time I was writing something that was very personal. And as. As Lisa and Charlene will remember when we were discussing the book. And I think, you know, I'm trying to write something, but I can't do it. I just. I don't know.

[B]

I just.

[C]

I. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to. What to write. Just every day, every. Every time I try to write something, it's very. I don't know, it feels very boring. And it's like. And then I. I thought, maybe I'll have nothing. I'll have no contribution, and it's okay. Which just, you know. And then I started thinking, well, actually, maybe I can write about fieldwork and Then that was, that came kind of easily. And I wrote that really quickly. And yeah, so it was, it was challenging in the sense that I was writing for something very personal for the first time. But it's kind of this pushing me into a different type of writing. I'm writing a little book right now, which is, which is kind of a. I mean, it's both an academic book, very academic and dry and jargony, and at the same time, very personal and very kind of narrative and not jargon at all. And if I intersperse the two into like a very short paragraphs, interspersed two, and then come to a resolution about this particular topic, which is topology, and how it is a very personal thing for me. So, yeah, so it's. Again, I'm trying to kind of challenge my way of writing. So I think this is what it's been. It's been more like a personal journey for me. This book, try to write differently. So not so much about the topic, but the form. The form has been very inspirational. Yeah.

[B]

Well, thank you very much to all three of you. And that certainly makes me want to read all of those, those works as soon as I can. And then to wrap up then I'd like to thank the three of you for bringing together this collection of texts, which is really very profoundly thought through and I think potentially very generative for a lot of scholars working in lots of different fields who might be listening to this audio podcast. I personally took a lot from the book. Go ahead.

[C]

Sorry, there's just something I realized we haven't said. The book is also open access, so people can just download it if they don't want to buy it. We forgot to say that.

[B]

Right, sorry. You're right to mention that you can download it for free even on, online, which is, which is very, very cool. I appreciate that. I also would say that if you can get your hands on a copy, I wouldn't, I would encourage people to get their hands on a copy, however they might be able to, because I do think there's another, there's another engagement to be had or to be experienced with, with the, the actual copy in your hands. But yes, thank you for mentioning that. Absolutely. Anything else to mention?

[C]

No.

[D]

Thank you for doing this, Jolin. Yeah.

[E]

Thank you.

[C]

Yeah, thank you.

[B]

No, well, thank you to all three of you. I mean, I, I, I want to thank you again for making the writing the book. I certainly will be coming back to it for reference. I, that's for sure. And thanks for speaking with me today. It was really interesting to hear everything you had to say.

[D]

Glad it worked out in the dark there. And in France. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah, there's still in the dark. Y.

[C]

Sam.