Summer of 2022 saw our annual retreat. This year, it came in the aftermath of our launch conference this May (in collaboration with the CATCH network) and in preparation for our panel at Generation Asia, taking place in Iceland later in August.

We’ll be posting the year in review in due course, but the retreat itself was a time to reflect on papers written and emerging, the real challenges involved in fieldwork, and what it means to juggle timelines in the time of COVID. We spent longer than we probably should have on possible configurations of budget lines and possible fieldwork, re-mapping spreadsheets on whiteboards.

Anders Sybrandt Hansen joined us to talk through overlaps in interest between his new project “The End of Ethics: High-Tech State Moralism and Popular Surveillance in Contemporary China” and some of the preliminary avenues pursued in MDMP. Wei Zhu joined us online to talk through her plans for fieldwork when she takes up the post in September.