This article theorizes the “digisphere” as an ambient infrastructural environment by investigating how digital media reshapes the communication ecologies of millennial farmers in Kerala. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2023), the study traces the trajectory of disruption, negotiation, and systematic replacement initiated by the incursion of digital tools. Conceptually anchored in communication ecology, affordance theory, remediation, media life, convergence, and the emerging notion of the “digisphere,” the study explores how digital technologies initially disrupt traditional communication practices, are gradually negotiated and adapted, and ultimately displace or refashion existing elements in everyday agricultural life. The analysis demonstrates how digital interfaces, such as smartphones, apps, and social platforms, coexist with and/or replace prior tools, roles, and institutions, from the substitution of local agricultural experts by online advisory services to the transformation of informal social interactions into digital spheres of exchange. The paper introduces the “digisphere,” an immersive digital atmosphere, to historicize and contextualize the post-digital rural modernity of South India. Synthesizing the insights from fieldwork, the study formulated a Sequential Integration of Technology into Communication Ecology Model (SITCEM) to represent the phases through which a new technology is integrated into an existing communication ecology. These findings contribute to social sciences, communication theory, rural media studies, and digital anthropology, offering grounded insights into the evolving contours of digitally mediated agricultural practices in the Global South.
This study explores daily challenges faced by unemployed graduates while transitioning from university to the job market. Twenty-eight unemployed university graduates (16 males and 12 females) were part of this qualitative study. The findings revealed that unemployed graduates face severe challenges in securing basic necessities, i.e., three meals a day, adequate accommodation, and access to health care. It also highlighted that during this transition period, graduates' daily routines become disrupted, creating uncertainty about whether to remain in hostels or return home. Additionally, the study divulged that most participants are dependent on their families and close friends, which compromises their social status and respect. Using Human Capital Theory, the results suggest that despite having degrees, many graduates still encounter unemployment. This paradox underscores that unemployment is not merely an individual failure but a structural and institutional challenge. There is an urgent need for structural reforms and forward-looking policies to ensure smooth transitions from education to employment.
This article is part of a broader project that challenges dominant readings of social interactions with the aim of decentring authoritative accounts of knowledge production in social anthropology and cognate disciplines. I examine field research examples that reveal the differential value placed on senses, emotions and memory in telling personal and community stories from the bottom up. This article draws on Haraway's composting storying approach to pile up and turn over four moments from my participant observation on a public bus ride in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. My approach questions the production of authoritative accounts and draws attention to the multiplying and unsettling effect of a sensory frisson - a sudden strong feeling, a thrill, an interaction - in fieldwork accounts. I reflect on whether overlooking the senses amounts to a form of authoritarianism shaped by disciplinary expectations, institutional requirements and researcher ambitions in knowledge production in ethnographic research.
As climate change intensifies, communities in Bangladesh’s Haor basin face recurrent flooding that disrupts livelihoods and generates persistent socio-emotional stress. This study explores the lived experiences, socio-emotional responses, and coping strategies of individuals repeatedly affected by climate-induced flooding in the Haor region. Using a qualitative case study approach, data were collected through 20 in-depth interviews, one focus group discussion, and four key informant interviews with 31 purposively selected participants. Thematic analysis, guided by climate vulnerability theory and socio-emotional perspectives, reveals an emotional landscape shaped by fear, trauma, and chronic uncertainty, often interpreted through cultural and spiritual frameworks. Coping strategies are socially embedded, including household preparedness, reliance on social networks, and culturally normalized risk practices, but are sometimes short-term and potentially maladaptive. Recurrent flooding also shapes long-term decisions on education, migration, and livelihoods, disproportionately affecting women and youth. The study highlights the importance of psychosocial support, gender-sensitive planning, and community-based adaptation, providing a nuanced understanding of the socio-emotional and structural dimensions of climate vulnerability in the Global South.
This paper examines how the prolonged armed conflict in Aceh (1976-2005) and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami intersected to shape lived experiences, recovery trajectories, and collective memory in postcrisis Aceh, Indonesia. Drawing on insights from Critical Disaster Studies and longitudinal ethnographic research -including in-depth interviews, oral histories, and participant observation with 25 participants across nine districts -the study argues that the tsunami cannot be understood as a singular natural event detached from Aceh's longer history of violence and displacement. Instead, conflict and disaster formed layered crises that produced cumulative trauma and uneven pathways of recovery. The findings show that tsunami experiences often reactivated earlier conflictrelated suffering, while recovery unfolded within existing social fragmentation and political silence. Women emerged as key actors in caregiving, emotional survival, and the transmission of memory across generations. The study demonstrates that resilience in Aceh is negotiated through everyday memory practices, cultural knowledge, and social relationships.
This study examines how gender antagonism is discursively produced, normalized and contested across three distinct Chinese social media ecologies: Weibo, Zhihu and Xiaohongshu (Rednote). Drawing on a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, it integrates computational mapping of sentiment and thematic patterns with feminist critical discourse analysis of high-engagement posts. Based on 102,347 posts and comments collected between 2022 and 2025, the analysis suggests that gender antagonism is not a uniform outcome of online polarization, but a platform-mediated discursive formation shaped by interactions among discourse, affordances, community norms, and governance. While Weibo amplifies confrontational visibility and affective polarization, Zhihu legitimizes antagonism through rationalist framings and appeals to social cohesion and Xiaohongshu enables adaptive, coded feminist expression within semipublic counterpublics. The study advances a cross-platform model for analyzing how digital platforms simultaneously reproduce and reconfigure feminist discourse and gendered power relations.
This article examines how the commodification of art reshapes social relations within the community. It draws on the Patua community in Naya village, West Bengal, India, as a case study. Based on short-term ethnographic qualitative fieldwork conducted across multiple visits between 2019 and 2025, the study traces the transition from collective, performance-based artistic practice to increasingly individualised and market-driven production. Commodification and various government initiatives have expanded economic opportunities and visibility for the artisans. However, these shifts have also produced new hierarchies and weakened collaborative structures for knowledge sharing and performance, thereby diminishing social cohesion among the artisans. By foregrounding artisans’ lived and shared experiences, the article argues that commodification reorganises not only the economic value of Patachitra art but also its social life. The findings highlight the need for more socially attuned cultural policies that preserve community cohesion while supporting rural artisans’ participation in contemporary craft economies.
Despite decades of pro-democratic protests, Central Asian Republics remain authoritarian. This paper examines how regimes use informational control to co-opt mobilization and how gender shapes collective action in these contexts. Using January 2022 uprising in Kazakhstan as a critical case, we investigate: (a) under what conditions do informational autocrats successfully co-opt pro-democratic mobilization? (b) how do gender dynamics influence collective claim-making? Through mixed-methods analysis combining survey data and qualitative fieldwork, we demonstrate that Kazakhstan's government deployed information control to reframe antiregime narratives into pro-regime discourse, enabling protest co-optation and elite consolidation. Our findings reveal significant gender differences: women show higher online participation while offline participation shows no meaningful gender gap. Education is associated with higher likelihood of participation, whereas economic security predicts lower likelihood. The findings help advance our understanding of how authoritarian regimes adapt in the digital age to sustain control and how citizens navigate constraints on collective action.
Taobao villages, hailed as a new rural development model by the Chinese government and e-platform giants, have drawn extensive attention in academia. While acknowledging its dividends, this article contends that, in the long term, the model risks becoming a conduit for urban extraction of rural resources. Existing Taobao villages can be divided into two types based on their geographic locations and main adopters of digital technologies. Suburban Taobao villages leveraged their low-cost advantages to assemble migrant e-merchants, but their development was undermined once local growth erased those advantages and consequently drove out e-merchants. Remote Taobao villages, despite having industrialized, saw their native e-merchants relocate to cities due to the uneven distribution of resources in China's urban-rural dichotomy, and that population outflow similarly eroded the villages' sustainable development. By tracing the long-term development of two exemplary cases, this article reveals the dual impact of the urban-rural disparities on the digital transformation of Chinese countryside.
