John Postill

• PhD in Social Anthropology (UCL)
• Senior Researcher at RMIT University

When people move country, they experience new social, infrastructural, and ambient contingencies, which enables them to imagine otherwise unknowable possible futures ‘at home’. In this article, we mobilise a design anthropological approach to show how collaboration with temporary migrants can generate understandings that generate insights regarding...

The link between the spread of social media and the recent surge of populism around the world remains elusive. A global, rather than Western, theory is required to explore this connection. Such a theory would need to pay particular attention to five questions, namely, the roots of populism, ideology and populism, the rise of theocratic populism, so...

The popularity of social media in Indonesia, along with the rise of political Islam, is changing the ways in which people engage with religious matters in the country. In this article, we deploy post-Bourdieuan field theory to explore Indonesia’s religious domain as a ‘hybrid media space’ – a social space mediated by old and new media agents intera...

The popularity of social media in Indonesia, combined with the rise of political Islamism in recent years, are changing the ways in which people engage with religious matters in the world’s largest Muslim country. One significant change is the way that religious and political figures incorporate a combination of online and offline audiences in main...

post-Bourdieu version of field theory can produce nuanced analyses of the relationship between media change, the new citizen movements and ongoing struggles for democratic renewal. Through the case of Spain's indignados (15M) movement and its political offshoots, I explore the potential uses of a range of field concepts and propose a conceptual dis...

In this article, we discuss how new configurations of stakeholders are implicated and can be conceptualised in digital-visual applied and public ethnography. We set the discussion in the context of the increasing calls for researchers to have impact in the world and the ways that digital technologies are increasingly implicated in this. In doing so...

In this article, we draw on ethnographic research to examine some key communication activism practices of Spain's indignados (15M) movement. The 15M radically transformed communication activism in Spain through its strong political-pedagogical orientation. Here lies the greatest 15M lesson for Communication for Social Change: Ordinary citizens in c...

In this article, we develop a novel approach to transient student migration: by studying it through the mundane everyday. We focus on the private worlds where migrants encounter and improvise with new domestic technologies - through their laundry - by drawing on our video ethnography of Indonesian students in Australia. Such an analysis creates ins...

The emergence of network-movements since 2011 has opened the debate around the way in which social media and networked practices make possible innovative forms of collective identity. We briefly review the literature on social movements and ‘collective identity’, and show the tension between different positions stressing either organization or cult...

In this article, I draw from anthropological fieldwork in Spain and secondary research on Tunisia and Iceland to explore the connection between Internet freedom activism and post-2008 protest movements. I introduce two new concepts: ‘freedom technologists’ and ‘protest formulas’. I use the term freedom technologists to refer to those social agents...

The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: 'media epidemiography'. This composite of the terms 'epidemiology' and 'ethnography' is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today's swiftly evolving techno-politic...

Social media practices and technologies are often part of how ethnographic research participants navigate their wider social, material and technological worlds, and are equally part of ethnographic practice. This creates the need to consider how emergent forms of social media-driven ethnographic practice might be understood theoretically and method...

Internet activism is playing a crucial role in the democratic reform happening across many parts of Southeast Asia. Focusing on Subang Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, this study offers an in-depth examination of the workings of the Internet at the local level. In fact, Subang Jaya is regarded as Malaysia’s electronic governance laboratory. The auth...

This article explores the possibility of a new paradigm of media research which understand media, not as texts or structures of production, but as practice. Drawing on recent moves towards a theory of practice in sociology, this paradigm aims to move beyond old debates about media effects and the relative importance of political economy and audienc...

After long decades of neglect, the anthropological study of media is now booming. The period between 2002 and 2005 alone saw the publication of no less than four overviews of this emerging subfield (Askew and Wilk 2002; Ginsburg et al. 2002; Peterson 2003; Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005) as well as the founding of the EASA Media Anthropology Network,...

As the numbers of internet users worldwide continue to grow, the internet is becoming `more local’. This article addresses the epistemological challenge posed by this global process of internet localization by examining some of the conceptual tools at the disposal of internet researchers. It argues that progress has been hampered by an overdependen...

With the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of civil wars and "regime changes," the question of nation building has acquired great practical and theoretical urgency. From Eastern Europe to East Timor, Afghanistan and recently Iraq, the United States and its allies have often been accused of shirking their nation-building responsibilities as...

Maurice Bloch has rejected Jack Goody's ‘autonomous’ theory of literacy for being deterministic and eurocentric. The Merina of Madagascar, says Bloch, have adapted literacy to local purposes. Rather than altering their (oral) knowledge system, bringing it closer to European models, literacy has actually extended this system. In this article I apply...

The spread of clock and calendar time (CCT) from the North Atlantic region to the rest of the world is an understudied phe- nomenon. The second part of this article, based on anthropological fieldwork, examines the successful localization of CCT in a semi- rural area of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo. Before that, the article critically assesses some...

This paper suggests that media anthropology should pay closer attention to the manifold nation-building uses of media technologies, especially in postcolonial and post-Soviet countries. Adopting an ethnological approach, it questions the present celebration of the creative appropriation of media forms, and argues that it is time to reintroduce diff...