Internet Popular Culture and (Everyday) Politics

This edited collection considers how scholars conduct research on (everyday) politics in Southeast Asia via networks of internet popular culture. This includes artifacts, networks, groups, and cultures that are specific to Southeast Asian online practices, and that seek to represent, advocate for, provoke, or question how citizens ‘do’ politics online.

In the Southeast Asia region in particular, these behind-the-scenes minutiae of everyday decisions are all the more under-valued when researchers have been taught, conditioned, or cautioned to tiptoe around the OB (out-of-bound) markers implicitly policed by states and governments. This book examines the combination of media regimes with limited press freedoms, the employment of sedition acts against citizens, and the need to be strategic to secure state and industry funding for research has also pressured or motivated scholars to strategically obscure certain research anecdotes in favour of a smoother publishing journey and/or posterity. As such, this collection serves as a sounding board and collection of reflections on what is really looks like to conduct research on everyday politics online in the Southeast Asian region, while navigating innovative media methods, negotiating inter-disciplinary gatekeeping, demands of publishing in tiered journals and the tensions around legitimizing one's methodological choices. Featuring four methodological accounts of scholars contemplating the methodological and ethical conundrums when conducting research on Southeast Asian internet popular culture and everyday politics.

This book will appeal to readers in the disciplines of anthropology, Asian studies, communications, cultural studies, media studies, and science and technology studies.