13.06.2025 - 10:00

EAF Online Guest Lecture by Jonathan Yainishet

Parallel Methodology: Approximating Affective Futures in Recalcitrant Landscapes  |  Fri, June 13, 2025, 10 am – 12 pm CEST  |  Online Lecture

Jonathan Yainishet, M.A. is PhD Candidate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and The Ethnographic Collection, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

Abstract:
The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) presents a distinctively complex research landscape, where visibility and mobility are stringently yet inconsistently regulated. This regime of access and denial complicates ethnographic fieldwork, transforming the DMZ into a site of partial, selective, and unreliable perceptibility. In this talk, I offer methodological reflections drawn from long-term research on speculative futures in the DMZ, focusing on how researchers must grapple with the pervasive problem of absence. The DMZ embodies absence in two senses: as a spatially demarcated but largely inaccessible space, and as a landscape whose envisioned futures remain speculative. A further challenge is that this lack of access is shared by both researchers and interlocutors, diverging from traditional debates on distance and co-location in ethnography. Methodological discussions acknowledge absence as a challenge. This talk builds on these by engaging explicitly with future-oriented affective practices in the DMZ—aspirations that have not materialized and are “not there (yet).” In response to these conceptual challenges, I introduce a set of geometric metaphors—the asymptote and the parallel—to conceptualize how absence and aspiration are negotiated within the DMZ. This approach offers a methodological framework for approximating and engaging with affective futures in recalcitrant research landscapes such as the DMZ.

Access to the meeting:
https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/61821572478?pwd=U5IiO1e65IQEaA36e03ZbK90dj30Yy.1
Meeting ID: 618 2157 2478
Password: 890269

Link to the website of East Asian Futures:
https://east-asian-futures.de