Birgitt Röttger-Rössler: I am speaking with social anthropologist Dr. Max Kramer, who focuses on religious minorities in India, particularly Muslim communities and their media practices. Max, if I understood correctly, you are primarily interested in how religious minorities tactically use digital platforms. That is, you examine how activists’ experiences in their analog lives are represented online.

Max Kramer: Well, that’s not entirely accurate – primarily because these activists no longer have purely „analog“ lives. Their everyday world is deeply mediatized, meaning that there is no meaningful separation between online and offline. Instead, they strategically utilize various platform affordances, which present both opportunities and risks. I understand tactics as something that emerges from long-term learning, and this learning is not solely about representation. My main interest is in what one could call ethical questions – how to emotionally prepare for Twitter engagement, why one sometimes chooses to write a poem instead of posting a politically charged tweet, or why one may withdraw from social media for months to observe political opponents and study India’s racialized digital ecosystem, largely built by Hindu nationalists over the past 15 years.

One develops a sense of when and how to post the right content, on the right platform, with the right emotions. This tactical refinement is acquired through a sometimes brutal learning process. Otherwise, one may be ‚framed‘ or used as an instrument in the staging of moral outrage by political opponents. My interlocutors carefully consider what they can do to prevent this from happening.

Birgitt Röttger-Rössler: If I may briefly interject – this is very interesting, what you’re describing – because you have convincingly shown us that the separation between online and offline, between the virtual or digital and the analog world, can no longer really be maintained. That all these media and digital practices shape our everyday lives, and that this separation has essentially become artificial. This, of course, also presents a challenge for social anthropology – we have to find ways to deal with it. So, how do you approach this? You mentioned to me in our previous conversations that you initially followed the leading political activists – those with significant influence, large Twitter handles, or, as we should now say, X handles – online and tracked what they were doing, how they represented themselves, whom they interacted with, and whom they responded to. And then you tried, of course, to establish contact with these people through your many existing connections. So, how did you document and store your online research? That’s something I’d like to know. And also, how do you document this entanglement between the analog and digital worlds that you just spoke about?

Max Kramer: It’s more of a circular process. I already had networks in Delhi and Mumbai from previous research, and I had to read and retweet content related to these actors – who were usually people with relatively large handles. By that, I mean more than 50,000 followers, sometimes even up to 150,000 followers – perhaps one could call them Twitter micro-star personas. I initially followed all of them. There aren’t many individuals across India who have such a large following. And I then tried to meet these people in person as quickly as possible. So, my primary data consists of conversations about practice. What interests me is what matters to these actors – what is important to them in their practice? What problems do they face when using social networks, and how do they learn to deal with these problems, avoid them, and develop new tactical approaches? Before my first meeting with activists, I would usually review their tweets from the past few months and occasionally take screenshots if I thought a particular tweet had been widely shared, was heavily debated, or had even led to a lawsuit against these individuals. These were the tweets I took screenshots of and then brought into the first conversation. However, I soon realized that the screenshots I had taken beforehand were not necessarily of tweets that were important to the activists themselves. The tweets that I had selected were often insignificant to their own memory of their Twitter history, while entirely different tweets held much greater significance for them. So I then began engaging with these tweets, taking screenshots of them, organizing them into folders, encrypting those folders, and storing them securely on an encrypted hard drive. That’s what I do with all the data I collect.

Birgitt Röttger-Rössler: That brings us to a very, very important question. In your research, the particular challenge is its political sensitivity – Muslim minority groups, as you’ve already mentioned, are repeatedly subjected to hostilities from Hindu nationalists. How do you deal with that? You’ve already hinted at it, but perhaps you could add a bit more. How do you ensure the safety of your interlocutors? And to what extent does this affect – or rather, influence – how you handle your research data?

Max Kramer: In every possible way. For example, in the field, we don’t use WhatsApp but Signal for communication. When I’m in the field, I set Signal to automatically delete messages after 30 minutes. I make sure that whatever I record as raw data is secure – securely recorded, securely stored, and securely processed. For recording videos, photos, and audio files, I use a separate phone in the field – one without a SIM card, running GrapheneOS, a secure operating system. This phone also has encryption software, which I use every evening to encrypt all the files I recorded during the day.

And in my book – so this is all at the level of data collection, transport, storage, processing, and especially transcription – which is the most sensitive aspect of my research. Because people are giving me insight into their operational knowledge, and there is information included – although these individuals are, in a way, micro-stars and quite visible – the specific knowledge I have is not visible and must never end up in the wrong hands. This also means that I have to carefully consider how I process my data and how I present it in my arguments. And I experiment a bit – not only with anonymization but also with fictionalization. By that, I mean that some locations and events need to be shuffled or altered as long as the general context remains intact – just enough to support the argument. Otherwise, these individuals could be too easily tracked. For example, I can’t simply copy and paste tweets into my finished text – that would immediately expose any attempt at anonymization. So, any data that is easily traceable, that could be linked to a person with just a few clicks, cannot be reproduced in its original form. Instead, tweets must be paraphrased, so that the context remains, but nothing can be traced back to the original source. Now, this creates an interesting tension, because the people I work with – these micro-stars – are political figures, and they receive a lot of recognition for their courage. Some of them are also poets, and their aesthetic refinement should be acknowledged. Moreover, many of them explicitly tell me that they want to be named. So, this is also a difficult trade-off for me.

Birgitt Röttger-Rössler: Yes, I think that is a completely different and much greater challenge – how do you represent this material, given the tension you just described? Some of our interlocutors want to be named – they do not want to disappear behind anonymization. And yes, that is a major challenge.

Max, I really appreciate this conversation. I think you have raised many, many important points, particularly regarding the level of thought that must go into encryption and secure data storage in the field. In my experience, many researchers still approach this issue far too naively. So, thank you very much for this conversation.