Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers Dr. Mohammad Ali Askar

research fellowship from the Alexander von Hulmboldt Foundation to stay as a guest researcher at the department for cultural and social geography; Dr. Karimi will work with the department members in different projects regarding the techniques and technologies of surveillance, with a focus on information and governance. He is especially interested in numerical information and the instruments that we use to quantify, classify, and measure things.

During the twenty-four months of my fellowship, I will primarily focus on finishing my proposed research project, “Information Poverty: The Politics of Census Data in Afghanistan.” In addition, if the pandemic restrictions allowed, I will present my research at conferences, take part in activities on campus, and carry out other tasks in consultation with my supervisor Prof. Helbrecht. The main outcome of my fellowship will be the publication of one journal article from my findings and getting another article ready for submission. Ultimately, I will publish all my findings in a book at a later date after the end of the fellowship.

In order to complete my project in a timely manner, I have broken down the major tasks as follows: The first four months of the fellowship (Feb-May 2021) will be spent on the literature review and the assessment of the data that I have already collected. In the next two months (Jun-Jul 2021), I will conduct interviews with a number of informants who formerly worked at the Central Statistics Office in Kabul. These interviewees mostly live in exile in Europe and North America. The interviews will be online or by telephone. In the next two months (Aug-Sep 2021), I will conduct further data collection. In addition to archival data and interviews, I will also use digital methods. The next three months (Oct-Dec 2021) will be spent on research on digital technologies of population data such as the areal census conducted in 2018 in Afghanistan. In the second year of the fellowship, I will spend all the time on analyzing the data and writing. By the end of the fellowship, I hope to finish the draft of a second journal article and make significant progress towards a book manuscript based on my research