Two document pages open side by side on a laptop screen. The left page shows short bios of Alexander Fedorov and Euan Auld above two black-and-white portrait photos. The right page shows an abstract titled “Rave as Method: Writing, Knowing, and Becoming at Ozora,” with a festival writing photo below

This one is going to be hilarious and meaningful at the same time—my favorite academic combination, honestly: vivid, deeply grounded, connecting several worlds, human, sincere, and slightly shamanic. But we begin at #AERA2026.

#RaveAsMethod #Ozora

4 rules for staying alive (field-tested on the road, over many years):

1. Shape your environment.
2. Keep rules minimal and repeatable.
3. Protect sovereignty.
4. Ship something real. (Tangible + emotionally true.)

#Top3 #Asana #ShippingList #TravelAsNonMethod #RaveAsMethod

The day before Kathmandu, I made a decent #shippinglist (two weeks in Thailand!).

Conferences/talks:
– #AAR (online this year, my autumn is brutal),
– #REA (religious education, never been – also online),
– #EASR in Bucharest in Sept (great city + timing),
– #RaveAsMethod talk with Euan for #Ozora.

She “grounded” me, did her shamanic thing, and said: " You’ll write your best work, that part is already fine—but don’t forget you belong to the earth". Very simple, very deep.

With Euan, we keep using this “shaman” metaphor when we talk about knowledge, sociology of emotions, and #RaveAsMethod.

This’s why affect explains “why travel” and “why rave” best.

#TravelAsNonMethod isn’t really about places—it’s about state transitions.
#RaveAsMethod isn’t really about music—it’s about collective modulation: how a crowd, a rhythm, and a temporary village reorganise attention, belonging, aliveness.

I’ve been writing heavily on #TravelRave and #RaveAsMethod lately and realised my 2026 schedule is kind of unbelievable:

1. Awakenings in July, right after Australia.
2. Back to my beloved Ozora, hopefully with a #RaveAsMethod + epistemology talk.

Next are these: #AERA (first time!) with #RaveAsMethod and #CIES with #FreedomOfConscience.

And Nepal for 1 month for #DigitalDetox.

#CESHK went great (as always).

I’m at the point where I know ~60% of the people in my “home” venue and was genuinely happy to see everyone (and disrupt a bit, as always).

Can’t wait to present the next iteration of this new work at #CIES (and #RaveAsMethod at #AERA).

Call it #autoethnography, call it #RaveAsMethod, or just diary-writing with better footnotes. Even memoirs. Whatever works works—aka the pragmatic concept of truth in philosophy (Peirce/Dewey).

And like any #art, whatever you can take and hold is yours. I’m holding practice + serious ethnography + deep community + DIY epistemology. Not so little.

#RaveAsMethod

Travel/Rave in progress. Been working on this project for a little over two years.

Hammock office on Koh Phangan, trying to turn 20 years of airports, fields, and dance floors into a book on the emotional economy of going elsewhere.

#RaveAsMethod #TravelRave

The older I get, the less Koh Phangan feels like “escape” and the more it feels like maintenance.
Sleep, sunrise, movement, writing.
Then back to airports and conferences.

Maybe #RaveAsMethod is just: go somewhere liminal to remember how you actually want to live.

#kohphangan

Eden as always 🥰😘🦾😎

#RaveAsMethod

This summer, I gave myself three goals:

1. Work daily, track in Asana, and journal.
2. Travel beautifully, dance freely, sleep in a tent.
3. Keep writing — in airports, under trees, between sets.

#RaveAsMethod is a lived research practice: writing, festival conversations, quiet belief in people 🙃🫠

Someone asked for #RaveAsMethod literature, and I realised it’s actually a pretty solid reading list.

This is basically my portable toolbox for thinking about festivals as method.

Mostly autoethnography, affect, liminality, and epistemology: Ellis, Bochner, St. John, Turner, writing-as-method ppl.

Academic highlights: #CIES on religious education and plurality/secularity in HK (from my dissertation), #HabitusOfStaycations at AAA, and pushing #RaveAsMethod forward with Euan.

I had to cancel AAR with #AccidentalPlurality, so 2026 will carry that promise. Next stops: #CESHK, #AERA, and #CIES.

After festivals/conferences, the “afterglow” is the worst time to make big decisions—but the best time to write.

I try to schedule 1–3 days: wash the dust off and do deep work with coffee +AI.

#RaveAsMethod is between campsites and airports, when emotions are still raw, but life is already “back.”

Ellis reminds us that autoethnography means staying with our own vulnerability and using our lives as sites of inquiry, not just a colourful background.

That’s basically the core of #RaveAsMethod for me.

Three years ago, I promised my supervisor I’d keep working no matter what—and then went off to a week-long rave in the middle of nowhere in Hungary.

That’s how #RaveAsMethod began :)

As the new year approaches, I’m working on my field diaries from the #RaveAsMethod summer of 2025.
You rarely truly value what comes too easily.
Maybe that’s why Boom—with all its dust and chaos—felt earned.

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Today’s tiny structural move: I connected my old semi-anonymous IG (jatb.nl) to this Bluesky.

Same person in two rooms: raves, hotels, Hong Kong curriculum, EQ-writing. I just added “Alex.” to the IG bio and pointed the link to this feed.

#RaveAsMethod treats digital identity as fieldwork.

Top 3 for today:

1. Habitus of Staycations revisions
2. Finishing #RaveAsMethod / Wonderfruit diary
3. Cleaning home, slowing down, exercising

Most days, three key things are enough. #HabitusOfStaycations

At Wonderfruit, freedom of conscience is simply lived: believe what you want, dance how you want, nobody cares.
In Hong Kong schools, the same idea becomes a subject of curriculum debates and governance rules. #RaveAsMethod

This is precisely the kind of “research room” I mean when I talk about #RaveAsMethod.

The deeper we go into the #AI era, the more writers need #EQ. Models already write “good enough” prose—smooth, generic, slightly oversold. Our edge is #EQ-writing: emotion, honesty, risk. That’s what I’m training in #RaveAsMethod, often with AI as a sparring partner 😘

I don’t really see a massive difference between conferences and raves. You arrive, talk all day with cool people, discuss every possible idea, some key events/meetings, write a bit, take some pictures, and then can’t sleep after all these thoughts and encounters.

#RaveAsMethod

Speaking of #RaveAsMethod: I just bought tickets to #Awakenings (Grand Camping).
The last 2-3 years I stayed at Relax Resort—or whatever it’s called now.

Grand Camping is rough. I still remember my first Awakenings.
Yet in the mood for some back-to-the-roots.

Nina Kraviz, I love you 🥰🫠

A week ago, in the US, I wrote that jetlag is an underrated research method.
Now it’s 1:29 am in Asia—I woke up at 21:00, danced a little, and finished the #RaveAsMethod draft for #AERA.

I told him I’m only passing through this time. #RaveAsMethod at #AERA and freedom of conscience at #CIES will take a while next spring.

While I was meditating, our #RaveAsMethod paper was accepted by #AERA Arts-Based SIG.

Euan and I are thrilled—it’s one of the few spaces to provoke about the blurring lines between epistemology and affect/emotions in academia. And in a liminal world.

Hoping to be in LA soon. Loved the reviews 🫠