Displacement and return in the internet Era: Social media for monitoring migration decisions in Northern Syria

According to UNHCR reporting there are over 27 million refugees globally, many of whom are hosted in neighboring countries which struggle with bureaucracy and service provision to support them. With the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020, gathering data on the location and conditions of these refugees has become increasingly difficult. Using Syria as a case study, where since 2011 80% of the population has been displaced in the civil war, this paper shows how the widespread use of social media could be used to monitor migration of refugees. Using social media text and image data from three popular platforms (Twitter, Telegram, and Facebook), and leveraging survey data as a source of ground truth on the presence of IDPs and returnees, it uses topic modeling and image analysis to find that areas without return have a higher prevalence of violence-related discourse and images while areas with return feature content related to services and the economy. Building on these findings, the paper uses mixed effects models to show that these results hold pre- and post-return as well as when migration is quantified as monthly population flows. Monitoring refugee return in war prone areas is a complex task and social media may provide researchers, aid groups, and policymakers with tools for assessing return in areas where survey or other data is unavailable or difficult to obtain. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

COVID-19 and Fieldwork: Challenges and Solutions

This reflection article presents insights on conducting fieldwork during and after COVID-19 from a diverse collection of political scientists-from department heads to graduate students based at public and private universities in the United States and abroad. Many of them contributed to a newly published volume, Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Krause and Szekely 2020). As in the book, these contributors draw on their years of experience in the field to identify the unique ethical and logistical challenges posed by COVID-19 and offer suggestions for how to adjust and continue research in the face of the pandemic's disruptions. Key themes include how contingency planning must now be a central part of our research designs;how cyberspace has increasingly become "the field"for the time being;and how scholars can build lasting, mutually beneficial partnerships with "field citizens,"now and in the future. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association.