Criminalising the gaze: Methodological degradation as evidence in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan

This article theorises methodological degradation as a distinct form of evidence about coercive environments. Drawing on practice-as-research fieldwork in Afghanistan in August 2025, it traces how a dual visual methodology, combining discreet researcher documentation with an adapted Photovoice protocol involving Afghan women, was progressively dismantled by the conditions it sought to study. Five of nine participants withdrew; digital data transmission proved impossible; and all material was physically carried across international borders. The article reads these breakdowns not as limitations but as structured data, mapping how ontological control operates across geopolitical distrust, technological fear, economic precarity and surveillance exposure. It proposes that where coercive regimes govern visibility itself, the points at which a research design fails map the architecture of that governance.