Academy 2024

Photo Credit: Marvin Meyer

ACSS Academy on Ethnography, Gendering the Archive and Decoloniality

The Arab Council for the Social Sciences held its second ACSS Academy virtually from September 18-28, 2024.

The Academy is organized by the ACSS to provide an opportunity for junior researchers in the Arab region to engage with critical theory and analysis, advanced writing, professionalization skills and networking.

The themes of this Academy revolved around the 3 ACSS groups:

1. Gendering the Archive

2. Reflexivity and Decoloniality in the Arab Region

3. Ethnography and Knowledge in the Arab Region

The 35 participants from nine countries attended lectures by the working group faculty members, professionalization/ training sessions, mentoring sessions on their research papers and a keynote lecture.      

Goals of the Academy

• Preparing junior researchers for cross-disciplinary research that critically interrogates social scientific and humanistic research questions
• Explore guiding concepts in Arab critical thought
• Understand genealogies and canons of leading theories and frameworks relevant to the region
• Constructively review and assess academic research and texts
• Collaborate with peers from across the Arab region
• Incorporate learnings from the academy into research by participants
• Provide a space for participants to present their research and receive verbal and written feedback from the faculty members
• Bring participants and faculty members together in order to discuss issues around publishing, teaching and other professional concerns

The Academy program adopted complementary teaching strategies:

• Working Groups: participants were divided between the 3 groups, which gave them the opportunity to work and network within smaller groups.
• Thematic sessions: This involved lectures by core faculty and guest lecturers to introduce participants to the above-mentioned themes and the ways in which critical research within these themes can be conducted. Faculty members also presented their contribution to these themes and their ongoing work.
• Mentoring & writing sessions: The purpose of these sessions was for participants to present their research within smaller groups and to receive written and verbal feedback from faculty members.

The program also included a keynote lecture and professionalization/professional development sessions that brought together the students from across the working groups:

• Keynote lecture: A keynote session presented by Dr. Abaher El Sakka, ACSS Board of Trustees member, opened this year’s Academy, titled “Conflict, Memory, and History: Contradictory Uses and Approaches in the Arab Region”.
• Trainings: Given by experts in their fields, these included “Publishing outside of Academia”, “Research Ethics in the Social Sciences”, “Open Science & Infrastructure: Enhancing Persistent Identifiers for Arab Research Societies”. The Academy also included a session titled “How to be part of the ACSS” were staff presented the different programs that the ACSS implements, and how the participants are able to benefit from these programs after the Academy concludes.
• Professionalization/professional development sessions: Participants and faculty members came together to discuss issues around publishing, fieldwork, teaching, and other professional concerns.

Description of ACSS Academy Working Groups

About the Gendering the Archive Working Group

The Gendering the Archive Working Group (GAWG) is part of the ACSS’ Gender Oral History Archive project, which aims to create new collections of oral histories that support a feminist and multidisciplinary critique of knowledge production practices and research methodologies in, from, and about the Arab region; as well as to develop a more inclusive and critical body of situated knowledge. The GAWG brings together researchers and activists from diverse fields including history, literary criticism, sociology, anthropology, and feminist studies. The group is engaged in rethinking power dynamics in knowledge production in local and global contexts from a gender lens, exploring the relationship between material and digital archives; the gendered labor of archival knowledge production; the affective practices that shape archival texts and their dissemination; the marginalization of women’s stories in historical narratives; revolutionary and counterrevolutionary archives, among other pertinent themes.  

Topics covered at the ACSS Academy:

• A Gendered Arab archive: How can we conceptualize an interdisciplinary gendered Arab archive and what are the methodological, institutional, and narrative tools needed to do so?
• Archival Authority and Access: Who has the right to produce archival knowledges, where should this knowledge be stored, and how should it be managed? How does this authority or access change in violent, turbulent, or vulnerable contexts?
• Medical and Psychiatric Archives: How can we research medical and psychiatric archives in an ethical manner and what kinds of research questions, narratives and stories can we study in these archives? What pasts and possible futures do such archives illuminate and make possible? 
• Affective Archives: What is an affective archive? How does affect theory shape archival knowledges and relationships to the archive? 
• Digital Archives: What are the characteristics of a digital archive? What ethical questions emerge in the use and circulation of these archives? What is their relationship to material archives?
• Archival Resistance: What types of histories and narratives can gendered archival research make possible? What can be considered as an archive in the context of war, colonialism, and resistance? 

Learning Objectives: 

1. Introduce participants to key debates in archival studies and gender theory. 
2. Introduce participants to archival methodologies in contentious, vulnerable, or violent contexts. 
3. Introduce participants to different forms of archives and archival knowledges from a gender lens. 

Confirmed Faculty from the Gendering the Archive working group include:

Hana Sleiman, University of Edinburgh, is an archivist and a historian of the modern Middle East whose research focuses on intellectual history, histories of print and archive theory.  Before joining the University of Edinburgh, she was an Early Career Research Fellow in History at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge (2020-2022).

Hana’s PhD dissertation, completed in May 2021, is titled History Writing and History Making in Twentieth-Century Beirut. She earned an MA from Columbia University (2013) working on archive creation and appropriation in modern Palestinian history. Her work has been  published in the Arab Studies Journal and the Journal for Palestine Studies, and exhibited at the Qalandiya International biennale, Beirut.

Hana’s archival work focuses on devising open tools and methodologies for ephemera and oral history archives, and she is the co-founder of the open source MASRAD:platform for archiving oral history. Previously, she was the Special Collections Librarian at the American University of Beirut Archives (2014 – 2016), working on the Constantine Zurayk personal papers and co-leading the Palestinian Oral History Archive. 

Leyla Dakhli is a full-time historian in the French Center for National Research (CNRS), presently settled in the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin. Her work deals with the study of Arab intellectuals and social history of the South Mediterranean region, with a particular focus on the history of women and the question of exiled intellectuals and activists. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-founded program DREAM (Drafting and Enacting the revolution in the Arab Mediterranean). She is a member of the editorial committee of the International Review of Social History (Amsterdam) and Le Mouvement social (Paris), and of the Scientific Committee of the MuCem (Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, Marseilles).

Zahra Ali, Rutgers University, is a sociologist who researches dynamics of women and gender, race and class, social and political movements in relation to Islam(s), the Middle East, and contexts of war and conflict with a focus on contemporary Iraq. She is interested in (racial) capitalism, (post)coloniality, decolonial and transnational feminisms as well as critical knowledge production and epistemologies, especially in relation to global and public sociology. Ali works and writes in English, French and Arabic and is involved in feminist and critical knowledge production projects with activists and scholars from/in the Middle East and beyond.

Her bookWomen and Gender in Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2018; also translated into Arabic and French), is a sociology of Iraqi women’s social and political activism and feminisms through an in-depth ethnography of post-invasion Iraqi women’s rights organizations and a detailed research of women’s social, economic, and political experiences since the formation of the Iraqi state. Ali is currently working on a new book, Up-Rising / انتِ– فاضة and the Political Imagination, that shifts the dominant lens of social theory in analyzing mass protests away from a binary approach of power/resistance by looking at ‘the political’ from the point of view of life, space, violence, and emancipation.

Lamia Moghnieh received her PhD in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also holds an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago and an MA in Psychology from the American University of Beirut. In her dissertation “Humanitarian Psychology in War and Postwar Lebanon: Violence, Therapy and Suffering”, she examines the humanitarian process of psychologizing suffering from war and displacement from Israel’s invasion in 1982 to the Syrian Refugee crisis in 2012. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this research looks at how humanitarian psychology—a new form of expertise—sought to produce therapeutic subjects that both experts and communities in Lebanon contested, appropriated and negotiated. In 2016/17, Moghnieh was a postdoctoral fellow of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), affiliated with the SOAM department at the American University of Beirut. She recently took part in a collective special issue publication in Contemporary Levant on “Ethnography as Knowledge in the Arab Region”, contributing a paper on “The Violence We Live In: Reading and Experiencing Violence in the Field” (2:1, 2017, 24-36). She was a EUME Fellow during the academic year of 2017/18 and returned as EUME Fellow of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation 2019-21. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the DECOLMAD project at the University of Copenhagen.

Hoda Elsadda, Women and Memory Forum, is a feminist activist, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, and Chair of the Board of the Women and Memory Forum (www.wmf.org.eg). She previously held a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University, and was Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the UK. She was Carnegie Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University in 2014-2015.

Her research interests are in the areas of gender studies, comparative literature and oral history. She is author of Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt: 1892-2008 (Edinburgh UP and Syracuse UP, 2012); and co-editor of Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation and the Making of Archives (Cairo Papers, 35:1, 2018).

Reem Joudi is a researcher and writer based between Beirut and Abu Dhabi. She received her BSFS in International Economics from Georgetown University and her MA in Media Studies from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests lie at the intersection of visual culture, urban space, and affect theory, with particular focus on the South West Asia and North Africa region. She is currently a researcher with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences working on three projects: the Critical Humanities Initiative in the Arab region, Safeguarding Knowledge Production, and Gender and the Arab Archive.

About the Ethnography as Knowledge Working Group

The Ethnography as Knowledge (EthnoKnowledge) Working Group is engaged in a collaborative exploration of the critical knowledge that can be generated from attention to embodied, emotional and cognitive aspects of the ethnographic endeavor and from the resulting methodological adaptations. The group is interested in understanding how ethnography can counter dominant regimes of knowledge about the Arab countries and produce a more nuanced ethnographic understanding of the Arab region today. We propose that particular modes of attention are vital for ethnographic research, including attention to fear, sound, memory, lies, movement, dreams, and the immersive quality of violence.

For more information on the broader project, please go to  http://www.theacss.org/pages/ethnography-as-knowledge on the ACSS website.

Topics covered at the ACSS Academy:

• The role and offerings of Anthropology: This topic reflects on what theories and practices of Anthropology can offer in the present moment, and examines thechallenges and possibilities of conducting ethnographic research during periods of crisis and change, with a focus on its unique capabilities and contributions in such contexts. This includes thinking through what the ethnographic method enables in understanding temporalities of our turbulent times, and informing social and political action, imaginaries, and futures.
• The craft of ethnography: We will reflect on the specificity of ethnographic research tools, in responding to the needs of research today. We will introduce the concept of relational reflexivity and invite reflection on our fieldwork practices. Using qualitative analysis tools, we also focus on moving from field notes and material, to conceptual and ethnographic texts.

Learning Objectives

Through their participation in this Working Group, students will:

• Grasp the potential of ethnographic research in understanding society through turbulent times and informing paths of social change.
• Hone their ethnographic craft at different stages of research including practices of reflexivity, analyzing field material and writing ethnographic texts.

Confirmed Faculty from the EthnoKnowledge working group include:

Reem Saad is a social anthropologist based in Cairo. Her academic research and publications focus on agriculture and rural transformation. Her public engagement activities include advocating against the death penalty and initiatives to promote social science learning beyond institutional borders. She has previously held a number of positions at the American University in Cairo where she was an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, the Director of the Middle East Studies Center, and a Research Associate Professor at the Social Research Center. 

Muzna Al-Masri is an anthropologist, researcher and consultant and currently Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Urban Lab. Her research interests include everyday political practice and clientelism, the intersection of conflict and politics with humanitarian aid and energy, and the production of ethnographic research in turbulent times. She is also co-founding member of the Ebla Research Collective, a women led, Lebanon based collective with a mission to provide locally grounded, collectively produced, and globally engaged knowledge that is responsive to the needs of an unequal world.

Lamia Moghnieh is an anthropologist, psychotherapist and social worker, and an associate professor at the Center for Culture and the Mind (CULTMIND) at the university of Copenhagen. Her research broadly looks at the interplay and impact of psychiatry on social understandings of self and illness in postcolonial and post-conflict societies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Her book manuscript “Psychiatric Afterlives: Narrating Illness, Gender, and Violence in Lebanon” is an archival ethnography of psychiatry, therapeutic subjectivity, and public life in Lebanon from the late 1930s until present day. 

Michelle Obeid is a social anthropologist at the University of Manchester. She has conducted ethnographic research in Lebanon and the United Kingdom focusing on issues related to postwar socialities, livelihoods, state and borders, migration, home, kinship and gender. She is author of Border Lives: An Ethnography of a Lebanese Town in Changing Times (2019) and is currently completing her second manuscript Migration as Anchorage: Ethnography of Palestinians in London. Her new research explores food activism in the context of economic collapse and anthropogenic climate change in Lebanon. 

Samar Kanafani is a social anthropologist residing and working in Beirut. Her research explores the tactics of dwelling under precarious conditions at the intersection of ruined and renewed urban spaces in Beirut. She has been visiting lecturer at the American University of Beirut and tutor at the University of Manchester, doctoral fellow at the Orient Institute in Beirut, as well as postdoctoral fellow with the Arab Council for Social Sciences (2017-18), and the Institute of Global Prosperity in affiliation with University College London (2019). Her PhD research was titled, Made to Fall Apart: an ethnography of old houses and urban renewal in Beirut (2017). She is currently interested in the commons, commoning and efforts to collectivize under late capitalism, and works as a consultant for Mawred al-Thaqafy (Culture Resource).

Reflexivity and Decolonialityin the Arab Region

In order for us to conduct research at the present time we must critically think of the knowledge we produce and the research we conduct. To do so we turn our gaze inwards and reflect on how to engage in a decolonizing direction in research. This entails recognizing the baggage that lot of research in the past has relied on, benefited or was in the interests of colonial powers, as well as the types of methods that may continue to perpetuate power dynamics that follow in the same route. As such we hope to present an introduction to what is meant by decolonizing methodologies, how we think critically of our relation to research and communities we do research work with as well as why we do research and how that question should be seriously reflected upon. 

Learning Objectives:

• to assist young researchers in navigating colonial power relations within academia. The workshop will emphasize the importance of local research or how to conduct "fieldwork at home," as well as breaking away from the concept of international researchers.
• to stress the importance of making coherent and motivated ethical choices. We learn about the types of ethical concerns and considerations that come with fieldwork and the complexities of making ethical research choices in our postcolonial societies. Participants will learn to reflect on how one's own positionality vis-a-vis the chosen research topic shapes the questions asked, the relationships/collaborations in the field, the research materials gathered, and the conclusions reached. 
• considering the current state of academia in North Africa, we must pay attention to global issues pertaining to pedagogy and the sociopolitical environment in our local universities. By exploring heterodox methodologies and tools, we hope to strengthen the position and publication skills of young researchers while also acknowledging the globalization of academia and its standardization.

Topics covered at the ACSS Academy:

1. Paradoxes and dilemmas of the decolonized scholar.
2. Epistemological and ethical issues
3. Methodological de-framing and re-framing
4. Publication strategies.

Confirmed Faculty from the Decoloniality working group include:

Kmar Bendana is Emeritus Professor of Contemporary History at the University of La Manouba (Tunisia). She is also an associate researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC, Tunis) and a member of the editorial board of the journal IBLA. Her research and teaching focus on the history of Tunisian political culture in the contemporary period. The history of the conditions for the production of knowledge, of the university, of institutions, of journals and of the cinema is one of his areas of work. KB works also about translation, co-lingualism and historiography in relation to the development of the human and social sciences devoted to Tunisia.

Since 2011, KB has maintained a blog: hctc.hypotheses.org. For a list of his publications: https://hctc.hypotheses.org/travaux-scientifiques

Nadia Guessous is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Feminist and Gender Studies department at Colorado College. An anthropologist by training but an interdisciplinary scholar in practice, her work lies at the intersection of feminist and political anthropology; transnational feminist theory; postcolonial/decolonial thought; critical Muslim, Middle Eastern, and North African Studies. Her research and teaching interests include the transnational politics of gender and sexuality; religion and secularism; affect, power and subjectivity; memory and embodiment; and the decolonization of politics and knowledge. She is currently working on a book entitled The Tragedy of Progress where she explores how postcolonial secular feminism in Morocco has been shaped by the legacies of colonial modernity and conscripted by the civilizing logics of the war on terror. Her work has been published in numerous academic journals and online publications including Hespéris-Tamuda; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; American Anthropologist; Confluences Méditerranée; The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies; Review of Middle East Studies; Jadaliyya; and Conditions. She is also the author of a qualitative study on women, gender, and political violence during the years of lead in postcolonial Morocco, which was commissioned by the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission.

Zakaria Rhani holds a PhD in Biology (University of Geneva) and in Anthropology (University of Montreal). He is a full professor of anthropology at Mohammed V University in Rabat. His work focuses on “Anthropology of health and political imaginaries”; “Political violence and embodied memories”; “Ethnographies and decolonial theories”. He is the author of Le pouvoir de guérir: mythe, mystique et politique (2014) and the co-editor of Le Maroc au présent (2015) and Politiques du corps (2018).

Soraya El Kahlaoui a Ph.D. in sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University and Bir Zeit University, and her research examines the mechanisms of dispossession in the MENA region as well as the formation of property rights. This project aims to offer an innovative perspective on the dynamics of social and political transformation in the MENA region after 2011, with an emphasis on Morocco, Tunisia, and Palestine in particular. Furthermore, she produced the documentary Landless Moroccans and has written numerous articles, including the Journal of North African Studies article "Claiming their right to possess - The Guich Oudaya tribe's resistance to land grabbing." She is also the principal investigator of the Traab project (www.traab.com), which maps and visualizes property conflicts in North Africa.

Driss Ksikes is a Moroccan fiction and nonfiction writer, playwright and scholar. He is professor of methodology and creative writing, and director of Economia, HEM research center in Rabat. His book Le métier d’intellectuel : dialogues avec quinze penseurs du Maroc (The intellectual profession: interviews with 15 Moroccan thinkers), co-authored with Fadma Aït Mous, won the Prix Grand Atlas, Morocco’s most prestigious book prize in 2015. He is one of the two coordinators of Fatema Mernissi chair in Rabat. He was a Visiting professor at Northwestern University in 2017 and was invited, in 2019, to give a series of lectures in various American universities (UCLA, Tulane, Williams). He has been appointed in 2019 as member of CODESRIA (Council supporting social sciences in Africa) scientific committee. His last publication is a novel, entitled, Au Détroit d’Averroes. His main interests as a scholar are about media, culture and various ways of mediation between arts and research. Besides analyzing relationships between symbolic expressions and institutions, he has been working for the last ten years on various ways of indiscipline through art fabric, knowledge production and public sphere interactions. His book published in 2021 is entitled Pathways of indiscipline (Ed. En toutes lettres).