Fourth Arab Social Science Report

Humanities in the Arab World in Times of Conflict and Change

The fourth Arab Social Science Report seeks to address knowledge production in the humanities in the Arab world in the twenty-first century, focusing on the decade from 2011 to 2021. It is based on the premise that revolutionary movements that swept, and continue to sweep, the Arab region have caused an existential and epistemological upheaval in Arab societies, and opened new spaces for expression and action, spaces that benefited from the technological revolution and social media networks; and that despite, or perhaps due to, successive defeats, disasters, and political and economic crises, there is a remarkable momentum in knowledge initiatives and contributions in the Arab world.

The report adopts a critical approach to knowledge production in the humanities, aiming to achieve the following objectives: 1) monitoring and analyzing key research trends, topics, and intellectual contributions to the humanities in the 21st century; 2) highlighting outstanding knowledge production in the Arab world, especially in the last decade, that is, subsequent to revolutionary movements that swept the region in 2011; 3) identifying obstacles and challenges for scholars in the field; and 4) coming up with some preliminary questions.

This report benefits from the rich insights of the three previous reports, and builds on information and statistics provided by the databases of the Arab Social Science Monitor,the background papers written specifically to enrich the report, and a variety of other sources.

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Hoda Elsadda is professor of English and comparative literature at Cairo University, an activist for women’s rights and co-founder of the Women and Memory Forum (www.wmf. org.eg). She previously held a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Manchester (2005-2011), and was Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW) in the UK. She was 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 University Press and Syracuse University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation and the Making of Archives (Cairo Papers in Social Science, 35:1, 2018).

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