Manshiyet Nasir, Cairo. Picture by Joseph Hill / Flickr.com. Some rights reserved (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).This is another part in a series curated by Mona Abaza on the dilemmas and contradictions researchers encounter in undertaking research in the Middle East. The idea of listening to social scientists on the processes of the production of knowledge has been inspired from Michael Burawoy’s concept of ‘public sociology’, which he initiated and was followed by other sociologists who carried out further interviews with social scientists in ‘Global Dialogue’.
These articles attempt to focus on questions of methodology, equally, on the obstacles encountered by researchers when undertaking fieldwork in enduring political upheavals. It will also attempt to highlight the multiple and varied trajectories and voices which a younger generation of social scientists in the Middle East have been confronting.
Egypt = Politics?
Towards the end of my BA degree in anthropology at the American University in Cairo, I was introduced to a new body of literature, namely that which deals with human-animal relations (some of these fall under posthumanism while others don’t). I gradually came to appreciate, even fall under the spell of the animal and its worlds, and the opening of our thought and categories once we try to step outside the overused category of “human”. I felt a freshness, newness, and a breath-taking inspiration whenever I was assigned to read a book on forests, trees, dogs, or even mushrooms. Growing with the same ideas, similar views, and quite homogeneous body of literature for four years, this new theoretical oeuvre seemed very intriguing and I slowly felt that this is what I want to continue pursuing and experimenting with in my MA research/thesis.
