Eco-Systems of Research in the Middle East and North Africa
Special Session IX-06, sponsored byArab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), 2021 Annual Meeting
On Friday, December 3 at 2:00 pm
Special Session Description
Stalled economies, shrinking public spheres, decreasing resources for public institutions and increasing securitization and privatization of data collection --- this is the prevailing dismal picture of the MENA region and the discouraging context of knowledge production and Higher Education. Add to this the global pandemic and resultant restrictions on mobility and convening and the future for research appears bleak indeed.
And yet, research continues to take place, and there are lively online discussions and burgeoning portals for the production and dissemination of analysis and commentary on the politics, economics and social transformations of the region. This creative flow blurs the boundaries between academia and media, between academia and activism and between the institutional and the interstitial.
What then are the patterns and trends, constraints and potentials in current research contexts and practices in the MENA region. What is the present and future of research in the region in the light of unfolding crises, the fall of old orders and the rise of new hegemonies? How are research communities and institutions responding to the heightened demands for new knowledge in the context of deteriorating infrastructures, and decreasing resources?
Speakers will address multiple aspects of these questions including: The current challenges to higher education and research institutions; new possibilities emerging from new actors, interstitial collectivities, and thought-communities; the emergence of new audiences for new types of knowledge and the changing connections between academia, activism and policy. Finally, what are the possibilities for constructive and ethical collaboration between researchers based in different locations – in the MENA region, in diasporic spaces, in the Global South, in the Global North? Given the highly variegated landscape of knowledge production across the region, specific cases and examples will highlight local complexities as well as regional commonalities.
This intervention will describe an on-going collective project aimed at improving social science research on, and in, the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Born of the conviction that no single researcher or research team can ignore or transcend the incentives and hindrances their research environment imposes, this effort not only examines the particular context that shapes—and often distorts—decisions about research in the region but endeavors to propose responses that reflect the ethical responsibilities that researchers have to each other and to the broader academic communities of which they are a part.
To that end, it has taken on:
(a) identifying concrete impediments—institutional, economic, political, sociological—to the conduct of social science research in the region;
(b) proposing strategies for addressing such impediments and promoting social science research there;
(c) recommending mechanisms for greater co-operation among social science communities within and beyond the region;
(d) developing specific guidelines for the ethical conduct of research, especially in and on communities under duress and in circumstances of disparate power relations;
(e) fostering shared perceptions of the value of social science research and of the circumstances that advance it, within the region and beyond.
This paper situates the struggle for academic freedom and university autonomy at Boğaziçi University within the broader framework of post truth. Post truth is defined as a disinvestment from long-established norms regulating what counts as true, without introducing new criteria in their place. As such, it is a state of constant disorientation. The main argument is that post truth has a material power basis: it is neither an intellectual problem, nor one that can be solved by recourse to liberal rights. By briefly showing how neoliberalism, the New Right and biopolitical governmentality connect and reinforce each other, the paper asks what academic freedom can signify given the new game of power. What is it about the current political conjuncture that makes universities a particularly important target for right wing politics, not only by “Eastern despots,” but also by the supposedly democratic governments of the West? What forms of power and domination intersect in such offensives against universities? What do the protests and their particular forms and language reveal about the current state of universities? What kind of future do academic struggles harbor?
I will share some thoughts on the current state of knowledge production within the social sciences and history in the Gulf Arab States. Particularly, I will focus on what I perceive as the contrasting fortunes of knowledge production in Arabic versus English language, particularly focusing on the political economy of knowledge production. The rise of the satellite campus Western universities and a new generation of scholars in formal academic institutions writing almost exclusively in English will be contrasted with the crisis facing formally institutionalized knowledge production in Arabic. I will also talk about the new forms of public pedagogies and knowledge production in Arabic that are currently flourishing outside of formally institutionalized academic venues, using social media mediums such as Youtube, Instagram, and blogs. I will reflect on what this entails for continuity, ruptures, and accumulation of knowledge production in the region, as well as the tensions and interactions between knowledge production in the two languages. This includes the differences and intersections in topics, discourses, readerships, and motivations for knowledge production.
Recognizing the institutional and disciplinary constraints of the neoliberal academe in the Global South, particularly in MENA and Egypt, this paper narrates experiments aiming at the imbrication of diverse practices and networks of knowledge production in and beyond the University. Its focus is two spaces of knowledge production and engagement, namely the classroom and its outskirts within the University on the one hand, and a public open space in a working class neighborhood on the other. Within the University, I contend that - though the classroom is constrained by institutional and disciplinary imperatives, both material and immaterial - the thinking and practicing of knowledge emerges within multiple tensions and frictions relating to questions about the coloniality of paradigms and tools, social relevance, and the effects of disillusionment with critical practices. How the classroom can be rendered an otherwise enabling the merging intellectual and political projects is a question I engage in this contribution. Beyond the University, public and open sites for the production of critical knowledge are experiments that also emerge from and through the interstices of political, economic and social frictions and tensions. How to engender paths through which such spaces may (or may not) connect to the classroom reveal the limits of the University as a key domain for knowledge, but also pose possibilities for challenging the parameters on which the edifice of commodification and de-politicization of knowledge within the walls of the University have been erected.
Several studies, including ACSS reports, have documented key features of the infrastructure of social science knowledge in the Arab World. Based on these reports and other data, this paper identifies some of the institutional and perspectivist issues that have special bearing on the effort to decolonize social science. Colonial structures in the social sciences continue to be evident today in the dynamics that affect the strength and durability of local or regional scholarly networks; the extent to which research question are rooted in local concerns; the question of “grounded theory;” and the communicative hierarchies of global structures of knowledge. The paper proceeds to outline the role played by protest movements, national crises, and environments of general uncertainty in both fostering and inhibiting communities of knowledge, as well as some elements of a social science that uses these transformations in ways that may foster decolonial perspectives and a more even ecosystem of scholarly communication.
