Rethinking research practices and querying knowledge production have emerged as part of a popular movement in the academy to “decolonize” the social and human sciences. If decolonizing has become something of a buzzword, applied to curricula and embraced even by mainstream foundations eager to develop funding streams to support (in name) the intellectual/political project, this does not mean that we should be cynical. Neither, however, should we take decolonization to be a metaphor. This panel is about one of the most consequential implications of the “decolonizing” move: the ways it broadens our thinking about research ethics.
Animated by the particular experiences and concerns of an interdisciplinary group of what one scholar has recently characterized as “region-related” scholars, the panelists discuss how an initial effort to share comparative and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the contemporary politics of knowledge production on and in various parts of the region previously known as the Middle East (in which we all work) came to focus squarely on questions of ethical responsibility. The connection between knowledge production about the region and imperial power interests and agendas has been the subject of decades of critical scholarship but the decolonial turn shifts the focus from power/knowledge formations and questions of representation to the ethics of social research itself. This includes research practices, positionalities, and the political economy of research on a global scale.
What are the silences on the political contexts that shape research and make research possible? What lessons from the indigenous turn can MENA scholars take regarding the perspectives of those being researched, or about “extractive” research that does not benefit local communities? Decolonizing research includes institutional transformation related to exclusions—both of those being researched and some doing the research. If there is increasing concern about ethics in social research and the prioritization of reforming the bureaucratic procedures of university ethics review boards to rigorously account for power imbalances between researchers and researched, greater transparency and safeguards of anonymity, and measures to ensure safety and security for both researchers and research participants in zones of conflict and war, this panel suggests that more is required than tweaking the bureaucratic and technical aspects of current social research practices or modes of knowledge production. Drawing on their own research in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Palestinians in Israeli universities, panelists analyze the urgency of politicizing ethics.
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Dr. Zahra Ali
Drawing on critical feminist perspectives on research ethics and on the meaning and significance of decoloning, I take research on Iraq as a framework to raise essential questions about politics and geopolitics of knowledge production and on what constitutes the global academy today. I shed light on structural, infrastructural, and political dimensions that led to Iraq being researched and theorized outside of its borders and highlights the systemic inequalities existing between scholars based in the US and scholars based in Iraq. I question the production of knowledge and the development of research agendas stemming from institutions based in and tied to an imperial powers that have destroyed the very possibility of the existence of a robust academic life in Iraq. I also propose an alternative research imaginaries that politicize research ethics by putting justice and equality over an obsession for research.
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Nadia Fadil
This paper reflects on the methodological and ethical paradoxes that inform the current, and highly securitzed, anthropological field of Islam in Europe, which largely revolve around a growing refusal to be subjected to the ethnographic gaze of researchers. This refusal expresses itself in many ways among the Muslim community workers in Belgium, where I live and conduct most of my research. Many scholars have explored the convergence between the nexus of knowledge and power in surveillance in ethnographic practices. In so doing, they have critically challenged the idea that representational practices, even by well-intentioned researchers, do not operate in a vacuum but are necessarily entangled with the very same mechanisms of surveillance they seek to undo. Such observations have confronted anthropologists with the question on how to proceed with research, and whether one should abide by these demands. Building on some recent scholarly work that consider refusal as generative (McGranahan 2016, Simpson 2007), I consider the various iterations of refusal as an entry point to study the effects of power and, just as importantly, consider the distinct methodological and ethical considerations that are at stake. Furthermore, refusal also goes along with its accompanying double: ethnographic acceptance, with both the researched and the researcher. Attending carefully to the various iterations of refusal/acceptance, to what I describe here as the “pragmatics” of ethnographic refusal and acceptance, can thus serve as an entry point to study the effects of power and, just as importantly, consider the distinct methodological and ethical considerations that are at stake. I use the term “pragmatics” to highlight the socially situated and deliberative aspects that are involved in accepting and/or refusing the ethnographic encounters. These can be discursive and non-discursive, conscious, and subconscious. In so doing, I am interested in examining and showing how refusal/acceptance works in “making sense in common” (Stengers 2020), which figures here as a condition for the ethnographic encounter.
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Dr. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida
Confronting Silence and Cover-Up of the Colonial Genocide in Libya: Italian Fascism from the Standpoint of its Victims
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, University of New England
Abstract: This paper reflects my thinking on the ethics of silence and the recovery of the history of the concentration camps Italian colonists set up in the early 1930s to suppress resistance. It is based on 15 years of research among the survivors’ oral poetry and folk histories. It challenges the ethics of dominant colonial historiographical paradigm in MENA, which is based on the myth that Italian Fascism did not encompass acts of genocide and mass murder and was therefore a lesser evil than fascism practiced under the German Nazi regime. It focuses on the problems of the Italian cover up, and persistence of silence on violent pasts in the social sciences today. I propose an alternative view on how to decolonize the social sciences and historiography and de-center future ethical research. The revised history of the Fascist genocide in Libya is based on the agency and narrative of the Libyans who survived the camps between 1929-1934 and the critique of Italian fascism and their attempt to cover this up is an example of a decolonized research agenda.
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Dr. Sara Ababneh
Feminist and self-reflexive anthropological and postcolonial researchers have offered critiques of unequal power dynamics in research for decades. Much lip service is given to these kinds of critique that increasingly have been taken up by academics and international organizations alike. After the murder of George Floyd (1973-2020), the language of decolonization has even been used by banks and businesses and has entered the lingo of joint social research projects. Many funding organizations profess to value local knowledge, local leadership, local ownership of knowledge, and to want to promote decolonizing research and research methods. Yet, how much is changing in the field? In this paper I draw on my experience as an academic working at a Jordanian university and conversations with Jordanian colleagues in academia and civil society organizations to suggest that despite the discourse on decolonizing research, little has changed on the ground. In practice, unequal relations continue to be enshrined in funding regulations, university bylaws, and everyday interactions between local researchers and researchers from the global north. Local partners are often treated merely as sources whose knowledge and stories can be taken on without mention or credit of authorship. In this reflection on the politics and ethics of social research in Jordan, I start with the dynamics between individual researchers and then turn to the politics and policies of data ownership in funded projects. Both the power relations between individual researchers as well as those between foreign donors and local researchers indicate who is considered the producer and who the owner of knowledge. I draw on personal experiences from my work in Jordan to think through what this means in terms of power/knowledge structures on the ground and what can be done to resist, and transform, these dynamics.
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Yara Sa'di-Ibraheem
Studying in Israeli universities is the sole choice for most Palestinians living in Israel. While the bulk of critical research on Israeli academia has been written about these institutions' built-in discrimination against Palestinian students, the daily experiences and process of training and knowledge production by Palestinians within Israeli universities and colleges are rarely addressed. Yet the implications of these discriminatory practices for Palestinian students and staff with regard to psychological well-being, experiences of acquiring and producing knowledge, and the ethics of the research in which they participate as assistants, those carrying out surveys, or local informants have received little attention. Israeli universities are anxious spaces and intellectual milieus in which Palestinians study and teach. They are sites for reflecting on positionality and the relationship between ethics and politics in knowledge production. While some collective initiatives by Palestinian students and faculty seek to create separate spheres that allow for agency, more recently, Palestinian lecturers in Israeli universities have been advocating for individuals to become responsible and ethical researchers, examining the conditions under which knowledge is produced, challenging the power dynamics that the structural factors produce in the research process, protecting their Palestinian research subjects, clarifying the motivations and objectives of the research, and identifying plausible benefits of research for Palestinian society.
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Prof. Zakia Salime
Abstract: Why has race in North Africa and the Middle East become such an active zone of theory? Which concepts and frameworks dominate the scholarly debates, and with what political effects? These are consequential questions that the Moroccan case can help answer. A decolonial ethics should begin with the vibrant debates already taking place in Morocco. Moroccans’ engagement with the question of race preceded its discovery as a new field for generating expertise by Western-based scholars and journalists. To decolonize the debate about race and racism in North Africa we need to be both critical about the violences of racism and attentive to the contexts in which knowledge about it is produced and circulated. Without being apologists for anti-Black racism we need to reckon with the diversity of experiences and the specificities of histories of mixing in North Africa, and begin by acknowledging and learning from local initiatives and debates. Can we be cautious about transposing onto North Africa racial binaries and histories of racial segregation in the wake of Atlantic slavery, assuming that whiteness defines North Africa’s racial fabric and denying the region’s roots in Africa? Caution must be exercised when interpreting the complex racial situation in Morocco so as not to impose traveling theories or conceptual paradigms derived from different histories of racialization, especially from the US or Europe. Not only might they distort North African histories and social realities but could be politically consequential because of the geopolitical stakes, whether playing into hegemonic forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism or producing dangerous consequences for precarious contemporary migrants whose “bare life” circumstances (and the reasons for it) could get swept aside when lumped together in discussions about anti-Black racism of other sorts.
