This paper examines the tensions between anthropology, academia, feminism, and activism in the Me Too movement context. While the Me Too movement expands and intensifies around the world, Egypt witnesses its episode. This year, around one hundred Egyptian women, anonymously reported Ahmed Bassam Zaki for allegedly sexually assaulting them. This feminist tsunami sent out its waves across the Egyptian, Arab, and international mainstream media outlets, social media channels, and enticed an intense public debate. This opened the gate to hundreds of anonymous accounts of sexual assaults by Egyptian men. Within the Egyptian community in Washington DC, reports emerged of two Egyptian human rights activists assaulting Egyptian female activists and asylee seekers. I found myself as an anthropologist, a feminist, and an activist overwhelmed by moral, theoretical, and methodological dilemmas. How do we reconcile the anthropological commitment to the disfranchised and the subaltern when the perpetrators are also vulnerable? How do we give voice, representation, and agency to the victim while keeping her anonymity? How do we ensure rigorous research methodology and credible sexual harassment reporting without further jeopardizing the women at the intersection of a complex matrix of oppression? What does this movement reveal about the current system of the pursuit of justice? What can a feminist perspective to justice offer to the world right now? I use ethnographic data collected within the last four months among Egyptians in Washington, DC to reflect on these questions.

“What did you expect? You needed to have some emotional distance in order to have more analytical clarity” was a senior colleague’s response after a talk my co-author and I gave a few years ago about our research involving certain actors during the Egyptian uprising and its aftermath. In the talk, we described how the arc of our research and fieldwork mirrored the arc of the Egyptian uprising itself, as we grappled with the emotional impact of traumatic experiences and major setbacks that culminated in the retrenchment of authoritarianism in the country. We also spoke about how we were first met by euphoria and enthusiasm from our interlocutors, followed by caution and suspicion and then by outright fear and paranoia, as many of our interlocutors ended up in prison, were exiled or significantly traumatized and depressed. In my intervention, I hope to investigate the role played by emotions in our academic endeavors, particularly those of us engaged in different iterations of what has been described as engaged scholarship or academic activism. Some of the questions revolving around academic activism have become more salient in recent years in light of the current crackdown on both activists and academics in many countries in the Middle East, as well as with the rise of academic activism in the US under the Trump Administration and in other parts of the world witnessing waves of fascist politics (Brazil, India among others). Relying on germane works, from Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual (Gramsci, 1992) to Foucault’s theorization of intellectuals and power (Deleuze and Foucault, 1977), and from bell hooks’s notion of theory as sanctuary and liberatory practice (hooks, 1991) to Sara Ahmed’s affect theory (Ahmed, 2013), along with insights from feminist Science and Technology Studies (Haraway, 1988 and 2016), I argue that the hyphen separating, or rather conjoining, the “activist-academic” is constantly inhabited and occupied, but not without tensions stemming from how we negotiate our emotional investments within the conventions of academic research and writing.

What is a ‘fieldwork’ after 2010-2011 uprisings in the Southwest Asia and North Africa region (SWANA)? As a 2011 protestor and grassroots organizer in Syria, I never had access to ‘fieldwork’ until popular protests erupted. Since exile in 2014, my understanding and experience of ‘fieldwork’ changed and therefore I am finding myself rethinking my positionality and ethical dynamics with my interlocutors, many of whom are still caught up in limbo and awaiting resettlements. What is a ‘fieldwork’ for an activist-scholar in exile? What are the questions and issues that native researchers who gone exile should be asking and thinking about? What does it matter? In this intervention, I reflect on my everyday experience on my 8-month fieldwork in Beirut between 2018-2019 as an activist-scholar in exile by attempting to think and address some of these questions.