Field Research and Its Challenges in the MENA Region

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

This roundtable will engage with the present challenges that researchers face when conducting field research in the MENA region. Political scientists focused on the region have long engaged in a robust discussion about the ethics of fieldwork and the positionality of researchers in the field (POMEPS 2014, Clark & Cavatorta 2018), most recently including the Research Ethics in the Middle East and North Africa (REMENA) working group and conversations organized by the Arab Political Science Network. While ethical considerations as well as subject and researcher safety are of paramount consideration, we seek to expand on these discussions by highlighting some of the practical barriers facing research on regional political dynamics and discussing possible means of surmounting them. At a basic level, security concerns — whether in the form of active conflicts or authoritarian repression — impose limitations on what scholars from the region can safely study and the ability of non-native scholars to undertake field visits, even for language acquisition. In the same vein, extensive state surveillance in some countries makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the anonymity of interview partners. Adding to this, methodological trends in the social sciences put pressure on graduate students to arrive with (or quickly obtain) extensive training in statistical analysis, potentially excluding applicants from the region who lack access to this training at the undergraduate level while crowding out acquisition of language skills and country knowledge for those from outside the region. These trends can make it hard to put together a competitive application for a diminishing number of field research grants; even where funding is available, the prohibitively high cost of living in some countries (esp. the Arab Gulf states) in turn influences case selection strategies, reinforcing blind spots in the research agenda. Finally, the academy’s precarious employment situation can incentivize junior scholars to obtain “marketable” knowledge as insurance against the job market, or vulnerable to political pressure on highly polarized topics. These trends create hurdles and barriers for researchers to empirically study phenomena in the MENA region and incentivize graduate students to study subjects unrelated to the Middle East. This roundtable will discuss and reflect on these issues by drawing on the experience from participants as graduate students, researchers and supervisors as well as suggest solutions to above problems.

Sub Unit

• Division 57: Middle East and North African Politics

Chair

• Lisa Anderson Columbia University

Presenters

• Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd University of Cambridge

• Andrew Leber Tulane University

• Dana El Kurd University of Richmond

• Molly Hickey Harvard University

• Mohamed-Dhia Hammami Maxwell School, Syracuse University

• Marsin Rahim Alshamary Boston College

• Hind M Ahmed Zaki University of Connecticut