Research Themes
The project will focus around the following three thematic areas:
Research and exploitation in communities under duress
Foreign researchers too often briefly visit countries in the global south, vacuum up data, and leave without ever investing in local people or infrastructure, or even sharing their findings locally. These patterns of “safari science” and “parachute research” have clearly been documented in biomedical science but are also replicated in the social sciences in what is sometimes called “drive by anthropology.” As Egyptian sociologist Mona Abaza argued in the context of the Arab Spring, “the ongoing international academic division of labor whereby the divide between the so called ‘theoreticians’ of the North and the ‘informants’ who are also ‘objects of study’ in the South continues to grow.”
As research has become more hazardous, whether in circumstances of violent conflict, among displaced people, or under hostile governments, the problem has been exacerbated by the increasing employment of local research assistants, informants and “fixers,” often underemployed students of recent graduates and rarely credited with having participated in the research at all.
This theme will explore the prevalence of “drive-by” research, its impact on the lives of research subjects, on the scientific integrity of the scholarship, and the careers of those who conduct the research.
Research as a modern “anti-politics machine”
The form and content of contemporary social science research is often shaped by a desire to avoid difficult political issues. Authorities often prevent research on subjects deemed matters of “national security” or limit research to issues bearing on “national priorities.” Likewise, researchers themselves often deny political intent or implication in social science research to secure access to research sites. These efforts by both researchers and research subjects in the Middle East to “depoliticize” the practice characterize research as an effort to find, as James Ferguson put it, "technical solutions to technical problems." This serves to reinforce the privileging of highly technical social science research methods that obviate the need for a physical presence or deep training and familiarity with the language and history of the region.
This theme examines the significance of methodology, from survey research to experimental design, in shaping research agendas and findings; implications of the “securitization” of research for choices of topics and methods; and the role of Institutional Review Boards in encouraging the transformation of social communities into collections of “human subjects.”
Research scholars, government consultants and policy experts
Policy-makers around the world, and especially in the Middle East, often prefer to rely on paid contractors for their research needs: such contractors may produce findings and recommendations more quickly and with less political consequence than their university-based scholarly counterparts. Particularly in contexts where university-based researchers are poorly paid, scholarly research is poorly funded, and academic freedom is uncertain, the proliferation of global consulting companies has not only provided lucrative opportunities for a particular kind of researcher—often a recent university graduate—but has undermined the influence and authority of independent university-based researchers. The commercialization of research in the Middle East—including the deployment of local for-profit survey research firms to conduct research for foreign scholars and students—may exacerbate the uneven availability of information and the growth of secret or proprietary data and analysis, while discouraging adhering to scientific criteria of peer review, scholarly disinterestedness and critical scrutiny of both researchers and their clients.
This theme will assess the role of international consultants in providing research to public and private authorities, the funding landscape for independent scholarly research, and the career trajectories of social scientists in the Middle East and North Africa.