Ethnographic Experiments from and with the Arab World

Call for Papers
Symposium and Workshop 
Ethnographic Experiments from and with the Arab World
15-16 December, 2025
Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
Doha, Qatar

Ethnographic research—both as a genre of writing and as an all-encompassing and embodied way of knowing the world that transcends mere methodological concerns—in the Arab world, as is elsewhere, have long been haunted by the field’s colonial legacies and its complicity with imperial statecraft (Asad 1973; Abu-Lughod 1989; Deeb and Winegar 2012; Bishara 2023). This colonial and imperial entanglement has marked the epistemological anxieties shaping the uptake of the field of anthropology and the practice of ethnographic research in the Arab world, not least of which manifesting in the discipline’s complicity in the so-called “Global War on Terror” (Gill 2007; Forte 2012). 

In light of this, anthropologists with ties to the Arab world have found themselves grappling with these realities through developing different methodological and theoretical innovations that seek to dissolve, disrupt, and trouble the discipline’s complicity with empire, while simultaneously attending to the urgent social and political concerns shaping their worlds (Al-Masri et al 2024). These interventions have included a turn to sensory ethnography (Al-Masri 2017; 2019), to the thresholds of ethnographic research during war time (Moghnieh 2017; El Dardiry and Hermez 2020), to engagements with post-war ecologies and biology (Khayyat 2022; Dewachi 2022), and more experimental endeavours like patchwork ethnography (Günel and Watanabe 2024), that attempt to grapple with the legal and political limitations of classic ethnographic methodologies.

This symposium seeks to bring together scholars working in/on/from/with the Arab world who are engaged in developing innovative ethnographic practices and critical contemplations on broader epistemological concerns within the discipline of anthropology. In particular, we seek to bring scholars whose research agenda does not only emerge from the political and existential urgencies of the present moment, but who are also grappling with the incommensurability between the ethnographic practices of the discipline’s older generation of scholars and the contemporary crises shaping this present moment. The symposium attempts to engage with on-going debates within the discipline in order to sketch the contours of a potential anthropology that critically centers traditions that have been relegated, if not silenced, in those classical anthropological debates, not least of which are those traditions from Arab world? In doing so however, it does not propose an essentialist claim for an exceptionally Arab knowledge, and rather situates such alternative departures in an on-going dialogue with critical intellectual traditions in the Global South and among critical scholarship from the North Atlantic (e.g Mbembe 2001; Hurston 1935; Du Bois 1996 [1903]; Coronil 1996; Jobson 2020). We ponder, how can thinking of ethnographic practice from Arab world help us recapture the liberatory humanistic potential of anthropological knowledge, and in turn, how can such knowledge reimagine the Arab world itself?

To that end then, this symposium contributes to this movement and seeks to critically engage with classical epistemological debates in anthropology by locating them within the diverse intellectual traditions shaping the Arab world and its shifting geopolitical realities. These debates include, but are not limited to, questions of scale and distance (Rachik 2016; Yates-Doerr 2017; Hammoudi 2019), ethnographic excess (Das 1998, Gandolfo and Ramon Ochoa 2017), critique (Khatibi 2000; Asad 2003; Fassin 2017), ethnographic refusal (Ortner 1995; Simpson 2007; McGranahan 2020), and the limits and possibilities of comparison in anthropology (Candea 2019; Strathern 2020). Some of the key questions this symposium engages with, include: 

1) What alternative ethnographic tools and practices can we imagine responding to the current climate of genocidal violence in the Arab world, whether settler colonial or that under the banner of the “state,” and what are the epistemological questions that different ethnographic practices may critically respond to in such contexts of genocidal violence?

2) How can thinking of anthropology in the Arab world trouble the colonial and imperial complicity of the field and reclaim the emancipatory potential of ethnographic praxis? To that end, what can we learn from critical indigenous and black scholarship in North America (e.g. Harrison 2011; Kauanui 2018; Simpson 2020; Thomas 2019), as well as critical turns such as subaltern studies in South Asia and Latin America? 

3) How can certain sites and practices within the broader Arab tradition, intellectual and lived, allow us to conceptualize alternative and innovative ethnographic methodologies that rethink classical anthropological debates around sociality, self and other, and relationality? At the same time, what are some of the ethical and epistemological limitations of this disciplinary tradition and how do we grapple with it in our present scholarship?

The impetus of organizing this symposium is to cultivate a sustainable and critical community of scholars who are engaged in developing their own research agendas alongside scholars with shared political and pedagogical concerns, and who are also committed to cultivating an anthropological knowledge production of the Arab world. To that end, participants will be invited to an open symposium to be held at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, followed by a closed workshop where we will collectively workshop each other’s papers in preparation for submission to a special issue or section to a peer-reviewed journal such as Cultural Anthropology.

We invite interested participants—particularly PhD Candidates, Postdocs, and Early Career Scholars—to submit a short bio (150-200 words) and paper abstract (300-400 words) to eeaw_conf@dohainstitute.edu.qa by August 10th, 2025. 

Submissions in both English and Arabic will be considered. 

Decisions will be communicated to accepted papers by September 10th, 2025, after which confirmed participants must circulate their papers with the invited participants by November 10th, 2025. 

Participation in the symposium is contingent on receiving the full paper drafts (approx. 8000 words including bibliography) by the deadline. 

Travel, accommodation, and meals will be covered by the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

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