1- Introduction
During the first weeks of my doctoral studies in November 2016, I attended one of the mandatory courses designed for sociology and anthropology students, the ones who plan to carry out ethnographic fieldwork during their studies. “You should prepare forms of consent before doing interviews with your informants, and ask them to sign the forms,” said the instructor. “I cannot,” I said. “Then you might fabricate the interviews,” she said. “I can also fabricate the signatures,” I replied.
The fabrication of the interviews (or the signatures) is indeed one of the main violations of academic integrity. Academia should be based on true information gathered from our interlocutors in the field. But what if our interlocutors do not read and/or write or if it places then in a sensible situation due to the socioeconomic or political context?
I encountered these problems not only during my fieldwork among Coptic Christians in Egypt but also while founding a research centre in Cairo called
SARD. In this proceeding paper, I discuss the story of a public research centre that I have started by the end of 2019. I have firstly presented this paper in an international seminar held in Cairo about “Public Space, Public Sphere, and Publicness” in March 2020. The conference, which was organized by the Centre d’Études et de Documentation Economiques, Juridiques, et Sociales (CEDEJ) and Sophia University in Japan with the support of the Japanese Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS), helped me a lot to conceptualize my understanding of the public role of my research centre.
After introducing the Cairene neighbourhood of Shubra, where the research centre is located, I will give a glimpse of the mission and the objectives of the centre. Afterwards, I will trace the risks together with the moral paradoxes that face similar research (centres) in general. The latter sections will be investigated in light of the first experimental project that was carried out by SARD between November 2019 and March 2020.
2- Shubra: A Neighbourhood in Cairo
Shubra is a neighbourhood located in northern Cairo with approximately 600,000 inhabitants. As will be later argued, Shubra has been a hub for academic research during the previous few decades. For example, sociologist Asef Bayat lived in Shubra for some time, in which he observed how “[m]inarets of cross and crescent conjoin sometimes in juxtaposed proximity, stating each other in resolve and rectitude” [Bayat 2017: 13]. In short, Bayat argues about a cosmopolitan neighbourhood where Muslims and Coptic Christians live together, eat, and peacefully pray their different rituals next to each other.
As someone who is born in Shubra, and who lived most of his life in this neighbourhood, I can closely observe Bayat’s argument. Yet, this does not mean that Copts and Muslims are not aware of how their different religious beliefs contribute to tensions and competitions of who hold the true faith and who will join heaven in the afterlife. Sometimes, as Julia Droeber [2012] argues in her article, which she wrote about Muslim-Christian relations in Jordan, foreign researchers fall into the trap of presenting communities of different religious and/ethnic belongings as a unified one to counter stereotypes of sectarianism and discrimination in the Middle East. In a similar vein, in her article, sociologist Hyun Jeong Ha [2016] argued about the macroaggressions that Copts encounter during their everyday lives in Shubra [see also, Gauvain 2013]. Although Ha did not explicitly mention Shubra in her article, but her talking about a neighbourhood that is known for its tight relationships between Muslims and Christian in Cairo directly and solely signify Shubra.
Beyond the essentialization of religious identities in how they derive people’s lives, I always think about the other concepts and practices that bring people together rather than setting them apart. During my doctoral studies and my life in Shubra in general, I should admit that the hegemonic interpretations of religious texts and beliefs cultivate differences between people more than the opposite. Hence, my doctoral studies fieldwork has been based in public spaces like coffeehouses, weed gatherings, wedding parties, football games, and bars where people forget about their religious belongings, or where at least they keep silent about them. In this regard, I have become interested in concepts like sohobiyya (friendship), gira (neighbourliness), ‘ishrah (cohabitation). These words and other ones reflect ways of (be-)coming together in different public spaces that supersede and resist the latent violence of religious differences in Cairo and in Egypt in general.
To be sure, this paper is not about my fieldwork in particular, but more about how the idea of my public research centre in Shubra has emerged out of people’s ways of becoming together. As will be later emphasized, despite of the many books and articles written about Shubra, there is not a place where people can document their own stories and determine what concepts and practices are important for them. As trained ‘professional’ researchers, and whether we liked it or not, we have research agendas connected to the agencies that fund our projects and/or to the universities from which we come. The aim of the research centre of SARD, however, is to have an open-access public site where people can both produce and consume an archive for their daily stories.
3- Mission & Objectives
SARD is an abbreviation for Shubra’s Archive for Research and Development, and is located at an old family flat that has been abandoned for nearly eight years.
With the help of family members and friends and since August 2019, I have been trying to convert the flat into a public research center.
SARD has three pillars that signify its name. First, the essential aim of SARD is the production of an archive of podcasts, short movies, and written papers about popular (sha’biyyah) neighbourhoods in Cairo and in other Egyptian cities. SARD (auf is an Arabic noun and verb that can be translated in English into narration or to narrate. It is a word that reflects a continuous act of storytelling the gives power to marginalized and silenced interlocutors.
Accordingly, SARD seeks to raise and promote the motto that “anything old is valuable and deserves to be told.” Through providing a public space for the inhabitants of the popular neighbourhoods, the nascent research centre gives a special attention to the means by which researchers can learn about/from the most mundane aspects of people’s everyday lives including, for instance, cooking, playing football, shopping, and praying.
Second, with respect to the research pillar, SARD aims at building a database of theses and dissertations submitted to public universities in Egypt. By translating and editing them, SARD will situate research projects written in Arabic within the global job market of publications, fellowships, and professorships. Third, as reflection to the development pillar, SARD will try to organize courses and workshops for those who are interested in pursuing academic careers outside of Egypt. By teaching scholars how to write proposals, how to contact universities, and how to learn languages, SARD will act as a bridge between Egyptian and non-Egyptian scholarship.
As hinted above, Shubra is not known for having any research center that works on archiving and documenting the history of such a neighborhood in particular or other ones in general. Moreover, there are not human rights organizations or cultural centers, where people can gather and discuss issues related to their daily lives, as it is the case with other Cairene areas like Zamalek, Garden City, and Heliopolis. The latter, which are usually defined as the elitist high-class areas of Cairo, are also the sites where foreign researchers, journalists, filmmakers, and academics usually reside. Hence, SARD suggests that this geographical distribution contributes to a spatial inequality regarding the venues where research and academic work can take place. Such absence in its turn influences the making of public research centres that seek to transfer knowledge production and, more importantly, consumption to popular neighbourhoods such as Shubra.
4- The First Project
In October 2019, SARD received its first grant from the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS). My friend and colleague Mohammed Ezz and I applied to earn one of the grants, which are dedicated for the topic of “Youth” and “Urban Spatial Inequalities” in the Arab World.’ We proposed with the aim of producing a short ethnographic film about the neighbourhood of Shubra during the remarkable 18 days of the 2011 uprisings. The film is the result of four workshops we conducted with male and female inhabitants in Shubra. Entitled “18 Days in Shubra,” this was the film’s short synopsis: “Nine Years after the Egyptian uprisings in 2011, some inhabitants of Shubra discuss why they (dis-)liked this moment of change.
Particularly during the 18 days between January 25th and February 11th, they remember how their everyday lives were affected.”
The proposal, which Mohamed and I sent to ACSS, integrated the previously mentioned main concept of SARD. In this regard, the proposed project of the film aimed at paying special attention to the smallest details that encountered people during the 18 days of the 2011 uprisings in Egypt. Unfortunately, however, the film, which was concluded in March 2020, will not be made available to the public. To preserve the security of the participants, the film will be only viewed upon request.
The consecutive processes of researching, shooting, and editing the film were never smooth. During the first workshop, which was held in November 2019, some people got afraid when they saw the camera. One of the participants decided to leave, and another opened the camera of his phone and began to visually record the conversations, which panicked other participants. Moreover, two of the participants were not actively participating in the discussions and left the meeting room several times for different excuses. And we (Mohammed and I) appreciated this. As social researchers who are also local ones, we appreciate when people decide to remain silent and invisible. Giving the previously mentioned atmosphere of fear and mistrust, we appreciate those who decided not to appear in the film from the beginning.
The editing and producing phases of the film were not better with respect to the securitization of public research in Egypt. In the credits of the film, Mohamed and I decided to mention only the first names of the participants. We also promised the participants not to share the film with anyone or any research institute, unless they give us their oral and/or written permissions. The participants also mentioned that they will have to ask their parents, partners, and close friends about (the limits of) the visibility (i.e. publicness) of the film. Our film, which is supposed to become public to everyone, was kept as a secret similar to the memory of the 2011 uprisings. Both the film and the uprisings, in the words of historian Henrice Altink, have turned out to become “public secrets” that their participants have empirically experienced, but are not able to tell, or are afraid to stimulate relevant modes of remembrance.
5- Moral puzzles of (be) coming public
The problems that face SARD during its first experimental project are also related to its first months of functioning in general. These problems are mainly about the ways by which the stakeholders of any research center organize their relationships with their surrounding spheres, that is, the Egyptian government and the inhabitants of the district where the center is located. I argue that these relationships embrace moral puzzles that I seek to highlight and share with mentors and colleagues in academic and non-academic circles. Rather than resolving such puzzles, I suggest that meanings of public space (and research) should include and appreciate aspects of invisibility and silence and not only the visibility and the transparency that are usually connected to definitions of publicness as well as codes of academic integrity and ethics.
It should be noted that choosing this legal status or any other one for SARD is ultimately accompanied by the changing of the name of the center from “Shubra’s Archive for Research and Documentation” to “Shubra’s Archive for Research and Development”. In any case, the letter “D” in SARD should have changed to something that the government likes to see. As noted above, following the 2013 coup, the Egyptian government has launched a renaissance project to develop and to renovate the whole country. In doing so, the government has established “Egypt’s 2030” sustainable development plan, by which it plans to “develop a competitive, balanced and diversified economy. Supporting innovation and knowledge, social justice, economic development, and the environment.” Hence, for pragmatic and political reasons, when submitting the official documents of SARD to MOSA, a few lawyers asked me to copy paste the latter plan from governmental websites. “This will help us to execute the procedures faster”, one of the lawyers said.
It might be a good idea to hide the purpose of one’s research from ruling institutions, especially amid the concurrent high levels of securitization in Egypt.
However, when the purpose of a research project is its publicness (i.e. visibility), as it is the case with SARD, the problematic of transparency turns to be more intense and compelling to deal with. As repetitively mentioned before as well, people in Shubra are not used to researchers and to foreigners in general. More importantly, people sometimes perceive researchers to be spies sent by foreign countries to threaten their homeland. While this atmosphere of mistrust divides the researchers and their interlocutors into a dichotomy of “us” and “them,” I wish to blur such distinction through SARD. The current and main task of SARD is allowing those who always produce our empirical knowledge to consume such knowledge as well. Again, I always believe that academic research should be firstly analyzed from the household, the market, the coffeehouse, the factory, where researchers begin their journeys, and before they confine themselves to their libraries and offices to write and read.
To close with a note of hope, I wish to build a bridge of trusteeship among the inhabitants of the street where SARD is established together with the inhabitants of the neighborhood of Shubra in general. Moreover, I have already started to organize trips for non-Egyptian friends coming from abroad to Shubra, with the aim of cultivating a constellation, which will bring them with Shubra’s population and to build a comprehensive network of cohabitation, friendship, and neighborliness. Research ethics, I imagine, should be regarded as a grounded security critical theory, which counters hegemonic security discourses of the state.
Before asking people to sign forms of consent, as the instructor asked me to do in the introduction of this paper and as universities require its students to do in general, I think that people should attain and perform the necessary methodological research tools to be real and essential shareholders of any academic article, book chapter, or monograph.
6- Concluding Remarks
In this short proceeding paper, I introduced the problematic gap between the production and the consumption of knowledge, especially with respect to a project like SARD that seeks to build a people-oriented archive. To fill this gap, I suggest an alternative reading of academic research ethics and integrity that require students to be transparent about their research objectives. I also provided a critique of the euro-centric concept of public sphere, which similarly refers to the importance of being and becoming visible and loud. Defining how such transparency and visibility lead to moral puzzles while carrying out research projects, I suggest that definitions of public space and public research should be an intrinsic part of an ongoing grounded critical security theory that makes people real and essential shareholders of any academic work.
References
Altink, H. 2019. Public Secrets: Race and Colour in Colonial and Independent
Jamaica. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Bayat, A. 2017. Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab