Deadline: September 6, 2025
Within the framework of ongoing explorations and reflections in ethnographic fieldwork methodologies, the Arab Council of the Social Sciences’ Ethnography and Knowledge Collective is pleased to invite applications to join the new project, “Restorative Ethnography and Ecologies of Solidarity: A Fieldnote Blackbox through Overbearing Times.”
Since Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and with the expansion of Israeli’s atrocities to Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, we among many social researchers, scholars, artists and ethnographers in our community have shared personal struggles to make sense of what we are experiencing up-close or witnessing from a distance. Several of us have expressed the difficulty – the impossibility even – of writing anything analytical or conceptual at a time such as this, let alone continuing our research as planned while the carnage persists and instability in our region grows.
This project builds upon the EKC’s previous work in collective writing and reflecting (See Ethnographic Diaries page and publication), as well as conceptual exploration of collective reflexivity and research methods tending towards decolonial and engaged ethnography (Reflexivity paper On Reflexivity). It is an invitation to engage together in ethnographic fieldnote making and shared reflection about the process, without the exigency to theorize what these records might tell us about culture, society, or being human in the high-intensity moment of rabid imperial war.
Once selected, participants are invited to share and reflect on their and each other’s fieldnotes, and discuss the project’s trajectory, with a view to collectively commit our entries to a common repository. Like the Blackbox of an airplane, this repository tries to secure the possibility of more rigorous analysis and engagement in the future, when and if the killing and destruction stop, or at least when we (might) feel safer and better in our beings to have more clarity of heart and mind to comprehend what is befalling us.
This project is our experiment in collective restoration and solidarity, a safe forum to elaborate our terms of sharing fieldnotes as a common resource, and an occasion to showcase our work and process within a wider conversation. We hope collecting individual descriptions and depictions of these turbulent overbearing times we’re traversing, and having them exist together side-by-side, even if as fragments, for possible future reference, reflection, interpretation and co-creation, can inspire us to heal our paralysis and resist Israel’s best efforts to bury our stories.
Interested applicants must submit an application on the ACSS Applications Platform. On the applications platform, applicants must select the chapter titled “Restorative Ethnography and Ecologies of Solidarity.”
Applications must include:
Participants will be selected based mostly on the statement of motivation and intent, and notified by mid-September when they become core partners in the project and invited to write, share and discuss over the course of 4 months.
Fieldnotes should be about/from Lebanon, from October 7, 2023 onwards. Accepted formats include writing, audio/visual material or relevant social media posts (only open-source), responding to or representing for the applicant, some aspect of the overbearing events of the past year and a half, as they have witnessed and experienced them, starting with the recent genocide in Palestine.
Fieldnote entries that are the original creation of the applicant can be submitted as they are, in any of the accepted formats mentioned above. However, entries centering social media content that is created by someone other than the applicant, must be accompanied by a written reflection by the applicant, about the selected material. Either way, content should emphasize description/reflection/expression over analysis or conceptualization.
Interested applicants may be of any national provenance from the Arab region, residing in the diaspora or in Lebanon during this period of time, however, with substantial connections to Lebanon either way. They will have an interest or existing practice in ethnography, broadly speaking (the everyday, the emblematic), whether textual or audio/visual. They will be ready to reflect on and experience sharing fieldnote entries within a compassionate and nonjudgemental space that they contribute to building and maintaining, and be curious about engaging with the relevant fieldnotes of others in current or future individual or collaborative work.
A modest remuneration is available for participants, to be determined based on the total number of participants who join.
For clarification or additional information, please contact Samar Kanafani (samarkanafani@gmail.com) and Jamil Bazzi (bazzi@theacss.org). For assistance with the application form, please email Wassim Alam (alam@theacss.org).
