The Ethnography and Knowledge Collective came together in 2016 and was established as an ACSS working group in 2019. The working group is interested in understanding how ethnography can counter dominant regimes of knowledge about/in the Arab societies and produce a more nuanced ethnographic understanding of the Arab region today. The working group proposes that particular modes of attention are vital for ethnographic research, including attention to fear, sound, memory, lies, movement, dreams, and the immersive quality of violence.
The work of the Ethnography and Knowledge Collective includes sub-groups on the following themes:
Ethnography and Medicine in the Arab Region (coordinated by Lamia Moughnieh), which explores the relationship between ethnography and medical/psychiatric knowledge and practice in the Arab region. It is interested in producing research on the methodologies and theories of medical anthropology, as well as creating and expanding the networks of scholars working in medical anthropology in the Arab region.
Ethnography and Commoning (coordinated by Samar Kanafani), a project in its preparatory phase, explores the material, spatial, symbolic and discursive practices of collective/commons initiatives, and under overbearing conditions in the Arab region and the global south. It is interested in how commoning and the politics of social justice can inform more collectivistic ways of doing ethnography and producing knowledge.
Research in Turbulent Times (coordinated by Muzna Al-Masri), invites reflection on doing social science research during turbulent times, in times of crisis, violent conflict, or upheaval. This theme explores what ethnography as a method is uniquely capable of capturing, and what methodological adaptations – like collaborative or participatory research – can achieve. It also explores the ability of ethnography to contribute to visions for the future, as the ethnographic gaze is directed towards, hesitation and ambivalence at the margins of and political turmoil and possibilities that emerging from turbulent sites.
This collaboration between Lamia Moghnieh and Mustafa Abdalla (Medical Anthropologist at Freie Universität Berlin) aimed to create discussion, collaboration and knowledge production on Ethnography and Medicine in Arab majority societies. Building on the Working Group’s interest in ethnography and knowledge production in the Arab world, this project addressed and scrutinized existing concepts, ethnographic tools and gaps in medicine advanced by knowledge practices and productions of ethnographic disciplines like anthropology. With the emergence of the COVID pandemic, the group focused on creating innovative regional and local collaborations as well as collective research projects that contribute to ethnographic knowledge production on medicine, health and disease in the context of the pandemic in the Arab region.
The group led a series of meetings with leading medical anthropologists from the region, and organized two roundtables on COVID 19 and medical anthropology with the ACSS. Additionally, a workshop was held in June 2022 on “Living and Dying in COVID Times: Approaches from Medical Anthropology in the Arab Region” that resulted in the publication of a special issue, and the creation of a network of medical ethnographers and scholars working in the Arab region, from Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt and Palestine.
Engaging with and constantly reflecting on collective writing methodologies, the working group sees this as a long-term and slow process of learning how to write collectively, and generating collective methodologies for research and knowledge production. With this in mind, the working group organizes internal retreats every year to work on and practice these methodologies. The group produced their first collectively written position paper, “On Reflectivity” in 2021, which was translated and published in Arabic in 2024 “عن الانعكاسية” . The working group participated in the ACSS First Academy, offering graduate students and practicing researchers from the region thematic seminars within the scope of the group’s thematic interests and mentoring participants on their research projects.
Participating in the ACSS Academy, offering graduate students and practicing researchers from the region, thematic seminars within the scope of the Collective’s thematic interests and mentoring participants on their research projects.
An experimental project of collective diarization, this work aimed at creating an ethnographic record of the intricacies of the turbulent times members of the group were living through and shed some light on everyday experiences in extraordinary times. The project was led by Muzna Al-Masri and Michelle Obeid, and brought together twelve writers living in Lebanon who between November 2020 and February 2021, wrote dozens of entries and met on a weekly basis for several months. The writing was published in collaboration with the literary magazine, Rusted Radishes, and included the diaries, themes, a timeline, and ongoing conversations that reflected the individuals’ and the group’s navigation through crisis. The project also produced two podcasts that contained a selection of diary entries, in collaboration with director Sabine El Chamaa and Sound Designer Chadi Roukoz.
A series of podcast interviews with scholars from across the region documenting their experiences, inspirations and reflections of their ethnographic practice and of ethnography as a mode of knowledge production.
Before it formally became a working group of the ACSS but with support from it, the Collective had already published a special journal issue entitled “Ethnography as Knowledge in the Arab Region” (Contemporary Levant vol. 2, no. 1), which helped define the agenda of the Collective.
The introduction and abstracts of the issue are also available in Arabic.
To learn more about this working group and explore other publications, visit The Beirut Forum.
The Beirut Forum
Established: 2017
The Beirut Forum serves to publish and disseminate the outputs of the ACSS working groups including SKPP.
Samar Kanafani is a social anthropologist residing and working in Beirut. Her research explores the tactics of dwelling under precarious conditions at the intersection of ruined and renewed urban spaces in Beirut. She has been visiting lecturer at the American University of Beirut and tutor at the University of Manchester, doctoral fellow at the Orient Institute in Beirut, as well as postdoctoral fellow with the Arab Council for Social Sciences (2017-18), and the Institute of Global Prosperity in affiliation with University College London (2019). Her PhD research was titled, “Made to Fall Apart: an ethnography of old houses and urban renewal in Beirut” (2017). She is currently interested in the commons, commoning and efforts to collectivize under late capitalism, and works as a consultant for Mawred al-Thaqafy (Culture Resource).
Muzna Al-Masri is an anthropologist, researcher and consultant and currently Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Urban Lab. Her research interests include everyday political practice and clientelism, the intersection of conflict and politics with humanitarian aid and energy, and the production of ethnographic research in turbulent times. She is also co-founding member of the Ebla Research Collective, a women-led, Lebanon-based collective with a mission to provide locally grounded, collectively produced, and globally engaged knowledge that is responsive to the needs of an unequal world. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Peacebuilding from Eastern Mennonite University in VA, USA.
Lamia Moghnieh is associate professor at the Center for Culture and the Mind at the University of Copenhagen. She is a medical anthropologist, psychotherapist and social worker. Her research broadly looks at the interplay and impact of psychiatry on social understandings of self and illness in postcolonial and post-conflict societies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Her book manuscript Psychiatric Afterlives: Narrating Illness, Gender, and Violence in Lebanon is an archival ethnography of psychiatry, therapeutic subjectivity, and public life in Lebanon from the late 1930s until present day. She received her MSW and her PhD in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2016. She also hold an MA in psychology from the American University of Beirut, and an MA in the Social Sciences from the university of Chicago.
Elizabeth Saleh is assistant professor in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She works at the intersection of political and economic anthropology. Her first long-term ethnographic fieldwork was based in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and culminated in 2014, in her doctoral thesis about the Lebanese wine industry. Elizabeth’s current ethnographic research began in 2015 and is about the lives of underage Syrian waste pickers growing up at a small scrapyard located in a run-down building in Beirut. The book in progress has the working title, Junk Territory: Coming of Age at a Beirut Scrapyard. It focuses on question of value pertaining to the way young waste pickers buttress, engage, and become entangled with Beirut’s infrastructures as well as different economies of recycling and their supply chains.
Zina Sawaf is assistant professor of gender studies at the Lebanese American University. Her research and teaching span the fields of social anthropology, gender studies and Gulf studies. She has written and published on ethnographic practice in the Arab region, the history of anthropology in Lebanon and divorce and intimate life in Saudi Arabia. Her book manuscript provisionally titled Encountering the State: Women and Intimate Lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, is a study of embodied encounters between women and the processes, offices, and officials of the state and its material culture.
Helena Nassif studied public health, journalism and media studies in Beirut, Aarhus, Amsterdam, Swansea and London. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Westminster, with research focused on the construction and reception of popular cultural, moral and spatial telos. Helena’s multi-disciplinary research and career in media and culture extend to the non-governmental sector, the aid industry, television and documentary film production, program design and evaluation, training and education, and consultancy. From 2015-2017, Nassif was a visiting fellow researcher at the University of Marburg and at the Orient Institute in Beirut, working on a book project that explores the role of memory in mass and oppositional cultures in the Arab East. She is the Executive Director of Culture Resource (Al Mawred Al Thaqafy) since September 2017.
Michelle Obeid is a social anthropologist at the University of Manchester. She has conducted ethnographic research in Lebanon and the United Kingdom focusing on issues related to postwar socialities, livelihoods, state and borders, migration, home, kinship and gender. She is author of Border Lives: An Ethnography of a Lebanese Town in Changing Times (2019), and is currently completing her second manuscript, ‘Now We are Here!’ Palestinians Anchoring in London. Her new research explores food activism in the context of economic collapse and anthropogenic climate change in Lebanon.
