In 2019 the ACSS and the American University of Beirut (AUB) launched an oral history project entitled: The Arab Oral History Archive: Gender, Alternative Histories, and the Production of Knowledge (GOHA). The aim of the project is to create new collections of oral histories that support a feminist multidisciplinary critique of knowledge production practices and research methodologies. It also seeks to create a more inclusive and critical body of new situated knowledge, in, from, and about the region.
Activities of the GOHA project revolve around the following:
ACSS led the documentation of the oral histories of Arab Women from the generation of the 1970s, a collection of 110 interviews with professional and activist women from Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan and Syria, who were socially and politically active in the 70s. The aim of the interviews is to document women’s experiences during this historical moment marked by the rise of state feminism and the building of independent women’s movements.
Gendering the Archive Working Group (GAWG) was established at ACSS as part of the GOHA project. It brings together researchers and activists from diverse fields including history, literary criticism, sociology, anthropology, and feminist studies. The group is engaged in rethinking power dynamics in knowledge production in local and global contexts from a gender lens, exploring the relationship between material and digital archives; the gendered labor of archival knowledge production; the affective practices that shape archival texts and their dissemination; the marginalization of women’s stories in historical narratives; revolutionary and counterrevolutionary archives, among other pertinent themes.
Oral History Methodologies
Within GOHA activities, ACSS organized workshops on oral history methodologies from a gender perspective which seek to train young Arab researchers in oral history methodologies and create a network of researchers using gender approaches to documentation and archiving projects.
Ethics of Oral History
GOHA organized workshops on the ethics of oral history within the New Paradigms Factory (NPF) cycle 5, titled “Gendered Resistance”. Under the title of “Ethical Practices in Oral History Narratives” GOHA trained NPF fellows on the ethics of conducting oral history from a gender sensitive perspective and introduced them to key concepts and research skills in this area.
–Principal Investigator: Hoda Elsadda
–Reema Shbeita (Palestine)
–Nay El Rahi (Lebanon)
–Nahla El Nadawi (Iraq)
–Joelle Hatem (Lebanon)
–Alia Moursi (Egypt)
–Dima Karadsheh (Jordan)
