Talking Texts

Talking Texts is a thinking/feeling space for research on the Gulf. A select group of academics and researchers reflect on their positionality, research process, and the politics of knowledge production. My students and I read their articles and books as part of my class “Women and Work in the Gulf” and we hosted the authors in our virtual classroom for a rich exchange.

Alanoud Al-Sharekh

We invited Alanoud Al-Sharekh, a Kuwaiti researcher, academic, activist and feminist to join our class "Women and Work in the Gulf". Alanoud shared her experience of connecting feminist work in the academy with her advocacy journey as the founding member of Abolish 153, a campaign calling to end honour killings in Kuwait. In this interview, you can learn about feminist research and practice in Kuwait, the challenges of advocating for legislative change on gender issues, and the politics of academic knowledge production about gender in the gulf.

Omar AlShehabi

In this conversation, Omar AlShehabi gave us an overview of his book, Contested Modernity, which contains a history of intellectual and political life in Bahrain that he argued cuts across sectarian lines. By including Arabic language archives and reading colonial archives against the grain, he provided a different reading of society and power in the Gulf compared to mainstream approaches. Omar also reflected on his writing about the colonial origins of the Kafala system and the assumptions of transience in urban development projects and shared his view on the importance of ‘decolonizing’ academic research.

Mira Al Hussein

We invited Mira Al-Hussein, an Emirati researcher currently based at Cambridge University, to share her experience of creating "virtual roundtables" on topics such as "Expats in the Gulf", "Intersectional Feminism", and "Gulf Feminisms" in both English and Arabic. Mira also shared her current dissertation project on the relationship between gender, the state, and educational institutions in the UAE drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from Zayed University. Her talk enables us to further unpack questions relating to constructions of the national family, migrant and citizen belonging, and normalization of "separate but equal" policies in state supported women's empowerment projects.

Rana Al Mutawa

Meet Rana Al Mutawa, an Emirati researcher currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Oxford in Middle Eastern Studies. Rana shared her published work on topics such as "Constructions of Authenticity in National Dress in the UAE" and "State Feminism and Legitimizing Myths". She also shared some of her current dissertation work on the concept of authenticity of urban spaces in Dubai and various self- reflexive insights on what it means to conduct ethnographic work in her home country. Through engaging with her and her work we were able to unpack the nuances involved in constructed and gendered cultural symbols and better understand the role of the researcher’s positionality in shaping access to power in an urban ethnography.

Maya Allison

We invited Maya Allison, the chief curator of the NYUAD art gallery, to speak to our class "Women and Work in the Gulf" about her past exhibitions and current work. In her talk, Maya reflected on her experience establishing the NYUAD art gallery from scratch and engaging in a slow and intentional sense-making process with academics, students, and members of the art community in the UAE. Maya’s talk helped us understand what is meant by dialogical practice: what does it mean to learn about ourselves by engaging with people who are differently situated from us? Maya’s examples highlighted a methodology we tried out in our class “Self Tracing” which requires self reflexive practice, articulation of provisional positionalities, and exchanges with others in both visual and written form.

Munira Al Sayegh

In this talk, we meet Munira Al Sayegh, an independent curator and co-founder of Engage 101, a grassroots platform that supports artists in the local art community in the UAE. Munira shares her experience working with various arts institutions and how that led her to co-found Engage 101 with Gaith Abdallah. Munira emphasizes the need to develop a strong local art community through inclusive practices and a resistance to problematic “global art” agendas or western-centric approaches. Her talk enabled students to better understand how to center their own lived experience and recognize the importance of emotions and language in academic and artistic production.

Sarah Brahim

In this episode of Talking Texts, we engage with questions of embodied knowledge: what would it mean to read the body as one would an academic text? Can the body be a source of knowledge? And if so, what does that knowledge tell us about the world we live in? We invited Sarah Brahim, a visual and performance artist from Saudi Arabia, working across mediums to present work rooted in experiences of the body. Sarah shares examples of her practice and then takes us through an embodiment workshop so we can experientially work through our bodies. Her session, which featured as part of our class “Women and Work in the Gulf” enabled us to creatively experiment with new ways of developing our Self Tracing projects.

In this episode, we delve into the fascinating history, sociology, and cultural life of air conditioning (A.C.) in the Gulf with Marwa Koheji. Using Bahrain as an entry point, Marwa explains the colonial history of A.C. then takes us through anecdotes from her fieldwork. Her findings shed light on the relationship between cooling practices and modernity projects and on the racialized and gendered ways that shape how bodies interact with the technology. Marwa also reflects on the politics of knowledge production and what it meant to conduct her research as a Khaleeji PhD student in the U.S.