Counter-mapping the archive: a decolonial feminist research method

Abstract

The past decade has seen a growing interest in the ‘turn to history’ which has coincided with a counter-reading of the archive as a means to trouble contemporary practices of governance. In this article, I explore what a decolonial feminist approach to the colonial archive can look like through the development of a research method that involves counter-mapping. This method included the use of participatory interviews, carried out between 2019–2020, that involved asking interviewees to annotate colonial maps of Cairo, and the co-creation of an alternative map. This method presented a decolonial space where I, the researcher, and the participants, co-investigated the spatial securitisation of urban sites as ‘security threats’ and ‘dangerous communities’. In doing so, we co-examined how certain security ‘truths’ constructed by the colonial archive transcend the colonial/modern continuum in new postcolonial forms of securitisation in Egypt. Securitised spaces on the map were, instead, reimagined as spaces of emancipation and life. At the same time, the gendered differences between participants also point to the coloniality of gender in Egypt. In light of this, I thereby also discuss the troubles of representative methods, and the need for an intersectional feminist approach to decolonial research methods.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous peer reviewers for their invaluable comments on this article as well as the editorial team at Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Thank you to Ruth Kelly, Raquel da Silva and Emily Jones for providing me with generous feedback on this article. Thank you to my participants for being part of my research. Thank you to Anne Alexander for pointing me towards the map. Thank you also to Gina Heathcote and Mayur Suresh for all your support. The author acknowledges and thanks the British Library for providing permission to reproduce their images in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Access Statement

Our supporting research dataset will not be published because it contains personal and / or sensitive data.

Notes

1 I understand gender to be part of a constructed system of coloniality that orders and divides on a binary of male/female (Lugones 2007) and erases pre-colonial and non-colonial systems of gender and sexuality. As a result of this gender order, violence is aimed at groups who are gendered in certain fashions, often those who are feminised or are seen to stray outside of acceptable gender expressions. My participants did not expressly identify as anything other than male or female, and therefore I utilise these terms to both acknowledge this and to acknowledge the level of violence against women in Egypt.

2 NB. All participants quoted in this article are anonymised.

3 https://harassmap.org/en/

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to acknowledge the funding of the UKRI ESRC DTP which supported this research.

Notes on contributors

Alice E. Finden

Dr Alice E. Finden is an Assistant Professor of International Politics at Durham University. Her research explores the coloniality of counter terrorism and the normalisation of everyday violence through logics of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Her work has been supported by the ESRC. She has peer reviewed publications with Feminist Review journal and the Australian Feminist Law Journal and is the co-editor of a special journal issue entitled ‘Hygiene, Coloniality, Law’ also with the Australian Feminist Law Journal. She is a co-convenor for the British International Studies Association Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group. Email: [email protected]