Accommodating fieldwork to irreconcilable equations of citizenship, authoritarianism, poverty and fear in Egypt

ABSTRACT

Post-Mubarak Egypt witnessed major shifts in the elaboration of inclusive citizenship that came to halt after the abandonment of the democratic experiment. This period offered insights on the abruption of a process of citizenship building, especially in poor urban dwellings, where narratives of everyday violence shape the way citizenship is conceived. As I carried out fieldwork in an urban settlement in Cairo to address these issues following the 2013 military coup, I was forced to end my project in order to avoid risk to myself or to my respondents. This article demonstrates how fieldwork, even in unfavourable conditions, could be contextualised to redesign the research and theories guiding it. Through examining some of the dynamics of my fieldwork and positionality as a native female researcher, I demonstrate alternative methods of narrating the complex interactions of citizenship variables, poverty and fear in police-state-like conditions in Egypt.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• authoritarianism
• Egypt
• positionality
• fieldwork
• informal settlement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Julten Abdelhalim is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. She obtained her PhD in political science from Heidelberg University (Germany). Before that she studied at the universities of Cairo (Egypt), Freiburg (Germany), KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) and Jawaharlal Nehru (India). Her PhD thesis has been transformed into a book, titled Indian Muslims and Citizenship: Spaces for jihād in everyday life (London: Routhledge, 2015). Her research interests include citizenship studies, revivalist Islamic movements and gender issues, democratic transformation, and youth in India and the Arab World.

ORCID

Julten Abdelhalim http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0224-4853

Notes

1 Due to the current political situation, I am not able to identify locations for the sake of the safety of the interview respondents. Nevertheless, most of the material for this article deals with one of the informal settlements in Cairo.

2 Ghannam (1997) expands on this by deconstructing the gendering of public space in Egypt.

3 Increased urban activism is a byproduct of the revolutionary spirit that Egypt witnessed. See: Stadnicki (2016).

4 A polite Arabic word to address old women.

5 As examples, see Meijer (2014, 2017), Turner (1993), Kymlicka and Norman (1994), and Abdelhalim (2015).

6 By this I mean what Turner (1993), for example, lists as the Enlightenment and Modernity, the secular state and the universalistic norms of participation in civil society. In Arabic, the word citizenship is a modern invention. Given that it carries the root of watan (meaning the patria or home), the term usually connotes patriotic nostalgia, but has no political connotation.

Additional information

Funding

The material presented in this article was produced during fieldwork funded by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin within the Excellence Initiative of the states and the federal government.