Reading Over Our Shoulders: Writing About Arab Youth, Families, and Communities in the Post-9/11 United States

• In Event: Accepting Responsibility and Navigating Research Tensions: A Relational Praxis

Abstract

In this paper, we contend with the complexity of conducting research with Arab and Muslim youth in the U.S. as their families, schools, and communities face the politics of surveillance and anti-immigrant/refugee sentiment in the nearly two decades since 9/11. As a result of these political realities, we faced multiple ethical research dilemmas, including those surrounding the stories we tell. In this paper, we focus on the ways that ethical dilemmas arise from the reality that young people’s lives are inextricably entangled with those of their communities. The fact that their communities—from their families to their public schools and social welfare institutions—are facing public scrutiny and state surveillance, means that as we write, we are always, in a sense, simultaneously reading over our own shoulders, imagining the uses to which our audiences might put our work. Furthermore, as feminist scholars working within our own communities, we think through our relational responsibility to our participants (Shami, 1988). In particular, our paper asks: What stories do we have the right to tell? When must we remain silent about our research?
In this paper, we explore how these ethical dilemmas arise from our positions as critical ethnographers and advocates for Arab and Muslim communities made vulnerable by contemporary public scrutiny and state surveillance in the U.S. In particular, we wrestled with two central questions. First, how do we represent complex, and often oppressive, gender relations that we encountered in the course of our research? All too aware of the invisible reader whose Western gaze frames “women of cover” (as various members of the Bush administration coined them) as those who need saving from their putatively oppressive and violent patriarchal families and society (Abu Lughod, 2013; Said, 1978), we struggle with the ways our work might confirm these tropes. Second, how do address the danger of writing critiques of public institutions, especially given that our work is with youth, families, and communities whose lives are deeply affected by neoliberal attacks on the welfare state? Cognizant of the devastating effects of neoliberal reforms on public institutions—many of which are critical to our participants’ lives—we have also been concerned that our critiques can be used as fodder to further erode public support. While this paper does not offer concrete solutions to complex ethical dilemmas, we suggest that through asking these difficult questions, we might find ways to tell stories that offer rounder, more multifaceted view of these communities and that embed within them the reality of structural oppressions that exist across human societies.
We must find ways to break through the tendency to blame individuals, rather than looking to larger structures that constrain individuals’ possibilities for discourse and action. There is no shortcut for us as writers to resolve the inevitable ethical dilemmas embedded in the power we wield with our pens. We must continually remind ourselves to struggle with the impact that our words will have on others, especially the communities to whom we are responsible.

Authors

• Sally Wesley Bonet, Colgate University

• Thea R. Abu El-Haj, Barnard College