How To Say “Khalas:” Abandoning Projects in the Middle East and Beyond

• In Event: New Approaches to MENA Research for COVID-19 and Beyond

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically disrupted field-based social science research. However, it has simultaneously highlighted long-standing challenges related to scholars’ mobility, safety, agency, and ethics when conducting fieldwork. Many researchers have long faced travel bans, whether due to citizenship or political leanings. Others have had to halt research due to coups, civil war, disaster, or risk of detention to their interlocutors or themselves. Though the discussion of pre-travel testing and post-travel quarantine surrounds conversations regarding Covid-19, many countries force foreign citizens to submit to invasive medical testing, including, in some places, mandatory STI and HIV testing. The uncertain risks that both researchers and other members of research teams, such as translators, research assistants, and drivers—face has increasingly been noted by scholars writing about field methods. The pressures of the profession—to complete graduate school quickly, to publish extensively, to complete multiple projects pre-tenure—have always meant that the costs of abandoning any in-process field project are high. Yet the questions of when to terminate a field-based project, and how to move forward afterwards, represent the precise challenges that almost all field-based scholars faced in 2021.

This paper leverages scholars’ experiences from the Middle East to address the question of when to abandon a research project and how to think through the process of doing so. It has three goals. First, it seeks to outline past scenarios that have impelled Middle East scholars to consider prematurely stopping field-based data collection, rather than simply updating or shifting a research design and remaining in situ. These scenarios include researcher and research team safety, ethical concerns, and feasibility issues. Second, it uses a focused case study of an abandoned project with an international humanitarian organization operating in Iraq to walk scholars through the on-the-ground reasoning and process involved in halting ongoing research. Third, it discusses strategies for recovering from fieldwork cessation and provides pathways for leveraging ostensibly “incomplete” data.

Authors

• Sarah E. Parkinson, Johns Hopkins University

• Faten Ghosn, University of Arizona