Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 09/2009

Research Cultures in Local and Global Contexts: The Case of Middle East Gender Studies

Zeinab Abul-Magd, Aurelie Evangeline Perrier

March 2006

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies

Abstract

Through a critical dialogue, this workshop aimed to trace the various changes, shifts in intellectual paradigms, and transformations in both global and local contexts that have affected the growing field of Middle East Gender and Women’s studies in the US and the Middle East. It sought to understand how the particularity of a researcher’s milieu-made up of sociological, intellectual, political and cultural components interacting with one another to form what we term “a research culture”- have informed the approaches, agendas, and conclusions of scholars on gender-related issues. In particular the workshop explored the differences between and challenges to Middle East gender research in the US academy and in the academies of the Middle East.