Ajnabieh - The Foreigner

Hana Malhas has a new video out!



Hana is a Jordanian/American singer-songwriter, who plays the guitar and piano (I think?) and who is currently making music with her band The Overthinkers, which is, let's be real, the best band name. I think I've recced her here before, but oh well.



If, like me, you are easily seduced by singer-songwriter types performing covers of hip-hop, here she is doing Kanye West's Stronger.

You can stream their latest album at her website; it's also on Spotify, at least in the US. I discovered her on MideastTunes originally.

I have an article in the current issue of Middle East Journal which might be interesting to some of you. (I have the lead article, actually, which amuses me to no end.) "Democratic Paradoxes" is about Kuwaiti women's enfranchisement, particularly the 1999 enfranchisement by the emir, which was then retracted by the National Assembly. Essentially, I argue that this particular moment demonstrates a tension between distributing power across a variety of insitutions in a democratizing country, and increasing the number of people who are entitled to participate in the political process. Working from an analysis of 1999, I analyze subsequent ups and downs in women's political participation over the subsequent decade-and-change in Kuwait's never-boring political life. In the end, my argument is that those of us who have strong normative commitments to both women's empowerment in formal politics and to growing democratic control over governance need to be aware of moments where these two goals are in conflict, because they aren't always easily combined.

I'm overjoyed for this article to see print, not just because I like it, but because it began its life nearly a decade ago, first as a random idea floating through my head while I worked as a research assistant for the year before grad school, then as a research proposal for my first grad school seminar, then as a conference paper for my first MESA, and finally as a working paper for the past four years. It's gone through innumerable revisions, including being updated for no fewer than four new National Assembly elections (including the one in December that kept it out of the winter issue). The editing staff at MEJ was lovely throughout, and I'm glad to have had the chance to work with them--but I'm also glad to be done with this particular article. Now, finally, I am allowed to think different things about Kuwait!

You can see the whole issue here. If you want my article and can't get free access online, drop me a note and I'll send you a copy as a PDF. If you're my mother and want a physical copy with my name on the cover, go buy your own, the one I've got is mine.

I recently read a report by a group of Canadian academics and community activists on immigration and citizenship policy in the post-9/11 period, called Security and Immigration, Changes and Challenges: Immigrant and Ethnic Communities in Atlantic Canada, Presumed Guilty? (link to PDF). It was an enlightening report, not merely because I know next to nothing about Atlantic Canada. (Let's be real: like most North Americans, my mental image of Canada basically stops at Montreal, and east of that point I have only a vague notion of bears, trees, and Anne of Green Gables.) Much of what was in the report was profoundly similar to immigration politics and policy in the past decade-and-change in the US: Muslim and Arab communities being targeted for state surveillance, an increased securitization of migration policy, and anxiety from migrant communities about what future changes will mean for their ability to remain in Canada, or remain in status.

However, there was an angle that was new to me: the context of the US/Canada relationship. One of the major complaints of the immigrants and immigrant service organizations surveyed by the team was that Canadian immigration policy was becoming more like the US's during this decade. This was particularly disheartening because these new Canadians defined themselves as Canadians-not-Americans. Canada was not supposed to act like the US; it was supposed to prioritize human security and human rights, both in its migration policy and in its treatment of immigrants once they arrive in Canada.

The framework in which I locate my work is that of transnational migration, meaning not just migration that crosses international borders, but migration where people, ideas, and material goods flow back and forth between 'sending countries' and 'receiving countries.' However, this report suggests the importance of third-party countries to migrants' understanding of their own political movements and frameworks. They don't merely form the discourses that structure their political actions from the dialogical relationship between their experiences 'back home' and their experiences in diaspora; instead, they imagine other interlocutors against whom they define their discourses. This is new to me in the literature on transnational migration (which, incidentally, isn't the perspective this report takes--it's firmly rooted in domestic Canadian politics). I'd posit that this is because the literature on transnational migration has been largely about US/Latin America migratory circuits--and that American politics doesn't, very often, define itself against politics in other countries, certainly not the way that Canadian politics positions itself against US politics.

The report also deals in a very interesting way with how freedom is defined and understood by members of Atlantic Canadian immigrant communities; the researchers aimed to elicit meaningful definitions of freedom from their participants, and paint a picture of a very substantive working notion of freedom, which emphasizes fundamental freedoms, especially freedom of movement. It would be interesting to develop a comparative notion of how freedom is defined among dominant and subaltern communities in the US and Canada, considering how both countries make 'freedom' central to self-development.

In any case, I recommend the report if you're interested in ethnic politics in Canada, or broadening your lens on the security state and migration policy outside of either a Eurocentric or American lens. It also has an excellent methods section, which is clear, detailed, and explains enough to really ensure that readers who care about methods understand how the data was collected.

Inspired by nanila and the Ten Hundred Words of Science tumblr, I wrote a description of my research interests using the Up-Goer 5 text editor:

I went to school to study how people live together and make their lives together good or bad. I wrote a book about how people from a far away place do this in the large city where I lived. I studied how they said things and had ideas about how to live together with people who are different. Sometimes people do not listen to what different people have to say about how they should live together and what is right. I wrote a book to talk about how to listen to each other better when we are different and like different things.

Now I work with people studying how the people who set things up make sure that all the people have the things they need, like houses and water and food. People have a right to these things that they need, but not all people who set things up write down that they have this right. I study how this works in the far away place where the people from my first book are from. The way that the people who set things up get money to set things up and the way that they have set things up to work makes different things happen with writing down the rights people have.

I am also studying people who move between the place where I live and the far away place talk about different things for how to set things up. I want to know how moving between these places changes their thoughts about what is good and what is bad in how their places should be set up.

Sometimes I am a teacher (but not right now). I talk with young people about how people set things up and how they have ideas about how to set things up. I want those young people to think hard about the right way to set things up, and how different ways to set things up hurt or help other people. I want them to know better when to say yes or no to ideas about how to set things up. I also want them to like to read and write and think about these things, because I like to read and write and think about these things, too!

I wasn't able to work out any way to explain the Middle East in the Up-Goer 5 lexicon, but I'm pretty satisfied with "people who set things up" as a substitute for "government," and "how people live together and make their lives together good or bad" for "political science." I couldn't use the word "rules." It was challenging.

Your turn!

I got my fifteen minutes of policy-wonk fame last Thursday, when an article I wrote for the Middle East Channel (a dedicated group blog, run by Foreign Policy, on Middle Eastern politics) ended up designated their "top story." (While it no longer has that status, it's still on the front page, so I'm still rather pleased.) In any case, if you're at all interested in Egyptian economics, international financial institutions, or what technical negotiations about fuel subsidies can tell us about the underlying state of democracy, check out my piece: Politicizing Egypt's Economic Reform. Also, note the most interesting thing I learned from reading approximately 200 news articles about the Egypt/IMF negotiations: Christine LaGarde is really really tall.

And now, back to the Batcave of writing...

I finally finished posting all my Cairo photos to Flickr; have at. I haven't written notes on each of them, but I'll go back and do that now. No promises as to them being particularly excellent photos...

As I was uploading, I found another "language is cool!" moment. Remember my post from back in the day about English written in Arabic letters? I found a great example that complicates that:



This is a bakery on a side street in Mohandessin, called "Le Gourmet" in Latin letters on one side, and لو جورميه on the other. The Arabic here is great, because it's clearly working directly from the French, rather than via another language. Here we have the ج represents /g/ phenominon, the idea that the word ends in an /h/, and, most interesting to me, writing the vowel of the word "le" using the و, which we usually write as a u in English. I'd write the underlying French vowel as a /ʌ/, I think--and given that Arabic only has three long vowels (and long vowels are preferred for transliteration from other languages, to reduce ambiguity), u is probably a better choice than a or i. Still, though, not where I would have gone, with a more orthographic and less sound-based transliteration plan.

(Home safe from Cairo, and then from my post-Cairo "hey! Let's drive around the upper midwest for a week!" jaunt through Michigan and Ontario. But this has been sitting on my phone since I got back, and I finally had a moment to put it up here. Hi!)

NOTE: this post contains reference to the getting travel-related food poisoning. Nothing squicky and no details (trust me, you don't want them), but if the mere idea is an issue, best scroll on by.



1.

It was my first night in Cairo. I was jetlagged, exhausted, dehydrated, lost, confused, and about to get really, really sick, though I didn't know it. I ended up deciding to have knafeh for dinner, because I just didn't know anymore, and stumbled into a patisserie. After trying to order, and then being told to go take a seat and that a waiter would come, and then waiting for a table to open up, and then waiting for the waiter (probably all of this would have been easier if I weren't a mess), I managed to order a plate of knafeh and a cup of tea. "Bidoun sukker," I said, and the waiter gave me a funny look. I'm an idiot, I realized--there's an idiomatic way to order your tea without sugar, which I had of course forgotten. And maybe bidoun wasn't even how you said 'without' in Egyptian dialect. God, why had I left my Arabic textbook in the US? It wasn't doing me any good there.

After a while, I got my knafeh and my tea. "Without sugar," the waiter said pleasantly, and I tried not to feel too stupid. The tea was too hot to drink for a long time, but, God, I needed it.

2.

Two days later, I woke up at 9:15 and groaned. Of course, I had to get sick first thing in the morning this time. But I couldn't go all day without eating, and breakfast ended in fifteen minutes. I needed to put something in my stomach. I struggled into clothes and stumbled into the hotel restaurant at 9:32, feeling like an asshole.

The guy in the chef's hat who made omelettes was nowhere to be seen, but the girl who waited tables was around, and said "good morning!" to me cheerfully. I tried to smile back. Normally, this would be the point where I'd pile on the fuul and the boiled eggs and everything, but I decided to play it safe: orange juice, plain pita bread, plain yogurt, some honey to add to it. The waitress came to take my cup. (She'd learned, over my three mornings so far, that I wanted coffee with milk.) "Excuse me," I said. "Can I have tea this morning, instead?"

"Of course," she said, still cheerful, and walked away.

I struggled through some bread, and then a cup of tea appeared next to me. I looked at it. It had milk in it, already mixed. I blinked. No one, I mean no one, drinks tea with milk in the Middle East. God, they must keep a separate pot ready of milky tea for the aganib, because they know we like milk in our coffee and milk in our tea, strange as it is. My heart sank a little, because milky tea was the last thing I wanted in that state. I wanted a nice, plain cup of black tea, boring and bitter and enough to settle my stomach.

But what could I say? I sipped at it, forced down my yogurt, and cursed cultural sensitivity.

3.

Costa Coffee was like a giant suburban Starbucks, sprawled out on the side of Shari3 Gama3t Duwal 3arabi. (By the end of my two weeks, I knew just to call it Gama3t Duwal. I didn't yet.) It struck me as odd that these western-style restaurants took up so much space; in cities back home, they get crammed into the same tight quarters as everyone else. I got a seat--I had finally figured out that, in Cairo, you don't just go to the counter and order and then find your seat--and ordered tea and a croissant. I was feeling better than earlier that morning, but I still wanted to be soothed.

The tea arrived: a pot that must have held about two cups of hot water, a single Twining's English Breakfast teabag, and a latte cup to drink it from. I dropped the teabag in the pot, feeling resentful. When I make tea in a pot this size at home, I use three teabags, not one. The water wasn't going to be hot enough, either, which meant the tea was going to be frightfully weak. I huffed to myself. This cup of tea was going to be wrong.

And then I thought about learning to make tea with the family who put me up in the West Bank when I was there. Boil a saucepan of water; add a fistful of fresh mint, and a fistful of white sugar. Take one tea bag, and dip it in, again, again, again, until the water looks like tea. Then it's done.

This tea, I realized, was an act of fusion. Take tea-making norms from one place, apply them to tea from another. If this had been a bag of Lipton Yellow Label, then it would have made sense. I'd been thrown by my own, anglophile notions of what a "proper" cup of tea was. (Warm the pot, four minutes, no more, one spoon for the pot, milk goes in the cup first.) No, this is perfect, really; this is tea that is both/neither, that follows no rules but its own.

The inscription on the saucer said "Italian about coffee." And English about tea, I expect, in exactly the same way.

Thursday night, tired, still a little jetlagged, I walked the few blocks from my hotel to a sandwich place I'd seen recommended in a lifestyle magazine-thing, which had an English edition and a iphone app, so targeted at expats and that segment of the Cairene upper class who speaks English.  The shop was down a dark streets (no streetlights), next to another, indistinguishable, but it had been recommended, and the prices were obscenely low by my agnabi standards (plus I'd dropped over a hundred pounds on lunch at a Zamalek cafe, I needed to economize).  So I headed in, and ordered in my terrible Arabic.

The man behind the counter clarified what I wanted in perfect English (they always do), tried to convince me to get a second sandwich ("Not tonight, I'm saving it for another visit, since this is so close to me!" I said cheerfully), and then asked, once he'd placed my order, where I was from.  

"I'm American, from New York," I said (because all real Americans know New Yorkers don't count; plus, saying this often has the consequence of people talking about their friends, relatives, acquantainces, etc in New York).  

His face got a little sad, and he glanced at the TV in the corner, showing a salah jum3a somewhere in the world.  "Some people, they are not being good to Americans right now," he said quietly.  

"I know," I said.

We chatted politely about my reasons for coming to Egypt.  I made fun of my bad Arabic (as always, saying I studied fus7a in university impresses people; they shouldn't be impressed, my fus7a is atrocious).  He had had experiences that were relevant to my work, so I asked him about them, politely, explained what I was doing.  My sandwich came out from the kitchen, and he invited me to take a seat and keep talking.

After a few minutes, he said, "We talk all the time about how we are Muslims in this country.  But if we look at what we are doing, we are not being good Muslims.  We are not following the example of the prophet.  He never said to hurt anyone."

"We have the same problem in America," I said.  "People say they are Christians, but they are not doing what Jesus would want them to do."

"When someone says he is Muslim, you know he is not acting  like a Muslim," he said, nodding.

"The more they say it, the less they are!" I said.  We both laughed.  

When I had finished my sandwich, I thanked him, and told him it was delicious.  "How much do I owe you?" I said, reaching into my pocket for the pound coins rattling around there.  

"For you, nothing.  It's your first day," he said.

"Are you sure?"  

"Of course."

"Thank you," I said, smiling.  "I will be back."

I left that night, wandered around my neighborhood, where I was the oldest woman on the street without a headcover, and, I think, the only foreigner.  I went back to my hotel, happy to be here, happy to have met this man.

Last night, I stayed in my hotel room, and flipped between BBC World and Al Jazeera English.  Most times I want to practice my Arabic, but I needed to understand everything, last night.  I ate dinner in my hotel, and the tv in the restaurant played a Coptic priest and an imam critiquing insults to religion while I ate shorobat 3ads and baba ghanoug.

I'm going back out tonight.  I want to pay for my sandwich this time.

So, I leave for Egypt in three days. Pretty much my entire brain is chanting MASR MASR MASR MASR MASR MASR all the time; it would be annoying if it weren't so all-consuming. But, as things are starting to slot into place, I thought I'd do a couple of posts on what, precisely, the working political scientist-slash-ethnographer brings with her to go somewhere to do research. With the caveat that 1) I'm only going for two weeks, 2) I'm staying in a big city (Africa's biggest city, actually) and in a decent hotel, so I'll have resources available...

Here's what I'm bringing:




( notes on what you see here, and what you don't )

As well as all of the physical stuff, there's also a lot of digital stuff I'm bringing with me...



( probably the level of dependent I am on this particular rectangular prism of plastic is not healthy )

So, beloved readers, techies and fieldwork-conductors: what am I missing? What do you bring when you head into the field?

(And, off topic, but: I'm changing planes in Amsterdam with a longish layover, and am meeting some friends for lunch at Centraal Station--anyone have recommendations for things to do near there when you've only got 5 hours and some massive jetlag?)

The subjects of today's analysis: Kahrabtak ("your electricity"), a new site that allows people to report power outages all over Egypt, and Harassmap, a several-year-old site that allows women* to report street sexual harassment. This is a very preliminary analysis, and I haven't started going through reports off Kahrabtak to see content; this is just based on the structure of the sites as they stand.

What struck me immediately on going to the Kahrabtak website is that it looks just like Harassmap. Sure, the color scheme is different, but in a way that's like how going to different Tumblrs or MySpace pages is different: you still inevitably know what type of site it is. In this case, they are both implementations of the Ushahidi platform, which allows people to send text and email reports of the thing they are recorded, which is turned into visual data that includes the text of the report. Because they share a common platform, they share a structure and a lot of text. But this is all, on some level, just a generic trait: they're both Ushahidi platforms, so that level of textual similarity isn't necessarily meaningful.

There are a few relevant differences, though. Harassmap has links in the top pink sidebar to information about the platform, a set of links to organizations providing help and support to harassed women, and a place where people can go to volunteer to do street-level anti-sexual-harassment work in their neighborhoods. Kahrabtak, for its part, doesn't have any of that information. There are no links to the broader levels of social contestation over electricity shortages: not the "We Won't Pay" campaign of the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, for example, or any other political action around outages. There's no background on who the people are who are involved in the project, and information about the structure it comes from. Instead, there is a line of text, which says that the project is to capture real-time data about both outages and the "misuse" ( سوء استخدام) of power.

This suggests two things about the different mapping projects:

1) Harassmap is located in an existing network of people taking political action around street harassment/sexual harassment. In fact, street harassment has been one of the central concerns of Egyptian feminism over perhaps the last five years, and Harassmap as a project is an outgrowth of a coalition of women's & feminist groups looking for new ways to talk about the project. Kahrabtak, on the other hand, is unlinked to any broader project. That doesn't mean that the people behind it aren't; the article where I learned about Kahrabtak mentions that the people involved are also a part of another website monitoring Morsi's presidency, with a background in activism. But none of this is explicit, ready to be read anywhere. Purely from the site, Kahrabtak appears sui generis.

2) Harassmap places the blame for sexual harassment on the harassers, and does not make any judgments about the harassee. In their form, there is no space to document what you were wearing or what the conditions were. Sometimes people write about these things in their freeform comments, but even if you were wearing a tank top and shorts at two in the morning your citation of sexual harassment is still implicitly valid. Kahrabtak, on the other hand, lists as one of its categories to report "street lamps on during the day," a sign of electricity wastage. They're interested both in where blackouts are, and whether somebody's done something nearby to overload the system. This isn't, precisely, victim blaming, in the same way that it would be if Harassmap collected data on where there were women in revealing clothing who were "asking for it." But this is a way of saying that the cause of the blackouts might be something that's reportable, that people could see and label.


Geography is different between the two maps, as well. The vast, vast majority of Harassmap's reports of harassment come from the greater Cairo area, with Alexandria next, and then the resort towns in Sinai. Although the largest single location of reports is within Cairo on Kahrabtak (not surprising, given that nearly a quarter of the residents of Egypt live in greater Cairo, and that we're looking at people who use the internet, which also means an urban/educated bias), it's not even a bare majority; most of the reports are in Upper Egypt, which is also, incidentally, where most of the demonstrations are.

Assuming that those who have the ability to report blackouts also have the ability to report sexual harassment, and vice versa, this suggests one of two things. First, we have more evidence that blackouts are a bigger problem in rural and Upper Egypt than in Cairo. This isn't terribly surprising, but here we see the data in a new way. The second issue is that different people who have the theoretical access to these tools will choose to participate in one of them and not another. That is, that Cairenes might be more willing to identify and counter sexual harassment than people elsewhere in Egypt, and that they might be complaining less about the effects of the blackout. (Middle-class Cairo, which is who is on these sites, went from annoyed to super mad when the Metro went down a few weeks ago. Qena and Sohag were already livid by that point.)

I don't have any conclusions yet, but there are two general thoughts swirling around this for me. 1) People make choices about what issues to take action on. The extent to which a given problem bothers them personally makes a big difference, but so also does what sort of agency and blame they assign for the existence of the problem to begin with. So probably some of these differences are traceable to how people variously define the issues of sexual harassment and electricity shortages. 2) Whether or not an issue is taken up by a stable, pre-existing coalition of political actors is not generally a determinant of whether or not there will be some form of policy adjustment to deal with the issue. However, it is an issue if you're going to be defining a constituency to lobby for future changes, or for inclusion into political processes; there needs to be a group there that can be mobilized deliberately, not just turn out into the streets in a rage every now and then. It's not clear yet whether a group can grab onto the electricity issue and use it to define a constituency the way that feminist groups have used harassment to define women's interests and women as a group.


*Disclaimer: I'm going to use the term "women" to refer to the victims of sexual harassment in this context, because of the way that gender ideologies and the gender binary work in Egypt; there isn't a defined way to talk about the street harassment of gender-nonconforming individuals within this framework, or to talk about the sexual harassment of men by other men or by women. As the issue is constructed in contemporary Egyptian politics, we're talking about men groping, touching, or catcalling women. Obviously in the world things can get more complicated, but this is the active framework on the ground right now.