Why Thematics

Nawar Al-Hassan Golley and Sara Mourad

Introduction

The Mapping of the Production of Knowledge (MPK) conceptualized the mapping project to cover the social, the political, and the economic aspects of gender based on the fact that gender cuts across all domains of human activities. The social, economic, and political intersect in the unfolding and government of human lives. While we may distinguish them analytically, we recognize that they are interconnected and interrelated in real life. By mapping the literature that covers the social, the political, and the economic dynamics and dimensions of gender in the Arab region, we wanted to provide the public with an inclusive mapping of scholarship since the 1970s. However, funding for this project was limited as a result of conditions related to the pandemic. Given the funding limitations, socialities emerged as the focus of the MPK project, with the expectation that the scholarship on the political and economic would be mapped in future research projects.

What is “Socialities”?

As we set to map and critically evaluate the scholarship on women and gender produced in the past fifty years, the MPK team engaged in extensive and thorough discussions, over a period of six months, on identifying the scope of the theme termed “Socialites,” and its connection with social justice in contemporary research and discourses.

Scholarship on women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970’s has covered issues related to the term “socialities” which is used throughout this project. This term, rather than the traditional term, “the social”, is used as it is the terms that has become “increasingly prominent in sociocultural anthropology and the humanities over the last few decades” (Long and Moore 2012, 41), as it emphasizes the more accurate term of, the process, rather than the state, of socializing persons into gender categories. Gender, which is a social construct, refers to the roles, behaviors, characteristics, and norms associated with what is traditionally categorized as a man or a woman and the relationships between and amongst them. It is itself a category of social organization and stratification which shapes and affects all spheres of human life and activity, from the intimate to the collective, from the individual to the social, from the private to the public.

“Human sociality” is “a dynamic relational matrix within which human subjects are constantly interacting in ways that are co-productive, continually plastic and malleable, and through which they come to know the world they live in and find their purpose and meaning within it” (Long and Moore 2012, 41). The term, “Sociality” is used in the MPK project based on the understanding and agreement that no aspects of human development should be seen outside of sociality. In this sense, matter and information or biology and culture become inseparable, as argued by Christina Toren (in Long and Moore 2012, 41).

The scholarship that is mapped in this project covers all aspects of “Sociality,” as defined above, that relate to social arrangements of the life of individuals and groups, family arrangements, human relationships, behaviors, physiological processes, identity formation, religious practices, ethnic cultures, education, literature, arts, urbanization, migration and consequences of conflict and violence on social justice in countries of the Arab region.

The study of socialities include the study of relationships people forge in their own lives, their families, social groups, communities, organizations and institutions; it includes the analysis of the role of gender in creating and developing people’s networks, interactions, and connections with each other and within these groups in different settings. Hence, the literature on all the following fit under the umbrella of socialities: love, sexuality, marriage, divorce, violence, family, kin, housing, the media, popular culture, religion, education, physical and mental health, effect of conflict and war, displacement, migration.

Why These Thematics?

In order to map out the thematic terrain of gender in relation to socialities in existing literature across the social sciences and humanities, we needed to identify sub-themes that would allow us to capture the scholarship we are looking for. Based on our individual research interests and areas of expertise as feminist scholars working in different fields and disciplines (sociology, anthropology, literary studies, media studies, urban studies, geography, and history, to name a few), we collectively generated a long list of research topics and areas that we found most relevant and pertinent to the general socialities thematic. Our rationale to identify the research territory to be mapped out was deductive, moving from the general (socialities) to the particular (topics and areas).

While the broad range of topics our collective work engendered cannot be neatly or exclusively categorized as “social,” amenable as they are to be studied through an economic and political dynamics, we reached a consensus through extensive discussions and deliberations about each topic that it would be best integrated under the socialities component of our broader mapping project. We understand categories as constructed and provisional and the work of categorization as a necessary though certainly flawed process to organize knowledge. Categories are helpful conceptual tools to think with and through, yet they may also limit our understanding when they get reified. We thus invite users of the database to question our categorizations – as we did and continue to do – as they are only intended to provide a coherent and provisional way to organize the literature rather than foreclose other possible ways to do so.

After proceeding from the general to the particular in identifying what constitutes socialities, we used particular topics to arrive at and formulate broader and distinct thematic categories through which we can locate, compile, and organize scholarship of interest. Based on the preliminary long list of topics we generated, we proceeded by grouping related topics and consolidating them into six broader interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary thematics. For each thematic, we then identified key terms to be used in database searches and to code individual publications. These terms are thus both search and aggregation tools. Coming up with code terms was a dynamic process: we had to revise and refine these terms based on the literature that our searches were yielding. The following is a list of the thematics and their respective code terms:

Code Terms: Class; Inequity; NGOs; Social Organization; Social Division; Cultural Practices; Ethnicity; Head of House; Class; race; Subject Formation; Interpersonal; Power; Sect; Tribe; Family; Marriage; Division of Labor; Intersectionality; Gender-based Violence.

Code Terms: Media; Representation; Discourse/Language; celebrity; performing Arts; Visual Arts; Cinema; Advertising; Social Media; Internet/IT/Phone; Folk Culture; Literature; Journalism; Education; Production of Knowledge.

Code Terms: Religion; Religious Jurisprudence; Family Law; Spiritual Practices; Veiling; Religion and Sexuality; Religion and Feminism; Religion and Education; Piety.

Code Terms: Sexuality; Sex Trafficking; Sex Education; Sex Work; Health; Sexual and Reproductive Health; Disability; Virginity; Sex Tourism; Sports; Fashion; Sex; Gender Identity; LGBTQ; Homosexuality; Homosociality; Beauty; Porn; Female Genital Cutting; Sexual Violence.

Code Terms:  Violence; Migration; Refugees and Displaced; Precarity; Mental Health; War/Political Violence; Peace/Justice; Honor Killing; Female Genital Cutting; Harassment; Domestic Violence; Rape/Sexual Violence; Human Trafficking

Code Terms: Space; Urban; Housing; Rural; Safety; Infrastructure; Social Networks.

Each thematic is intended to capture a broad range of scholarship across the social sciences and humanities on what we found to be the most salient and active research areas in the field of Women and Gender Studies in the Arab region since the 1970s. While some of our identified thematics have been a focus of study for over four decades, such as religion and the family, others have emerged more recently as new research fields and areas, such as space and media. The selected thematics reflect our interest in excavating both long-standing and foundational literature on women and gender as well as capturing emergent conceptual trends, approaches, and research foci, all while being attentive to the changing realities of the Arab region and their effect on academic knowledge production. The thematics also reflect the actual and changing geopolitical context of the region under study. In mapping knowledge on women and gender in the region, we found it necessary to dedicate a thematic to capture research produced on the gendered consequences of war, conflict, and displacement – all of which have ravaged, unsettled, and reconfigured Arab societies and their populations in acute ways over the last two decades.

The thematics were also intended to capture and reflect the cross-disciplinary nature of scholarship on women and gender. While some thematics have become more closely associated with particular disciplines (for example religion with anthropology), our thematic organization takes the research topic, not the discipline, as a departure point for the mapping process. As feminist scholars committed to make connections between theory and practice, between the conceptual and the political, and between knowledge and activism for social justice, we are less interested in maintaining and reproducing rigid disciplinary boundaries in curating our research. Rather, we wanted to organize the knowledge we are compiling and reviewing in an intuitive and accessible manner. We thus formulated our thematics to guide whoever is interested in furthering their understanding of a particular topic or area of research/activism.

Reference

Long, Nicholas J., and Moore, Henrietta L. 2012. “Sociality Revisited:

Setting a New Agenda.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 30, no. 1 (Spring): 40–47.