MPK History

Suad Joseph

August 29, 2022

Mapping the Production of knowledge on Women and Gender in the Arab Region (MPK) is a project of the University of California Arab Region Consortium (UCDAR https://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/ucdar), in partnership with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. UCDAR, founded in 2001, is an organization of six universities including the American University of Beirut (AUB), American University in Cairo (AUC), Lebanese American University (LAU), Birzeit University (BZU), American University of Sharjah (AUS), University of California, Davis (UCD). UCDAR was founded by Suad Joseph and directed by her for twenty years. The proposal for the MPK was brought to the UCDAR Steering Committee by Joseph in 2015, which gave its approval.

A number of scholars have contributed at different points to the MPK project. This has included: Suad Joseph (UCD); Charlotte Karam (AUB), Nadia Cheikh (AUB), Sara Mourad (AUB); Eileen Kuttab (BZU), Lena Meari (BZU); Martina Rieker (AUC); Lina Abirafeh (LAU), Myriam Sfeir (LAU), Jennifer Skulte-Ouaiss (LAU), Connie Christiansen (LAU), Zina Sawaf (LAU); Nawar Al-Hassan Golley (AUS), Natalie Honein (AUS); Seteney Shami (ACSS), Moushira Elgeziri (ACSS), Nada Chaya (ACSS), Deema Kaidbey (ACSS).

The contours of the project evolved over an eight-year period. Initial planning began in 2015 through numerous skypes and zooms.  Meetings and discussions from 2015-2016 were undertaken in person in Beirut. A number of workshops were held to formulate the framework of MPK including April 5, 2016 at the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World at the Lebanese American University (IWSAW now AiW); November 1-3, 2016 at the American University of Beirut; April 19-21, 2018 at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, in Beirut; June 6-7, 2018 at the American University of Beirut.

Joseph was awarded a planning grant from the Ford Foundation, Cairo, for the 2018 meetings in Beirut. It was at the April 2018 meeting that the project was named the MPK project and the decision made to focus on the research produced from 1970 to the present. The April 2018 meeting formulated the three foci of the mapping the scholarship on women and gender in the Arab region: the Economic, the Political, and Socialities. The June meeting focused on conceptualizing the research and the research proposal. Those two meeting were critical in developing the framework of the MPK project. From these two meetings, the foundational proposal was developed for the MPK project and submitted to the Open Society Foundation (OSF) in Amman.

Suad Joseph (UC Davis) engaged with OSF and submitted concept notes between 2016-2020. In 2020, OSF funded MPK (for 2020-2023), with a focus on the Socialities thematic of the project, leaving the Economic and the Political for future consideration. In 2020, the MPK team included the following Senior Scholars: Suad Joseph (UCD), Martina Rieker (AUC), Sara Mourad (AUB), Lena Meari (BZU), Zina Sawaf (LAU), Nawar Al-Hassan Golley (AUS). With the awarding of the OSF grant, a formal partnership with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences was engaged for the MPK project.

The Senior Scholars (SS) met weekly, by Zoom, from Spring to the end of 2020 to formulate the project and to chart out the steps that needed to be taken. Central to this work was disaggregating the Socialities thematic into six subthematics that could be searched and mapped: 1.) Class, Race, Minority, Ethnicity, Tribe, Family, Kin Care, Work, Social Networks; 2.) Media and Popular Culture; 3.) Religion; 4.) Sexuality and the Body; 5.) Social Consequences of War, Displacement, Migration, Violence, and Precarity; 6.) Space and Socialities.

The SS team studied the different kinds of literature reviews, search engines, platforms and tools.  The decision was to focus on three critical axes to map the production of knowledge on women and gender in the Arab region related to Socialities: 1.) First, carrying out a scoping review of the scholarship to assess the range and nature of the published works on this thematic. The question was to identify who carried out research, on what countries, using what theories and methods and so forth. 2.) The second was to carry out a qualitative systematic review of the scholarship we assembled. 3.) The third was to undertake critical analyses of the published research on women and gender in the Arab region.

The beginning of 2021, the SS interviewed candidates for the Graduate Student Researchers (GSR) positions, finalizing the choices in March of 2021. In 2021, The 2021 GSR team included: Meghan Klasic (UCD), Chris Choueiri (AUB), Diana Khanafer (AUB), L’Emira Joanna Abillama (LAU), Maya El Helou (AUC), Zina Zarour (BZU). By mid-2022, the GSR team included: Meghan Klasic (UCD), Chris Choueiri (AUB), L’Emira Joanna Abillama (LAU), Zina Zarour (BZU). The GRSs met weekly, at times only with Suad Joseph, at times with trainers, at times with their SS mentors, at times on their own, and often with the full team of SS and GSRs together. The MPK project members met one to three times a week, by Zoom, from the early 2020 through the end of 2022.

Through much of Spring and Summer of 2021, the GSRs undertook intensive training on databases, subject indexes, scoping and systematic reviews, Boolean Operators, Zotero, Covidence, coding, content analysis, and other tools needed for the project. The trainers came from the UCDAR Transforming Refugee Mental Health project (https://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu/transforming-refugee-mental-health):  Patrick Marius Koga (UCD School of Medicine); and from UC Davis libraries:  Bruce Abbott (UCD School of Medicine library) and Adam Siegel (UCD Shields library). All team members were given access to the University of California library system through UC Davis.

To launch the searches to build the databases, the team worked with UC Davis librarian Adam Siegel to identify the appropriate databases. GSRs carried out test searches through the Spring of 2021 which we used to develop our search key terms and the Code Book.

Early Winter of 2021, the MPK team began working with WonderEight Offshore SAL, the company ACSS had contracted to design their website, to begin working on the MPK wepage of the ACSS website.

By mid-2021, the team launched the database searches focusing on Sociological Abstracts (Proquest, program manager) on the recommendation of Adam Siegel. We decided to run through all the steps of the project with this one database in order to refine all the steps needed.

By end of summer of 2022, the Code Book, having gone through innumerable revisions, was finalized; Sociological Abstract search was completed; searches of five additional Proquest databases were completed (Gender Watch, Index Islamicus, PsyInfo, Eric, and Linguistics and Language Behavior); searches of three EBSCO databases were near completion (Women’s Studies International, Historical Abstracts, and Anthropology Plus); exploration into adapting MPK search protocols for Bielefeld (BASE) database was launched; and the page for the MPK project on the ACSS webpage design was completed and tested.

The MPK project has been committed to documenting the methods and processes we developed as a template to share with scholars and students. From Spring of 2021, the MPK team documented its work, produced a detailed methods document on every step taken (including weekly reports and updates by the GSRs and annual reports by the SS), and recorded critical discussions and training on zoom. A manual of key steps to building and maintaining the database was developed in Fall of 2022 for ACSS. (See Methods document on the MPK webpage for a detailed account of the work of the MPK project).

The MPK database and MPK website went live in September of 2022, after testing with a selected group of scholars and graduate students.  As more database searches are completed, the MPK database will be updated and expanded. Critical analysis of the search findings was launched in Fall of 2022 and are to be published and/or posted on the MPK webpage.